October Homeschooling Miscellaney 2

Might try to do these as monthly things rather than semi-random ones.

Firstly, we are chick central again.  About three clutches with 7-10 chicks in each one.  Chappie's family want some of the naked necks.  This was the first lot.  Idiot hen had gone next door to brood, kids heard the cheeping and went next door to investigate.  Neighbour was astonished as she hadn't even realised they were there behind the shed, and just as well they'd only hatched that morning as she'd been dogsitting and the dog had left earlier in the day.

The picture of them is as day olds, they're now a week or so and feathering up.

JJ's sister wanted to catch up so we agreed to meet at a park "about halfway" close to cbd.  There's a lovely park near Burswood Casino that they wanted to meet up at.  Initially we went to completely the wrong park across the road as we couldn't actually go down the road sister in law told us to go down.  It was a nice enough park and gave us an opportunity to discuss algae, its growing conditions, uses in ecosystems and when it's a problem.

8yo is coming up to a birthday and wanted a new "party dress".  She was very specific in her description of the type of dress I wanted and after listening to her description, I knew exactly where to get one from.

She has since decided on the medieval theme after all, which led to 10yo deciding to make a dragon out of boxes with his Makedo set.

Further refinement required apparently, if he wants to do any more work he has some time as we had to push back the party a bit to try to fit around all the end of term stuff and make sure no one missed out.  8yo made her usual awesome invites.

After a bit of scurrying around trying to find a park with a castle (the only ones I know of are the Lotterywest Playground in King's Park and Fancote Park in Kelmscott.  The former was a bit more of a hike than I wanted to do (and we have done it before for 8yo's 7th birthday) and the latter we'd been told the castle often had broken glass or needles in there, and even though it would probably just take an adult sweeping through beforehand to make sure everything was safe we decided against it.  Fortuitously 10yo, 8yo and I had started playing Ingress (hurray for being able to practice map reading skills on the fly) and in our wanders looking for portals, we eventually decided on a pretty little local park which makes up for its lack of play equipment (something which has been concerning the big kids less and less) with a lot of grass and trees.  Now all she needs to do is the text for the inside and then we send them out.

And we shall end with a visit to another homeschooling friend including 6yo finding a magnet dart and finding out what on the bench was metal and how many metal things he could lift with it (quite a few if he stacked correctly):

and 8yo painting Christmas themed plaster models with the resident 12yo.