home education
November Homeschooling Miscellany
November had to be cruisy after the insanity of October, plus we usually start winding down about now anyway. We stayed home a lot. We weren’t completely lazy. The boys played with the snap circuits, 13yo mostly building his own. 9yo experimenting with food (in the picture he was doing arty things with strawberries and cream before consuming them), and 11yo was mostly experimenting with and learning about makeup (and spending a lot of money on it).
October Homeschooling Miscellany
October started out with 11yo’s bestie staying for the weekend and them asking if we could wander around Perth for a bit after visiting a store they wanted to browse. 9yo requested my phone to take a couple of photos of things that interested him: The city has been trying to do more fun and interesting stuff so we tend to find random things whenever we go there. At the time they were celebrating the arrival of spring so there were these random bird cages there, which were apparently great for photoshoots.
September Homeschooling Miscellany
One of the things about not learning in an institution is accepting that the stuff taught and learned in institutions isn’t the grand authority on all that’s worth learning. I know this, but sometimes I don’t really know it. Like on her day, 11yo said she wanted to get her nails done. My immediate response was “pick something educational”. I’m not sure why mouths sometimes just randomly fire off before engaging the logic part first as not only would it make a lot of things so much easier, it would probably also make the world a better place in general.
August Homeschooling Miscellany
This month, we started sliding back into normal. Seeing as most grocery stores have now stopped providing single-use plastic bags, we’ve ended up with a lot more cardboard boxes which get put to good use: Here after watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2 he’s made a cardboard version of the Infinity Gauntlet complete with the little stone things on top. As usual gymnastics kind of dominated our month again as our gym did regionals, which went over three weekends.
June/July Homeschooling Miscellany
Hopefully this will be the last month of not much happening as most of the chaos surrounding the closing of our business has been taken care of and there’s only a few loose strings left to tidy up now. As usual, June was dominated by preparing for and then helping out in badge tests. 11yo and one of her agemates volunteered to be errand grunts at the boys’ badge test, which basically involved running food to the judges and messages between the adult staff members and occasionally grabbing more sugar from the canteen for me.
May Homeschooling Miscellany
May was pretty quiet and boring as well. Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well). Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored).
April Homeschooling Miscellany
We didn’t do much. There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes. 13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something. I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they’re getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff.
March Homeschool Miscellany
March kicked off with Perth’s first steemup. The kids got to have some interesting conversations with new friends and encouraged to continue blogging (except for 9yo who disappeared off to the pool for most of the thing). The steem colours I sported in my mohawk so everyone knew where to go are still in! 9yo made his own “Oculus Rift” out of his snorkel mask and two toilet roll tubes (and unfortunately I can’t post pictures of it in use because he wasn’t dressed appropriately), and some “games” which involved pieces of paper being cut out roughly in the shape of the snorkel mask and taped on.
January Homeschooling Miscellany
Two weeks after getting home we were back in Jurien Bay again, this time for the kids’ great nanna’s 90th birthday party. As usual we were only there overnight and stayed in a different beach cottage with a backyard nicely set up for kids. The kids spent the day we got there playing in the backyard for a little while before having showers and getting ready for the party that evening.