May/June Homeschool Miscellany

• home education

During May, 12yo decided to get into fruit sculpture, and made a ridiculous amount of stuff out of bananas. Because I was really preoccupied with I can’t remember what at the time, the only thing I caught a photo of was this “sword”.

I did have time to make a trip to Spotlight to pick up some elastic and some fabric for 14yo to make a blanket thing that apparently only needs tying together.

The blanket was taken to her boyfriend’s place to complete and doesn’t seem to have come back since.

The highlight of the month was 12yo’s first trip to the redone museum. We started off the same way 16yo and I had started, heading to the top floor with the intent of working our way down.

He’s not quite as dinosaur obsessed as he used to be but still thoroughly enjoyed that section as I knew he would. And we took a “Youtube thumbnail” with the megalodon.

He deviated from the route 16yo took though (as per usual I was following their lead and letting them decide where they wanted to go), and we ended up in a section about the cosmos which contained these beautifully painted emu eggs

along with the more generally expected stuff.

This flowed into a geological type room

aqnd then into the crystal room which 14yo had been excitedly telling me about from her last date/trip there with her boyfriend. She’s into crystals at the moment so I wasn’t surprised that it was her favourite room but after getting in there I could see why. One of the pathways in was this cool tunnel.

And we had to do another Youtube thumbnail parody.

Then we went through the rest like normal people.

With the shorter attention span, 12yo moved a bit faster through the galleries than his older brother and before long we ended up in a relatively recent history gallery containing a lot of recent technology (including an iPhone 3GS which I still have in my house and had been joking that it and my second or third gen iPod belonged in the museum, apparently it does XD). He got really interested in these ridiculously old games

and then we moved into the next gallery which had some stuff which looked like it was from the early 1900s. 12yo told me bits and pieces about some of the firearms that he saw, some of which I was able to verify from the information boards and some that I would have had to look up.

He was quite keen to see the blue whale skeleton so we headed in that direction next. I was a bit sad at the accessways that have been cut into the buildings to faciliate better movement between the museum buildings but it did make for a very impressive reveal.

12yo informed me that the whale is posed in the attack/lunge position it would assume before charging into a group of fish to eat them. I’m not sure if he got it off an information sign or somewhere in his very self-guided studies but either way it was confirmed by a sign. From what I’ve noticed of photos or 3d reconstructions of other museums, it seems to be a popular way to pose whale skeletons, guess it looks nice and dynamic and takes up less space.

12yo spent a lot of time being amazed by it, and then we went down into the gallery and sat in an out of the way corner admiring it for a while and trying a few shots, one of them being this one taken by 12yo while we were sitting on the floor:

We wandered around and had a look at the display cases that were on the same floor before heading through the Australia-specific section where 12yo was most intrigued by this water cycle/usage touch display

while I spent about the same amount of time trying to figure out how they did it.

We eventually ended up in this other gallery which I think was also in an original part of the building that contained a lot of interactive displays. 12yo spent a lot of time colouring what I think is a replica of the Parthenon murals and being fascinated by the display itself.

We headed down onto the floor and played with the interactive displays down there before heading home.

12yo has also been doing homeschool group which I haven’t taken any photos of aside from this quick snap during one of the science classes as there are always a lot of other people around.

He’s made a few more friends there which has been great as he quit gymnastics and doesn’t always get to catch up with his friends from there, and most of the kids from judo are younger than he is.

14yo has been mostly designing various cosplays and props, drawing and finding video game references in random things:

She’s still very up in the air about further studies but she’s 14, I’m in no particular hurry.

16yo and I headed in to a TAFE as he has expressed interest in what he calls “gutwork” which apparently means working on big machines (there seems to be a slight preference towards the giant rigs that can be found on minte sites but otherwise it doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a big machine or a big vehicle as long as it’s big). The TAFE we went to does the same course that one of his friends is currently doing (which involves working with big vehicles). The options we got given were to go to school and use a school based entry in (nobody liked that idea), do a “general education” course next semester as part of the homeschool plan which would get him qualified to do a pre-apprenticeship next year after which he could hopefully start an apprenticeship, or do a different “general education” course next year which I’m under the (possibly mistaken) impression is longer, harder or both and then go down the same route.

Waiting on a definite decision from him about whether he wants to start next semester (if that’s the case he better get a move on unless there’s a closing date that we missed as I haven’t had a chance to check on that yet) or next year.

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