technonaturalist

My loving husband has told me on many occasions that I’m certifiably insane. While not exclusively so a lot of it has to do with the whole trying to be a studio around homeschooling, webmonkeying, being the one at home so having to manage the house and all the associated miscellany.

Recently I decided to muck around with something or other (precisely what escapes me now) and while doing so I inadvertantly discovered that the rig I had built in Lightwave 8 or 9 and dragged through 10 to 11 had blown up. Not sure what happened but it’s no longer working. I was a little peeved, but happy to discover after a bit of mucking around to find out how it works, it should only take me a few hours or at least under a week with Genoma, hopefully (allowing for numerous crashes as Genoma on Mac is buggy or at least memory leaky).

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Our garlic bulb has grown quite large but is now looking a bit limp and sad. Got the kids to draw it again (still have to find where 8yo put his first diagram). 8yo’s writing is improving a lot. Got him to work out the perimeter and area (both of just the floor and the entire building) of a building he was making in Minecraft.

Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done.

I’m not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red’s ears look massive it’s intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I’m currently working in.

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Monday: sick. Fortunately there was JJ to help with maths. JJ was making noises about wanting to do modular arithmetic. When I passed the kids were doing basic arithmetic on the whiteboard. JJ wasn’t quite sure who was where and thought 8yo knew how to carry 10s. I said we were working on carrying 10s, he hadn’t quite got it yet but could so multiple digit addition and subtraction in his head as long as the numbers were under 10.

[pretty much all the images I had in here were hotlinked and they’ve all vanished because they’re extremely outdated models by this point]

The “Primer”: a fictional computer (“book”) in a work of fiction called “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson. It is carted about by the child and absorbs information from its surroundings and uses that information to construct appropriate learning experiences for the child in a narrative fashion.

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Been a bit of a lazy week this week.

6yo made a (very) short story book with illustrations and a shape book to help 4yo learn his shapes. Bigs did their 10-12yo maths books and were either horribly distracted, not in the mood or they are starting to find the work harder as both only managed to get through one section before the endless fidgeting and recalcitration set in. As I watched 8yo prowling up and down the house while he worked out multiplication problems in his head I thought perhaps it was a good thing that he wasn’t going to school at this stage as he’d drive a teacher batty with his shark-like need to be always moving.

Dear Google

bek is part of my real name. I am currently running under the assumption that it was either my initials (of my real surname) or my handle (ryivhnn, which I use on Youtube, Artician, deviantART and as a username on the Diaspora pod I’m on, though the display name there is bek) that triggered WASPobot as I hope your code isn’t so defective that you would ping me for a string that was entirely your construction (all I did was choose that particular display).

Now with more detail and split into National Curriculum subject areas as best I can manage (because I fail at reductionism and bureaucracy seems to fail at holism; with some luck perhaps we shall collide in a catalystic rather than confrontational manner somewhere in the middle, and bonus if this helps someone somewhere in some way).

The players are an 8 year old boy, a 6 year old girl and a 4 year old boy. Bookwork (which includes using the computer programs) is officially done weekly and is tied to their pocket money, they can do extra for fun and profit, and they don’t get paid if they don’t do the work. The 4yo doesn’t get pocket money and isn’t required to do the bookwork though he will usually do some if everyone else is.

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Last week and a bit have been slack and uncoordinated partially due to Easter and mostly due to the sleeping pattern going seriously out of whack resulting in myself and the kids going to bed way too late (me because I was staying up late to finish stuff off and also to make sure the bigs were asleep before turning out their light, and them because I have no idea).

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The slogan is from an xkcd shirt.

And that was pretty much what happened today. I managed to convince the kids to go play outside. Even 6yo who “hates going outside” (or so she claimed today) decided to go out after her little brother (who had been playing inside with her) decided he was going to go outside. She found her “dinosaur stomach” and started making energon stew for the Autobots. I had a flash of “why the hell not” and started bringing out stuff.