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. Not sure how much he’s done as I think he’s gotten himself a new Khan Academy account instead of resetting the password for his existing one so I’ll have to try to remember to check that up when I’m compiling the report for the moderator meeting.

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. I’m trying really hard to pressure them harder into writing down stuff and basically doing their own reports especially as they’re doing so much stuff on their own now but still having zero luck with that.

May/June Homeschool Miscellany

During May, 12yo decided to get into fruit sculpture, and made a ridiculous amount of stuff out of bananas. Because I was really preoccupied with I can’t remember what at the time, the only thing I caught a photo of was this “sword”.

I did have time to make a trip to Spotlight to pick up some elastic and some fabric for 14yo to make a blanket thing that apparently only needs tying together.

April Homeschool Miscellany

April was a bit of a blur of late nights and continued chaos. When the budget cycle rolled around we did manage a zoo trip. 16yo refused to wake up, and 14yo, 12yo and 14yo’s SO and I were literally just about to walk out of the house when the outlaws arrived with my 4yo nephew. We told them we were just heading out to the zoo and they were welcome to come along if they wanted, so we all ended up piling back into their car and heading on over.

March Homeschool Miscellany

I would love to say things are picking up but they’re really not. Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we’d have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we’re trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.

February Homeschool Miscellany

At the end of January Homeschool Miscellany we were re-establishing routines and trying to get into good habits and making new plans.

Two of those things are somewhat working out for us.

I’m still struggling to go to bed on time x_x

There were a few unexpected shenanigans quite close together which have thrown me right off with AER and hive and training which is about normal, and in way too many cases excursion days were postponed as well.

January Homeschool Miscellany

One of the good things about The Big Reset (although the kids don’t really feel it at the time) is the slow and very limited internet (my parents actually have a quota as they don’t use nearly as much internet as we do or more specifically as the kids do), which means they tend to spend slightly less time on their devices. The boys actually spent a few nights playing chess against each other and JJ, and Sprat taught them how to play a game with a Chinese name somewhat similar to Poker (the similarity that I could pick up being that you had similar collections of cards you could use).

December Homeschool Miscellany

I usually don’t do December and January unless interesting things happen as December is usually write-off month (too many end of year things happening for anything to be effectively planned and even if it could be planned we’d be exhausted as normally around the end of year things we just want to chill) and January is planning month (because my organisational skills are that atrocious that I need an entire month to plan).

August/September/November Homeschool Miscellany

I thought I’d already done August Homeschool Miscellany but apparently I’d done July and collected photos for August but not actually written the post. Oops. So everything ended up getting grouped as I’ve been struggling this year.

It’s no accident that October was left out, apparently we didn’t do anything that I could include.

Goolugatup Heathcote Museum

We initially heard that there was a museum in the building of the Heathcote Cultural Precinct when we attended a relative’s birthday party there. The precinct was a mental institution in the 1920s for mildly afflicted people and was one of the pioneering ones that broke away from the methods that seem to result in buildings being haunted.