Been a bit of a lazy week this week.
Ruan made a (very) short story book with illustrations and a shape book to help Cub learn his shapes. Bigs did their 10-12yo maths books and were either horribly distracted, not in the mood or they are starting to find the work harder as both only managed to get through one section before the endless fidgeting and recalcitration set in. As I watched Tao prowling up and down the house while he worked out multiplication problems in his head I thought perhaps it was a good thing that he wasn't going to school at this stage as he'd drive a teacher batty with his shark-like need to be always moving.
I made some chicken stock and found that one of the cloves of garlic had shot, so showed it to the kids and threw it into a plastic container of water so we could watch the shoot grow and roots form before moving it to the aquaponics to (hopefully) complete growing. Because we had a few things going on at once I forgot to get them to sketch it out on Day 0.
Ru's diagram of the garlic's growth, Tao hadn't given me his at time of writing
We completely forgot English bookwork due to other things happening on the day, and then forgot to catch up the following day where we all had way too much screen time binging out on games pretty much the whole day (Ru played Minecraft and various Lego games, sometimes with Cub, Cub when he wasn't gaming was watching tv, Tao and I played Spore separately). Cub did request the globe at one stage and we sat in the computer room with the bigs at the computers and he pointed out pictures he was interested in and asked about the countries or oceans they were in.
Our kung fu trips have been filled with conversational learning. On the way up Ru and Cub usually have a nap, and on the way back everyone is awake though Tao tends to be the one talking with the other two occasionally chipping in (though Cub's chipping in mostly comprises of him parroting Tao). This time it was the news and journalism on the way up. He asked about my reaction to something on the news, and the conversation went from why news is always bad (amusing side, whenever a news station reports on anything that doesn't involve explosions and heaps of people getting injured and/or dying and generally anything to get into a self-righteous rage about, people derisively snort about how it must be a "slow news day", I think it says something about those people) and what journalists are supposed to do (travel around the place and report back on what's going on) all the way through to how news stations can and often are used to shape public perception of any given situation which is why we should cross-ref things (especially things that don't sound or feel quite right and even more particularly if we're feeling inclined to act on them) and also why many governments around the world are so laughably desperate to control the internet or at the very least access to it (we didn't get too much into this, we were almost at our destination). After trainng, as we were heading back to the car, we noticed lightning in the clouds. Tao (who is a bit of a drama llama) claimed he was scared of the lightning, so I told him how the lightning was formed, which apparently didn't make it any less scary so I pointed out it was a lot less scary than say nuclear explosions. We then talked about nuclear energy (awesome way to generate energy, pity about the highly toxic radioactive waste products and the derivative weapons of mass destruction) and wars, I told him to ask his father about the finer details of the physics involved. We moved on to why humans or any other given animal are the shape they are which led straight into evolution and compared and contrasted actual evoltuion with Spore evolution. We then went on to theories of how plants formed given that the planet was probably highly volcanic in its early days, which of course led on to what causes earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the difference between lava and magma (lava is what comes spewing of the volcano, magma tends to be subterranean by a long way and is hotter).
On Friday we hit the zoo with Nanna, Aunty and cousin. The kids planned the (rather inefficient) route, we didn't see everything but they all got to look at what they wanted for quite a well (mostly because I managed the small overtired hyperactive one freeing up Nanna to explore and explain with the bigs. Tao has been reading more of the informational signs than just the title to find out what the animal was called, and we also investigated binomial nomenclature in the cockatoo section where it was easy to compare the genus and species names. Additional highlight: Cub seeing the large python and exclaiming loudly "WOW THAT'S GINORMOUS!"