February/March Homeschool Miscellany

• home education

The rest of the year has just been a blur of trying to keep on top of anything never mind everything.

Most of February and March was 15yo painting Warhammer minis.

We both thought it would be funny for him to do a faux painting pose as seen on the internet.

He found lighter coloured models a little harder to paint.

The lighter coloured ones have since been stripped down (by soaking in a jar of turps) and repainted.

A bit more time was spent on this particular character as apparently it’s an important one.

He continued recounting all this lore stuff to me with almost no repeats as there is quite a lot. He also started obsessively watching painting videos and practising various painting techniques mostly on his Tyrannid models as he doesn’t plan on developing that particular army.

He also bought and started work on this dreadnaught which at the time was the biggest unit he had acquired.

According to him, while most people will get into Warhammer because they enjoy the game, a lot also get into it because they like building models and setting up dioramas.

A lot of time was spent attending to every tiny little detail on the dreadnaught. I thought it turned out pretty good and he is still happy with it for the most part.

He said that the small text transfers were very fiddly and they certainly look like they would have been.

At the beginning of term we had a chance encounter at work where we met up with the then-new coordinator for the youth group program that had re/started, and he invited 15yo along. As 15yo was going through a phase where he would just automatically reject anything I said or did (including things that he actually did want to do), I asked the coordinator to invite him and show him the space, which he did. 15yo told me that it was “okay, kinda mid” but the coordinator told me otherwise. 15yo ended up joining the youth group and having a grand old time. They ran both free and structured activities and would occasionally go out to various places nearby, as well as getting people to come in and do presentations (one that stands out in my memory was a mental health one as my boss asked 15yo about it afterwards) and 15yo went from trying it out once a week to wanting to go both days that were running to being happy to be picked up by the bus (the group did bus runs for the kids who couldn’t get there on their own) so he wouldn’t arrive late on the day I couldn’t drop him off on time. He also ended up getting dropped off home by the bus after I found out that they finished a lot earlier than I did.

True to our apparently “radical unschooling” approach (which is to say we just do stuff and I’ll occasionally nudge along something), 17yo and 15yo got back into their usual routine of self-directed study (which is to say they just did and researched things that interested them), and I’m not all the way across all of it, just the politics and current affairs and other random things that they will regularly pop out to discuss (usually in-depth).

17yo attempted to enrol at a university bridging course at Murdoch but they refused to consider anyone unnder 18, so she signed up for the one her brother was doing at Curtin for semester 2 as they were happy to take her at that age.

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