technonaturalist

image link to hive image link to ko-fi

home education

Schooling 0000m00x m06z

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Weeks are getting slower as far as socially accepted “schooling” goes and ramping up with Silly Season.

We did our usual park meet and roleplaying and a quick stint at the library this week but missed out on a chunk of the boring every day stuff such as grocery shopping as 4yo has been very 4 lately and taking him out anywhere is more unpleasant than it needs to be.

Potions

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Week has been flat tack.

But today they made potions. Supervised from a distance as today is a work day. Ingredients included a small tub of yoghurt, jellybeans, cordial (even though I told them no food items they could consume directly when they asked if they could make potions ie before they’d had a chance to gather ingredients, they tried to claim they had somehow assembled these things before I’d told them no food items), citric acid, bicarb, vinegar, hippie lice shampoo (contains only eucalyptus and melaleuca oils) and hippie plant-based detergent.

ko sipna

Late night lojban lesson with the stubborn 4yo:

me: Do you remember any lojban? mi prami do
4yo: mi prami do, what does dat mean?
me: it means “I love you”
4yo: mi prami do gives me a cuddle
me: cinba gives him a kiss
4yo: what does dat mean?
me: it means ‘kiss’
4yo: sheen ba! gives me a kiss
me: ko sipna, that means ‘go to sleep!’

He’s still not asleep.

!schooling 0000L06z-13z

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

We had one day where the smalls played Maths Seeds and 8yo found himself a doco about octopi (or at least the bit I saw of it had an octopus glooping through a “maze” of clear plastic pipes) just because it was fun. We had a kerbside collection recently which meant there were a lot of people kerbside collecting, including JJ who picked up an outdoor setting, three tubs, a shelving unit and two working monitors.

!schooling 0000K18c - 0000K25r

Another disorganised week. I did finally acknowledge the fact we don’t do weekends in the traditional sense so dumping that idea. I’m slow but I get there eventually.

8yo

  • started trigonometry with JJ
  • Pokemon card game with a deck he built himself
  • Go Fish

6yo

  • did some very simple letter transposing cyphers
  • Pokemon card game
  • Go Fish

4yo

  • Reading Eggs and Maths Seeds

8yo wants to start next year’s program this year, we’re going to start driftingin a thatwayward direction once everything settles down.

Home ed program 2014

Weekly-ish

All

  • library
  • 2x kung fu
  • visit great-grandmother
  • music lessons if finances allow
  • doco/music video/cooking show (every night)

9yo

  • 1x Khan Academy
  • 1x Reading Eggspress
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 1x extra any of the above
  • 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
  • AFL Juniors (1x training, 1x game)
  • gym/circus iff finances allow

7yo

  • 1x Khan Academy
  • 1x Reading Eggs
  • 1x Maths Seeds
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
  • gym

5yo

  • 1x Reading Eggs
  • 1x Maths Seeds
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 2x optional extra any of the above
  • Auskick (1x training, 1x game)

Bookwork is for $5/week pocket money. A bookwork “session” is two pages of a book, one set of exercises in Reading Eggs/Reading Eggspress/Maths Seeds (usually 10 short exercises, with Reading Eggspress it depends on what 8yo chooses to do at the time), one “stack” of problems or one video in Khan Academy. The rules for earning extra have changed, rather than doing extra bookwork the bigs can now embark on a research project of their own choosing. They get an extra $5 for a relatively simple thing like a poster, $10-15 for essays/reports with diagrams, $20 for a fairly detailed book (appropriate to age obviously).

Booklist 2014

Everyone

  • textas
  • coloured pencils
  • crayons (big ones)
  • street chalk
  • paint (acrylic, water, if Ru wants oil or something complicated get a small set and keep it out of the way)
  • pastels
  • oil pastels
  • one of those huge arse dangerous sharpeners with a handle that is impossible to lose

9yo

English

Maths

7yo

English

  • Reading Eggs 5-8
  • renew Reading Eggs sub

Maths

Science

5yo

English

  • renew Reading Eggs sub
  • Reading Eggs 1-4

Maths

  • renew Maths Seeds sub
  • Maths Seeds 1-4
Creative Commons License
This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

!schooling from whenever til now

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Due to stuff (some it was the parents coming up to visit for a couple of weeks, some is that business has picked up dramatically), I haven’t been keeping track of the homeschooly stuff. Also we’ve been finding better things to do than sitting and doing bookwork, so it’s a really good thing that’s not the core of our homeschooling program (I need to write one of those for next year by the way, and also a booklist). So here’s some photos of things it occurred to me to point a camera at.

!schooling 0000I18c - I22n

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

We spent most of the last week recovering from whatever plague we had and trying to get back into the bookwork. What this meant was that we stayed home all week and I let the kids do whatever books they wanted which meant 6yo only did Reading Eggs books all week when they are supposed to pick different subjects.

Christmas Island: long photopost and fyn's bad luck saga

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Back in Perth now and this post is going to be a long one.

The holiday has been great because I was home and crap because in the second week, I got a swollen gland or lymph node that pressed onto the nerve of one of my back teeth and caused a LOT of pain and made eating difficult, and the kids got sick. In the third week the kids recovered and I got sick (two days completely out of action and just general misery, persistent headache and neverending mucous production for the rest of the week and continuing as I type). I am feeling slightly bitter about it and thinking it’s brutally unfair but at least I stayed there the entire time unlike a certain Christmas where I got medevac’d.