January Homeschooling Miscellany

• home education

Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.

We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn’t see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn’t restrict themselves to the stage).

The kids thoroughly enjoyed the show, though 6yo’s comment at the end was “it went on forever!” Both the bigs have expressed a desire to see it again. Told them maybe in a few years if we ever managed to be rich. Their favourite character overall was Zazu. We were talking/raving about and discussing it for days afterwards with topics ranging from how the play was similar to and different from the movie through to the costume and set designs. Both 9yo and I have since added the soundtrack to our respective Spotify collections.

We’re doing (mostly) weekly excursions again with friends, and the first trip out was to the Western Australian Museum. The kids discussed a number of the exhibits with each other.

There were some dinosaur themed activities happening down in the “play area” on the first floor of the museum probably to go with a dinosaur exhibit that was going on at the time. The kids got to make their own dinosaurs and get an idea of how dinosaurs are named.

Next image is included mostly for cuteness factor and partly because I still occasionally hear people screeching about socialisation and how are the poor things supposed to make any friends when they’re homeschooled.

We rearranged the house to allow the boys to have their own rooms (they were previously sharing) and to give their sister and all her art stuff the bigger room.

6yo has really gotten into the Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering trading card games.

JJ bought him his own starter deck and they have traded some cards. 6yo has taken to perusing an old card encyclopedia of JJ’s and on one occasion tried to draw his favourite cards using the book as reference.

Unfortunately he ran off with the drawings and I have yet to find them (if they’re still around to be found) to put into his file.

We went fishing near the Garratt Rd bridge in Bayswater. I think everyone that was fishing there but us caught something. We were babysitting one of 9yo’s friends for a while and it was her first time fishing, so JJ and the bigs taught her how to cast. As usually happens when one goes fishing with kids, JJ spent a lot of time baiting hooks and I was helping untangle lines when I wasn’t running around hacking portals.

Apparently “nature play” is a thing these days. We do a bit of that anyway, especially up at the friend’s farm.

Our ancient relic of a chest freezer is occasionally growing stalactites. This is the second set we’ve found. The first set comprised of two stalactites that were a lot thicker. This of course led to a discussion of how stalatctites are formed.

One of the things that spun me out this month was walking in to 6yo’s room and asking him how long he had on his movie as it was time to get ready for bed. He hovered over the movie to bring up the time bar, observed that the elapsed time read 00:40something:something and the total time was 01:15:something and responded “About 35 minutes”. I had to go and check with JJ (without telling him what 6yo’s estimate had been) and got the same answer. I spent a bit of time wandering aimlessly around the house feeling amused at being massively outmathed by a 6yo and tryingt o decide if I should gt him harder maths books. Have decided to get him Year 3 Targeting Maths and seeing how he goes.

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