Showing posts with label The Weather Vocabulary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Weather Vocabulary. Show all posts

Monday, 27 April 2026

THE SCIENCE MUSEUM, WE WILL ROCK YOU (EVERYBODY)

Yesterday afternoon, The Morgans and The Grandma visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum as a prelude to a week of museums. 

Today, the family has visited the Science Museumone of the most interesting of London, perhaps the most amazing after the British Museum.

Before the visit, the family has been practising some English grammar with The Simple Future and the Object Pronouns, and learning some vocabulary about The Weather. They also have been talking about Occitan poets and Gypsy community and their ways of transmitting information about the future through poetry and fortune telling.

Finally, The Grandma has explained the interesting history of La Torre del Rellotgethe old lighthouse of Barcelona, located in La Barceloneta, the fishermen neighbourhood, that has its own little story: it has the honour of being one of the geodesic points where the scientist Pierre François André Méchain took the measurements he used as the basis of the metric system.

More information: Future Simple

More information: Object Pronouns 

More information: The Weather

The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019.

Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission, although visitors are requested to make a donation if they are able. Temporary exhibitions may incur an admission fee.

It is one of the five museums in the Science Museum Group.

The museum was founded in 1857 under Bennet Woodcroft from the collection of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

It included a collection of machinery which became the Museum of Patents in 1858, and the Patent Office Museum in 1863. This collection contained many of the most famous exhibits of what is now the Science Museum.

In 1883, the contents of the Patent Office Museum were transferred to the South Kensington Museum. In 1885, the Science Collections were renamed the Science Museum and in 1893 a separate director was appointed. The Art Collections were renamed the Art Museum, which eventually became the Victoria and Albert Museum.

When Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the new building for the Art Museum, she stipulated that the museum be renamed after herself and her late husband. This was initially applied to the whole museum, but when that new building finally opened ten years later, the title was confined to the Art Collections and the Science Collections had to be divorced from it. 

On 26 June 1909 the Science Museum, as an independent entity, came into existence.

The Science Museum's present quarters, designed by Sir Richard Allison, were opened to the public in stages over the period 1919-28. This building was known as the East Block, construction of which began in 1913 and was temporarily halted by World War I. As the name suggests it was intended to be the first building of a much larger project, which was never realized. However, the museum buildings were expanded over the following years; a pioneering Children's Gallery with interactive exhibits opened in 1931, the Centre Block was completed in 1961-3, the infill of the East Block and the construction of the Lower & Upper Wellcome Galleries in 1980, and the construction of the Wellcome Wing in 2000 result in the museum now extending to Queen's Gate. 

The Science Museum consists of two buildings -the main building and the Wellcome Wing. Visitors enter the main building from Exhibition Road, while the Wellcome Wing is accessed by walking through the Energy Hall, Exploring Space and then the Making the Modern World galleries at ground floor level.

More information: Science Museum

A visit to a museum is a search for beauty,
truth, and meaning in our lives.
Go to museums as often as you can.

Maira Kalman

Thursday, 28 March 2024

THE FOSTERS & THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS IN HOGWARTS

Today, The Fosters have started to search The Chamber of Secrets, a hidden
place in Hogwarts.

Searching The Chamber of Secrets is a difficult work full of dangers, magic and riddles but the family has accepted this challenge and they are ready to start this adventure.

Altogether, they have listened to the instructions of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, the best friends of Harry Potter.
 


 
Before, the family has been preparing their Cambridge Exam studying some vocabulary about Weather and The Body.
 
 
More information: Weather
 
Download The Body Vocabulary
 
 More information: The Body

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets is a fantasy novel written by British author J. K. Rowling and the second novel in the Harry Potter series.

The plot follows Harry's second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, during which a series of messages on the walls of the school's corridors warn that The Chamber of Secrets has been opened and that the heir of Slytherin would kill all pupils who do not come from all-magical families. These threats are found after attacks that leave residents of the school petrified. Throughout the year, Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione investigate the attacks.

