home education
July Homeschooling Miscellany
Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother. While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.
On the first day we decided to go and check out the Melbourne Museum, as the kids love museums. The train took forever as there were a million stops and by the time we got there the kids were starving to death so the first thing we did was run off to look for food. We ate at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then found out that we went in the opposite direction of the museum. After a quick glance around we discovered there was a Chinese museum down the alleyway between the building the Italian restaurant was in and the next one over. After assuring 7yo that we would not get mugged walking down this alleyway (it was quite literally a gap between two buildings, not even any room for skips or fire escapes), we walked down the alleyway into the tiny little Chinatown which seemed primarily designed to house The Chinese Museum.
June Homeschooling Miscellany
As it turned out the other 7yo’s pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn’t “drownded”, it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting.
He’s been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding. He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while “disguised” in the box he’d cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.
May Homeschooling Miscellany
11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard
JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot. 11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn. I’m obviously taking the photo. The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!).
April Homeschooling Miscellany
Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser. Didn’t get a lot of photos as we got rained out!
11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he’s any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.
March Homeschooling Miscellany
7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.
The fully “grown” thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.
February Homeschooling Miscellany
We took a fishing trip to Jurien but once again were not able to go out in the boat due to the howling winds. The boys went fishing off the jetty, JJ caught a blowfish and the same seafull four times. I caught some godrays and the kids checked out a sundial. There wasn’t enough sun to see what time the sundial thought it was, 11yo tried to take a guess based on the position of the sun while explaining how the sundial worked to 6yo.
Home Ed Program and Booklist 2016
We’ve had dramas with the big two for the last few months simply refusing to do their bookwork and occasionally also refusing to do anything I could use in place of that (including things that they get enthused about such as making their own books or building models, sounds too much like hard work and they’d much rather play games and chat with their friends on Skype all day). We’ve had some serious chats about entitlement and how no matter what they decide to do in life, no matter how much they enjoy it, at some point there is going to be a hard slog.
January Homeschooling Miscellany
Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.
We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn’t see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn’t restrict themselves to the stage).
December Homeschooling Miscellany
December is always an odd time of year due to having to wind up kids activities, business for the year and organising whatever is going on for Christmas so I rarely have much homeschooly to write about.
The kids had their gymnastics end of year performance, the theme was “Back to the 80s”. Costumes were fantastic, the performances were great and I completely failed at taking any good photos. The Christmas party followed directly afterwards including a visit from Santa.
November Homeschooling Miscellany
Fallen a bit behind on the regular homeschool blogging! I actually started this one in early December but didn’t quite get around to finishing it so here it is now.
We started playing Ingress (we’re Resistance) and have so far discovered a myriad of portals in familiar places and three new parks. One of next year’s goals is to try to go visit a new area at least once a week. We also met up with a bunch of local players at Pioneer Park and they gave us stuff, and 10yo gave one of them a Jarvis virus that he’d managed to pick up from one of the green portals we’d hacked. We’ve been doing a lot more walking as a result which is a nice bonus as we do quite a few activities already.