October Homeschool Miscellany
I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection. JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don’t think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did.
Our bees swarmed, and made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days. We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up. In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.
Are we getting sick of the greys yet?
The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD
The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.
Bees have ants
11yo: the drones are the male bees. They sit around and eat honey, then they mate and die.
7yo: don’t they store honey?
11yo: the drones are the ones with wings.
7yo: some bees don’t have wings? O_o
11yo: OH! I was thinking about ants XD
7yo: bees have ants? o_O
This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
September Homeschooling Miscellany
Apparently doing bookwork with Dad is much more interesting than doing the same bookwork with Mum. I have handed off 11yo to JJ for maths as he’s too advanced for me, so J has been teaching him physics and chemistry and other related things. They started off in the computer room, and then 9yo decided to join them doing English. As he was passing the computer room 7yo happened to look in, I told him not to go in there as they were doing bookwork and he decided then that he wanted to do bookwork too.
August Homeschooling Miscellany
There were a couple of birthdays this month which of course meant birthday cards had to be made.
We welcomed a new baby cousin.
3D Coat/Blender notes: Getting ptex textures from 3d Coat to Blender
tl;dr: bake the damn things.
After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool
Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don’t know :P)
July Homeschooling Miscellany
Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother. While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.
On the first day we decided to go and check out the Melbourne Museum, as the kids love museums. The train took forever as there were a million stops and by the time we got there the kids were starving to death so the first thing we did was run off to look for food. We ate at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then found out that we went in the opposite direction of the museum. After a quick glance around we discovered there was a Chinese museum down the alleyway between the building the Italian restaurant was in and the next one over. After assuring 7yo that we would not get mugged walking down this alleyway (it was quite literally a gap between two buildings, not even any room for skips or fire escapes), we walked down the alleyway into the tiny little Chinatown which seemed primarily designed to house The Chinese Museum.
June Homeschooling Miscellany
As it turned out the other 7yo’s pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn’t “drownded”, it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting.
He’s been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding. He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while “disguised” in the box he’d cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.
May Homeschooling Miscellany
11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard
JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot. 11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn. I’m obviously taking the photo. The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!).
April Homeschooling Miscellany
Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser. Didn’t get a lot of photos as we got rained out!
11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he’s any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.