The book was published in the United Kingdom on 2 July 1998 by Bloomsbury and later in the United States on 2 June 1999 by Scholastic Inc. Although Rowling says she found it difficult to finish the book, it won high praise and awards from critics, young readers, and the book industry, although some critics thought the story was perhaps too frightening for younger children.


Much like with other novels in the series, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets triggered religious debates; some religious authorities have condemned its use of magical themes, whereas others have praised its emphasis on self-sacrifice and the way one's character is the result of one's choices.

Several commentators have noted that personal identity is a strong theme in the book and that it addresses issues of racism through the treatment of non-human, non-magical, and non-living people. Some commentators regard the diary as a warning against uncritical acceptance of information from sources whose motives and reliability cannot be checked. Institutional authority is portrayed as self-serving and incompetent.

The film adaptation of the novel, released in 2002, became at that time the fifth highest-grossing film ever and received generally favourable reviews. Video games loosely based on Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets were also released for several platforms, and most obtained favourable reviews.


Rowling found it difficult to finish Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets because she was afraid it would not live up to the expectations raised by Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. After delivering the manuscript to Bloomsbury on schedule, she took it back for six weeks of revision.

More information: Wizarding World

In early drafts of the book, the ghost Nearly Headless Nick sang a self-composed song explaining his condition and the circumstances of his unknown death. This was cut because the book's editor did not care for the poem, which has been subsequently published as an extra on J. K. Rowling's official website. 

The family background of Dean Thomas was removed because Rowling and her publishers considered it an unnecessary digression, and she considered Neville Longbottom's own journey of discovery more important to the central plot.

Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets was published in the UK on 2 July 1998 and in the US on 2 June 1999. It immediately took first place in UK bestseller lists, displacing popular authors such as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Terry Pratchett and making Rowling the first author to win the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year for two years in succession. In June 1999, it went straight to the top of three US bestseller lists, including inThe New York Times.


Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets continues to examine what makes a person who he or she is, which began in the first book. As well as maintaining that Harry's identity is shaped by his decisions rather than any aspect of his birth, Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets provides contrasting characters who try to conceal their true personalities.

Gilderoy Lockhart lacks any real identity because he is nothing more than a charming liar. Tom Riddle also complicates Harry's struggle to understand himself by pointing out the similarities between the two both half-bloods, orphans raised by Muggles, probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin.

Opposition to class, death and its impacts, experiencing adolescence, sacrifice, love, friendship, loyalty, prejudice, and racism are constant themes of the series. In Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets Harry's consideration and respect for others extends to the lowly, non-human Dobby and the ghost Nearly Headless Nick.


More information: Wizarding World

Immorality and the portrayal of authority as negative are significant themes in the novel
. There are few absolute moral rules in Harry Potter's world, for example Harry prefers to tell the truth, but lies whenever he considers it necessary -very like his enemy Draco Malfoy.

At the end of Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore retracts his promise to punish Harry, Ron, and Hermione if they break any more school rules -after Professor Minerva McGonagall estimates they have broken over 100- and lavishly rewards them for ending the threat from The Chamber of Secrets. Krause further states that authority figures and political institutions receive little respect from Rowling

William MacNeil of Griffith University, Queensland, Australia states that the Minister for Magic is presented as a mediocrity. In his article Harry Potter and the Secular City, Ken Jacobson suggests the Ministry as a whole is portrayed as a tangle of bureaucratic empires, saying that Ministry officials busy themselves with minutiaeand coin politically correct euphemisms like 'non-magical community' for Muggles and 'memory modification' for magical brainwashing.

This novel implies it begins in 1992. The cake for Nearly-Headless Nick's 500th death day party bears the words Sir Nicholas De Mimsy Porpington died 31 October 1492.

More information: Screen Rant

 
 
 You will also find that help will always be given
at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.

Albus Dumbledore