January Homeschooling Miscellany

Two weeks after getting home we were back in Jurien Bay again, this time for the kids' great nanna's 90th birthday party.  As usual we were only there overnight and stayed in a different beach cottage with a backyard nicely set up for kids.

The kids spent the day we got there playing in the backyard for a little while before having showers and getting ready for the party that evening.  8yo taught their 6yo cousin how to play Exploding Kittens which the 6yo took a few games to learn and apparently told his mother he didn't understand but he seemed to enjoy it as he kept wanting to play.

There were a number of other games also available in a games cupboard so quite a few of them got a workout before we finally went to the party.  It was a buffet style dinner and the kids got to meet some of JJ's cousins' kids that we hadn't seen for years.  There was also a noticeboard that had some stories of the great nanna's life on it available for reading.

11yo found out that a couple of her friends (previous homeschoolers who now go to school) were going to be going to a zoo event and begged to be able to go too.  The tickets weren't expensive as we were members and I ended up cajoling JJ into coming (I really need to stop burnouts being a normal thing).

After the kids had done a few of the activities on offer (including the favoured rock climbing wall and having photos with some of the characters walking around, we went for a quick wander hrough the African Savannah to see if the friends we were supposed to meet up with had done likewise.  We didn't find them but we did find a new-to-us lion exhibit.

The friends were eventually found (they arrived later than we did and we were already a bit late) and the girls got matching body art of a rainbow lion and then joined in the dance party which included the DJ allowing them to sing along into he microphone with the poppy songs.

The kids received science kits as a late Christmas present from either my aunty and grandmother or my parents (I can't remember now!), and 8yo loved his molecule building set and the acids and bases test kit.  Many, many molecules were built, and he had a lot of fun finding out what things were acidic and basic and doing the experiment to create salt.

On Australia Day, we decided to go to a nearby beach as part of the "checking out the area" we do of a house we're considering buying.

And on the way out found a cute lizard sunbathing on one of the barrier poles.

Rest of the month was spent chilling and me trying to get the rest of the things organised for this year.  I've usually done a really rough plan for the year by November or December of the preceding year complete with dot points of activities and what workbooks I'm going to be getting and excursions we're going to be doing but things have been doing a lot of falling apart over the last couple of years so I'm going to ditch it and do something else.

This year seeing as all kids can now read and write, and pretty much everyone hates workbooks with every fibre of our being (so much so that I quite often can't be bothered forcing them to sit down and just do it for 10min a day as even though other people keep screeching YOU JUST HAVE TO BECAUSE YOU JUST DO at us, all of us have infinitely better things to do), I'm going to sit down with each kid and write up their own educational plans along with schedules (as rough or polished as they like).  And then stick it up on their walls and just make sure they follow it, and help them tweak it as necessary.  Hopefully them being a bit more involved now that they're plenty enough to be more involved in directing themselves will make the "educational" shenanigans a little bit easier to manage and produce more "work samples" which is something that we've always struggled with.