home education
Booklist 2014
Saturday, 5 October 2013 @ 5:23pm
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 ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
!schooling from whenever til now
Friday, 4 October 2013 @ 4:11pm
[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
Friday, 23 August 2013 @ 4:00pm
[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
Sunday, 11 August 2013 @ 11:02pm
[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.
Christmas Island: Tai Jin House exploration
Wednesday, 31 July 2013 @ 12:34pm
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
My suspected real life Crazy Dog House on the Cliff allegedly contains a museum these days. For various reasons we’ve never quite manged to get to it. Apparently neither have my parents, but as it turns out the opening hours are really awkward and you need to either be a tourist or taking time off work to go to it within the very short opening hours (Thursday and Friday 10-3).
Christmas Island: nature trail and Albert the robber crab and friends
Saturday, 27 July 2013 @ 11:19am
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
It’s been mostly overcast with bouts of rain so the last week has been kind of slack and kind of relaxed. We’ve been three times to two different beaches (though I didn’t take photos of the second beach partially because it was late when we went and I wasn’t sure how good the photos would turn out in that light, and mostly because I was going to be swimming as well, could have given it to my dad though), one loopy nature trail (which was slightly longer than I thought but a decent walk nonetheless, and we didn’t go to the lookout because it was probably too long a hike for the kids) and a few epic Minecraft sessions. I haven’t got as much art done as I was hoping but bits and pieces are getting done. The kids have been watching a LOT of Pokemon, a couple of other movies and reading books borrowed from the library (independently during the day in the case of the bigs; they each have a book on dinosaurs and 8yo has one on space and 6yo has a cookbook in addition to books selected for bedtime stories) as well as playing outside on the play equipment Nanny and Granddad are spoiling them rotten with, and looking at the fish in the pond.
Approxiprimer build notes
Tuesday, 16 July 2013 @ 4:12pm
Erm…note: these are actually notes for me so I only have to do other similar systems once (hopefully), not a fyn’s guide. If they come in useful for someone else to follow great, no guarantees blah blah blah.
System: Horize Clevo W110ER from Logical Blue One (on sale at time of writing) AU$919 with 3 year warranty
Specs display: 11.6" matte 1366x768 cpu: Intel Core i5-3380m 2.9Ghz - 3.6Ghz ram: 4Gb 750Gb hdd nVidia GeForce GT650M 2Gb A little pricier than I was intending but specs for that price made me pretty happy. They are VERY snappy little machines that almost match my mid-2011 iMac for specs, quite light, very solid feeling, and with this weird texture on the lid and under the keyboard that I quite like. The keys are titchy (good size for little fingers, anyone bigger than me might complain, took me a bit of getting used to the placement of the right shift key). I find them slightly clunky not so much in size (expected with the amount of stuff packed in there) but in the opening and shutting. I’m used to MacBooks which feel quite smooth and easy to open and shut (or at least mine did) and “locked” with a button thing on my Powerbook and magnet on my white MacBook. The Clevos appear to rely on hinge tightness to stay shut so opening them is a two-handed job (one hand opens the lid, the other keeps the base down) and they THUNK when you close them. So far the only issue I’m having is that the two that I ordered arrived separately which caused some friction between the recipients. I have yet to have one on my lap when it’s doing something intensive, otherwise it seems to deal with heat quite well.
!schooling 0000H04c - H09 | Jul 8-12
Monday, 15 July 2013 @ 12:57pm
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
Right up at the beginning of the week we spent half a day out. Morning was pretty cruisy, and then fell over a bit as we ran late to get to Nanna’s and then slightly later again as the road I usually take was unexpectedly closed and I don’t know my way around the area well enough to reliably navigate around the roadblock (pulled in at a medical centre and utilised the trusty GPS). While I was in the meeting (which ran unexpectedly long) the kids played down by the river and made some new friends, 6yo with a pair of sisters aged 6.5yo and 4.5yo and 8yo with a gaggle of boys who were a few years older but they all played Minecraft so everything was cool (he apparently invited them over for a Minecraft party, I told him their parents would probably not want to drive out so far). Back at the grandparents’ they didn’t want to leave immediately so we waited out rush hour and Pop let them play with his walkie talkies for a bit.
!schooling Jul 1-5
Tuesday, 9 July 2013 @ 9:27am
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
Had to temporarily drop theAbysmal dates as I got completely and utterly lost. Stupid Gregorian calendar and it’s shifting days ;) I’ll try to pick it up again next week.
Week before this one we trialled out the new weekly schedule. It went pretty well I think, and 6yo in particular has been enjoying checking it each day to find out what we’re up to that day, and to see what’s coming up. The new boxes have been working out quite well too, though after I’d sorted the books into the boxes I realised that there are only maths, English and science books (or more accurately 8yo has a science book, the other two don’t). I’m waiting on the two laptops to get here so I can set them up and I think the last two days will be Khan Academy (expanding and consolidating existing skills as well as learning new ones or just exploring random subject areas), Reading Eggs/Maths Seeds (mostly consolidation, only 4yo is really learning anything new from them) and general art shenanigans. I’m having a very hard time squeezing other languages in there, we’re still doing a very confusing and random mix of Lojban and Malay with no logic whatsoever behind it.
!schooling 0000G10n - 0000G15n | Jun 17-21
Friday, 21 June 2013 @ 8:11pm
[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
And just as you’re enjoying the nice blissful month of no weekly posts from fyn, we’re starting again! Anyway we’re about midyear so this is part catch-up and part vague plan for the rest of the year.
We had one week of staggered flu (nothing too serious, just lots of sleeping, lethargy and general blarginess) followed by a week of gastro (again not too serious in the grand scheme, the kids were a bit lethargic but not listless, the biggest issue was the washing machine choosing to break down immediately before the gastro hit and it was out of action for a couple of weeks), followed by a short week (thanks to a public holiday) of me taking it easy because I was exhausted from the previous two, followed by a week of JJ catching a really bad flu and then a week of me catching a much milder version of that flu which technically only lasted a day, I just chose to take the rest of the week easy. We did have a few bouts of okay or mostly okay in that period fortunately.