!schooling 0000C18c - C22n | Mar 4-9

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Bit of a short week this week due to Labour Day public holiday, and also (or perhaps because of that) a little bit disorganised. We did the zoo on the weekend, spent Monday cleaning the house which was rather festy. We didn’t get around to doing maths bookwork but did some Minecraft related spatial stuff. 8yo’s writing is getting neater and he is growing in confidence writing lowercase. We’re getting less freakouts about inability to form letters and other such things. He’s been having nightmares again so I’ve suggested he turn them into stories. He’s not so sure about writing horror but he has started thinking about stories he might like to write, including a self-insert Pokemon fanfic. I’m hoping to develop him out of the Mary Sue stage while he’s still young, he seems to be starting to grasp the concept of balancing characters.

!schooling 0000C11c-15n | Feb 25 - Mar 01

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8yo

8yo decided to do Khan Academy for maths, and happily worked through a few addition/subtraction stacks. After he giggled at me a few times for taking longer than he had to work out the problems, I told JJ that he could supervise at least 8yo’s maths from hereon (it won’t happen as I’ve said that a few times from about two thirds of the way through last year, and I’m still supervising everything except when I’ve asked JJ to supervise due to work). He didn’t watch any of the videos as he understood the basics behind the stacks and just needed some assistance with the 4 digit stuff.

!schooling 0000 Copernicus 04-08 | Feb 18-22

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First thing I noticed attempting to swing to theAbysmal time, it’s HARD now, because Monday was technically the middle of theAbysmal week and we kind of like having weekends with the person who works full time out of home, and also I’ve just noticed that something awkward has happened between my two copies of the converter. The form says it’s C03r and the block in the blog sidebar says it’s C04c. Meantime the official version says it’s Month 2 Day 2 (I expected to be a day ahead and two days sometimes due to observing leap years on different years). So for now I’ll have to keep track of tAT but continue using Gregorian.

!schooling 0000 Brahe 25 - 0000 01 Copernicus | Feb 11-15

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Seeing as I’m rejigging everything else anyway I think when I throw the boulders back in the river it will be following theAbysmal Calendar. It’s going to make date conversions interesting (suppose I better write that module at some stage) but even in the current rudimentary stages I’m finding date projections and calculations easier with theAbysmal than with the Gregorian (where I need to look at the calendar because it doesn’t always visualise correctly in my head). Yes I have actually had a plan for this year (since November in fact), no I haven’t written it down and sorted out all the final details yet, I’m working on it.

Best laid plans

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Stuff to keep going

Bookwork for pocket money was working out nicely (up to the point where it fell apart catastrophically from September while the dental work was being done and then again in December because of silly season). Been pinged for not doing literacy and numeracy every day again but none of us feel like bookworking it every single day and I honestly don’t know how much more literate and numerate I’m supposed to be getting after reading every single night (they are read to and the big ones read passages aloud, more if we can get them to read more), voluntarily playing Reading Eggs, counting how much pocket money they’ve saved up and how much more they need for whatever it is they want to get and working out how many blocks they need to build this thing in Minecraft and other random bits and pieces that seem to magically crop up without too much deliberate intervention by me.

!schooling -0001 Jung 10-14 | 10-14 Sept 2012

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Maths

Forgot 7yo already had a maths book so he’s continuing on with his old one. He got away with doing only one page instead of two as I also made him read the thing by himself which taxed him quite a lot as he was already a bit tired and we started later than we should have. Kumon book is much too easy for 5yo so will have to get another one that’s slightly more challenging. Seems like it would be a good thing for 3yo so either he will get 5yo’s book or I’ll get him another one like it.

Socially acceptable !schooling: 3-7 Sept 2012

In which I once more attempt weekly updates on the homeschooling side of things. Going to see how I go just writing about the bookwork and if I remember to add the Other Stuff we do as I go (and I found out after reading the curriculum outlines that we actually do most of the stuff in the curriculum without making much effort to do it, wonder how long I can get away with that… :).

Homeschooling thought+photo dump

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Because I don’t blog it nearly as often as I should.

7yo’s reading is now well and truly away. He reads everything from street and shop signs that we’re passing to books. His current favourite book is his Pokemon Black & White Handbook that Sprat bought for him. It’s not unusual for him to wander around the house with it, have it open on his lap while watching tv, and sometimes he’ll be multiscreening, watching tv, playing Pokemon White on his DS and have the book open beside him for reference. I’ve known for a while and I think both 7yo and Josh are discovering that he can actually parse what he considers large blocks of text when he wants to.

vi ma le crino lanme ("Where is the Green Sheep?" translated into lojban)

“Where is the Green Sheep” is a picture book by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek. It’s been a favourite for all three kids and it’s pretty easy (repetitive sentences with one-two word variations). In the interests of LOTE

I decided to translate it into lojban for them.

Unfortunately, I completely destroyed the lyrical rhyming thing while doing so.

Happily it seemed like a mostly straightforward task (which means I’m slowly getting better or conversely I fubared it and don’t realise it yet). I can’t find a word for “clown” and I don’t think {sakli} is the right thing to use when describing playground equipment.

Malay, lojban, and pocket money for bookwork

Not “versus” because it’s not a contest. Not really.

I’m about to give up on my Malay Anki deck, mostly because it’s not ordered in a way that makes logical sense to me. I grew up hearing a lot of Malay, sadly I didn’t learn it formally because I couldn’t be bothered going to Malay school on Saturday mornings (I already went to school five days a week, why in the hell would I want to go on a sixth?) and I didn’t pick up nearly enough in daily life (partially because I think my parents were more concerned about me speaking and writing decent English while going through school, partially because I had for a very long time this idiotic notion that if I couldn’t grasp something the very second it was presented then I was obviously too stupid to live, and mostly because I was probably too damn lazy to pay proper attention). I figured that I should just be able to pick it back up, and I did to a degree. I’m not sure how the deck was structured, perhaps relevance to something that wasn’t relevant to me. There were many instances where I wondered why the root word hadn’t been introduced before a word that built off it.