home education
May Homeschooling Miscellany
Sunday, 4 June 2017 @ 10:21am
May was a pretty cruisy month for a variety of reasons. Initially, we were recovering from an April that managed to be both crazy (but not nearly the same level insanity as the end of the year usually is) and relaxing. Then everyone took turns being sick. We’re all good now.
12yo seems to be headed into the know-it-all self-righeous phase and it’s a good thing he has a lot of different aged and types of people around him to bounce things off as it tempers his views and stops him from being insufferable. We’ve had quite a few interesting political and philosophical discussions usually on car rides, which are great except when I need to concentrate at a busy intersection. Trying to get him to be more observant of his surroundings is still an ongoing battle. He went cold off gymnastics at completely the wrong time, declared he was bored and didn’t want to do it anymore. I figured he was being hormonal and told him that he was doing it this term whether he wanted to or not because I’d already paid for it. He has found his love for it again, and I have told him that while I won’t make him keep doing it if he completely loses interest in it and really doesn’t want to do it anymore, I do want him to keep doing it as it’s something that he struggles with and I want him to keep working at something that is hard for him as a lot of things come pretty easily to him and he’s not used to struggling, so needs to learn to build some resilience from somewhere. Anyway he went cold at completely the wrong time and when he should have been working hard to qualify for badge testing he did his absolute best to skive off, and by the time he got back into it, it was too late. He initially tried to blame me for the fact he couldn’t qualify but eventually had to accept that it was his own refusal to train that has led to him having to remain in t he same level til this time next year.
April Homeschooling Miscellany
Wednesday, 3 May 2017 @ 2:13pm
We spent almost the entire month of April on Christmas Island. This post is part homeschool log and part “travel photos” therefore more picture heavy than usual so grab a drink and a snack.
The idea behind going up for Easter was to avoid getting crabbed in as often happens when we go up for Christmas. Being a tropical island we just got rained in for a bit of it instead. Additionally we spent a fair bit of time hanging with family and general chilling. In the first couple of days we decided to go out foraging and see if we could find some limes for Mum.
March Homeschooling Miscellany
Saturday, 1 April 2017 @ 1:54pm
March was kind of insane like February was as 12yo started doing FreeG and we started vaguely prepping for our somewhat unexpected April trip to Christmas Island and 8yo had diagonistic-related appointments, and it was crazy to the point where I didn’t take notes on our random interesting conversations for this thing like I usually do, so it’s just photos.
12yo made himself a riot shield type affair out of a box and almost an entire spool of twine (which 10yo was rather unimpressed about as it was her twine and she didn’t realise he was going to use the whole thing):
February Homeschooling Miscellany
Friday, 10 March 2017 @ 8:34pm
We do an awesome impression of having a pretty quiet month on the homeschooling front, but what was actually going on was getting used to “in term” stuff starting up and trying to make some crazy logistics work out. We ended up dropping swimming lessons altogether as all three kids are watersafe as far as swimming pools go (anywhere involving tides is going to have to be dealt with experience).
January Homeschooling Miscellany
Tuesday, 14 February 2017 @ 11:16pm
After eating a lot of avocado and guacomole, we decided to have a crack at sprouting some of the avocado seeds. According to the instructions the bigs looked up, we needed two skewer the seeds on toothpicks and suspend them in water for 6-8 weeks or something to that effect.
10yo found an experiment on Youtbe that she wanted to try, which involved dropping hot water into cold water rapidly to see if they mixed. So we would be able to see if there was any mixing going on, she colour coded the water with food colouring after boiling the hot water.
Home Ed Program 2017
Wednesday, 11 January 2017 @ 10:26pm
Straight off the bat, nobody likes doing bookwork, not even the primary homeschooling parent (that would be yours truly). I have the books mainly so I know what they’re technically supposed to be doing if they were at school (and it would be a handy syncing device should they ever decide to go to school or if I need to chuck them in there for whatever reason). So I’ll be getting English, Maths and Science books from my usual source for these things once I have money to do so. We have been doing ChoreMonster on another homeschooler’s recommendation which has been working out better for longer than other things I’ve tried. However the bigs are getting to an age where I want them to be a bit more responsible with how they manage their time and the things that need to do (rather than me telling them what they should be doing and then nagging them because they don’t want to do it). To that end the bigs and I are now giving Habitica a go as we’re all gamers and roleplayers so the idea is a bit more appealing than the simple reward system that ChoreMonster is. The bigs have copied their bookwork into the daily list and the other chores into habits, and I’ve told them they can add whatever else they like. Unlike ChoreMonster where I assigned how many points each chore was worth, they can assign how difficult they feel each task is and reap the rewards (or the punishments if they fail to complete their dailies). We’re still in early days and change is hard on anyone, they currently don’t like it and want to go back to ChoreMonster possibly because the interface is a lot more complicated and there are in-game consequences for not completing tasks (the character loses health) and the sudden responsibility is a bit overwhelming. They have since added their own todos and habits and dailies on top of the ones I’ve given them and we’re on a quest to defeat the Dust Bunnies, and 12yo actually scarpered to bed when he realised what time it was as one of his habits was to be in bed by 9:30pm, so it might go all right.
December Homeschooling Miscellany
Wednesday, 4 January 2017 @ 10:16pm
We didn’t get to do our Solstice Wreath this year due to a little more craziness than usual. But other stuff got done.
10yo figured out how to make fingerless gloves using her loomband loom and wool after watching a few Youtube videos:
She has since either given this one to her best friend or made her best friend one and there has been a request to teach another homeschoolie how to make them.
November Homeschool Miscellany
Monday, 26 December 2016 @ 10:29pm
We haven’t really made good use of our zoo passes this year. Hopefully this will be remedied next year. 10yo stole my phone to take a number of photos of things she considered cute and as we ventured into the Asian rainforest to see the Komodo dragon and the red panda it reminded me that there are a few sections we don’t get to very often and we should probably make the effort to go into them.
October Homeschool Miscellany
Friday, 16 December 2016 @ 7:35pm
I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection. JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don’t think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did.
Our bees swarmed, and made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days. We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up. In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.
Bees have ants
Sunday, 30 October 2016 @ 8:45pm
11yo: the drones are the male bees. They sit around and eat honey, then they mate and die.
7yo: don’t they store honey?
11yo: the drones are the ones with wings.
7yo: some bees don’t have wings? O_o
11yo: OH! I was thinking about ants XD
7yo: bees have ants? o_O
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