home education
June/July Homeschool Miscellany
13yo’s kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce. Was delicious warm with ice cream. He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason. Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding. There’s been a keen interest in blacksmithing and weaponsmithing and general annoyance that we won’t set up a forge (which he assures us can be done on the cheap and while I’m sure it can, it’s also a fire hazard and we’re in Australia) so he can get into it.
May Homeschool Miscellany
15yo and I decided we desperately needed a shoe rack so after dropping 17yo at TAFE we headed over to the KMart down the road and got a bamboo one. It didn’t end up getting put together til later that day and 15yo did most of it on her own but was struggling with a bit of it, and 17yo happened to be on his way to or from the kitchen, noticed and leant assistance.
April Homeschool Miscellany
We really didn’t do a lot in April because it kind of sucked. Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other. Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs. The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I’d decided I wanted a dog. The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time. The small dog came to us three years later.
March Homeschool Miscellany
It was another stay home month as I got too caught up in project related things and kept not sleeping, and also continually failed at finding places that we could go while unvaccinated. We did stuff though. Like going into the TAFE and finding out that 15yo could try to get into the Cert I course that 17yo is doing next semester in preparation for going into the early childhood course sometime next year.
February Homeschool Miscellany
After ending January on a high, I was looking forward to finding more expensive excursions that the kids would be interested in and working out what cheaper or free things I could sprinkle in between. And then vaccine mandates dropped which basically meant we weren’t “allowed” to do much of anything. Fortunately the kids were still “allowed” to go to gymnastics and TAFE, and in that time 17yo managed to regain his backflip (he had it last year, then lost it in the second half of the year), and on the same night got the double.
January Homeschool Miscellany
The month opened with 13yo being inspired by Genshin Impact (a game that 15yo and I have been playing together that 13yo occasionally joins us in) and making a chicken and mushroom kebab, which is one of the food items that can be crafted or purchased in game. There isn’t an actual recipe to follow so he just skewered and lightly seasoned and pan fried them. Was very delicious. In the spirit of more expensive excursions less often, we decided to do the Fremantle Prison tunnel tour before school term resumed so that 17yo wouldn’t have to skip out on gymnastics.November Homeschool Miscellany
I don’t know what happened to October either, aside from the roleplaying games continued (I have this vague idea that I will write about how roleplaying games are good for maths, drama and general language development one day). I think we may have also started more hardcore development of my dice system. 12yo has been making suggestions and helping test mechanics. October may have also been the month where I found out that 16yo was doing more algebra, because apparently he thinks he needs algebra for the TAFE course he’s thinking of enrolling in.
September Homeschool Miscellany
September was States month and it felt unusually close to Regionals because it was (we had the slightly awkward situation of that we needed to put people forward for states before we had the results from regionals to make sure they’d actually qualified, and to add chaos to the confusion, because it had been another unprecedented year, people were allowed to apply for states if they hadn’t done regionals (there were a number of people that missed out due to being sick or having to quarantine).
August Homeschool Miscellany
I did not forget July, apparently we didn’t do anything at all. Or at least we didn’t do anything that I took photos of. The boys had random conversations with me and 16yo with his friends at gym about astrophysics, philosophy, life, the universe and everything and I really wish they would write this stuff down so I had proof. 14yo has been out and about with her boyfriend including going to AQWA.