Attitude

As he approaches 5, the 4yo has been much less…well…4. While still prone to bouts of 4 year old raging tantrums, he is much easier to reason with and manage because he listens sometimes.

The attitudes of the bigs hae shifted dramatically from towards the end of last year where I have no idea what was going on (but the stress I was feeling at the time wouldn’t have helped) but I was fully prepared to pick up enrolment forms from the primary school down the road.

Breakthroughs

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9yo seems to finally be over his writing hurdle. Yesterday he reported that writing seems to be a lot easier, and as a result he hasn’t actively resisted/refused doing bookwork when I’ve put out the call to come and do it. Maybe he’s also realised that if he just comes and does the two pages he can go back to what he was doing quicker than if he tries to ignore me, then has a tantrum and argues about it, then does it with all of us in a cranky mood and then isn’t in the mood to do whatever it was he had been doing beforehand because the world is obviously dead set against him having any fun whatsoever. He still needs to work on some letter formation and is occasionally writing some things backwards but it seems to be coming a lot easier to him now which is great. I’ve told him it will get easier as it goes into muscle memory and his writing will slowly get neater the more he practises.

Schooling 0000m00x m06z

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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

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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

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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

• Excel Basic Skills - Spelling and Vocabulary Years 3–4
• Excel Basic Skills - Grammar and Punctuation Years 3–4
• Excel Basic Skills - Comprehension and Written Expression Year 4
• renew Reading Eggs sub

Maths

• [Excel Basic Skills - Addition and Subtraction Years 5–6])(http://www.pascalpress.com.au/excel-basic-skills-addition-and-subtraction-years-5-6/)
• Excel Basic Skills - Fractions, Decimals and Percentages Years 3–6

7yo

English

• Reading Eggs 5-8
• renew Reading Eggs sub

Maths

• renew Maths Seeds sub
• Excel Basic Skills - Working With Numbers Year 2
• Excel Basic Skills - Times Tables 1 Years 2–3

Science

• Excel Basic Skills - Science and Technology Years 1–2

5yo

English

• renew Reading Eggs sub
• Reading Eggs 1-4

Maths

• renew Maths Seeds sub
• Maths Seeds 1-4

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

!schooling from whenever til now

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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.