February Homeschooling Miscellany

• AEfter Ragnarok

The month kicked off with 9yo deciding to make his own “card game” after ages of playing Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. After quick playtests with me and 11yo, 11yo decided to help make even more “cards”. I use the term loosely bcause the “cards” were all A4-sized.

The game was fairly simple and entertaining, and after playing a couple of times 9yo decided that he probably needed more “good” cards as it didn’t take very long for me to die despite the lives and death prevention things that had been added in the iteration with 11yo.

9yo finally got his long awaited Yu-Gi-Oh Egyptian god cards in the mail (ordered via JJ using Habitica points) and wrote a steem post about them in his notebook (or rather I wrote out what he dictated and he copied, which I’ve since been told by his psych I shouldn’t do), which I then copied to his steem blog.

After some discussion the kids and I developed a new chore roster (which can be used in conjunction with Habitica). All of them doing all their chores each day earns an ice cream token. 7 ice cream tokens means I take them out for ice cream (whodathunkit eh XD), 28 ice cream tokens earns them an outing to Bounce or some other place that they might like to go that I otherwise probably wouldn’t take them to due to entry price. Anyone who doesn’t complete their chores loses a heart, and when all hearts are lost they’re off screens for the day, and the hearts are reset. This has been working reasonably well with 9yo pretty eager to get his chores done, and we’ve got better organisational skills happening as he stops what he’s doing to get the chores done and then goes back to it. Miss Perfectionist 11yo was pretty good on the chores to begin with but has also upped her game some as she doesn’t like losing the hearts. She also wrote and illustrated the chore labels (because she wanted to use her glitter gel pens and adhd/autistic kids work better with large visual cues apparently) and drew the hearts and ice creams.

13yo we’re still working on.

We took a trip to Scitech to meet up with some friends who were doing a class. 13yo came along reluctantly as he claimed everything at Scitech was boring, so I guess he’ll only be coming when they change the main displays.

The soundwave machine is a favourite of 9yo’s, it’s usually the first thing he runs to as soon as we enter the main area.

The feature display was Planet Pioneers which all three kids enjoyed, and made the teenager a bit less grumpy about having been dragged along.

There was a display that allowed investigating different rock samples under a microscope to examine their structure, and to test their radiation and magnetic levels:

A fun ball set up where the aim was to try to calculate the speed and angle at which to launch a metal ball “satellite” onto the moon which was spinning around the Earth:

and “driving” around a simulation in a life-size rover model:

There was probing for resources on a newly discovered planet (which as far as I could tell from what 11yo was doing meant trying to find the sweet spots where all the graphs maxed out):

Both the boys had a go on this drone simulator and found the controls a bit difficult to grasp. We have been discussing acquisitioning one but it’s going to be a beginner drone and not the several thousand dollars that the drone being simulated probably would have cost, partly because we don’t have thousands of dollars lying around for a drone and mostly because I was going by the number of times both of them crashed it on takeoff before figuring out how to fly around doing anything.

There were some other really vague simulation style games including trying to find the right mix of nutrients for optimum potato growth, and working out the right mix of water and gas for bottle rockets.

And then when we were trying to leave, I was unable to locate the child who had been the most reluctant to come, because he’d found a building table.

9yo got into some science kits that he’d been given for Christmas:

We were slightly stymied by one of the experiments that required a piece of equipment that was supposed to be in the box but didn’t appear to be, which would have been a bit less of a big deal if we hadn’t needed some of the things for the following experiment. So that one has been temporarily put aside for now until we figure out what to do about the missing parts.

He’s also been writing lists and short sentences randomly which I’m counting as a decent achievement considering how hard it’s been to get him sitting still for long enough to practise writing:

We usually spell mum with a u but I’ll give him credit for sounding it out or remembering it being spelled like that from elsewhere. And yes it came in an envelope and everything XD

He also drew a map of the house which is pretty accurate if you’re not sure how a house fits together and completely skip over areas you don’t register as important. The X is of course where the treasure was hidden.

We did Bounce (which is wonderfully quiet at midweek lunchtime):

And afterwards 13yo tried his hand at building design, coming up with some aquaponics glasshouse type ideas for use in desert areas if the money to build them wasn’t going to be an issue. For whatever reason (possibly aesthetic) he decided on a circular design which gave him both practical application of pi and realising why buildings tend to be designed in squares and rectangles rather than circles.

He has decided that building and landscape design is fun and asked about job prospects in either of those, told him there is always work for architects and landscape architects, so something else that he’s considering.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License