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May
03
2017

April Homeschooling Miscellany

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.

kids-on-plane

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.

Apr
01
2017

March Homeschooling Miscellany

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):


12yo-making-box-shield

Mar
10
2017

February Homeschooling Miscellany

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).

Feb
14
2017

January Homeschooling Miscellany

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.

Skewering avocado seeds

Avocado seeds soaking in party cups

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.

Jan
11
2017

Home Ed Program 2017

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

Jan
04
2017

December Homeschooling Miscellany

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:

10yo modelling a knitted glove
 

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.

7yo made a "quarry" with some collected rocks (not sure where they're from as they collect rocks and never label them...)

7yo with rock piles

Dec
26
2016

November Homeschool Miscellany

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.

Kids looking at lizard looking back, Perth Zoo, Western Australia

Little Penguin being fed at Perth Zoo, Western Australia

Dec
16
2016

October Homeschool Miscellany

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.

Ballobees!

Oct
30
2016

Bees have ants?

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

Oct
26
2016

September Homeschooling Miscellany

Apparently doing bookwork with Dad is much more interesting than doing the same bookwork with Mum.  I have handed off 11yo to JJ for maths as he's too advanced for me, so J has been teaching him physics and chemistry and other related things.  They started off in the computer room, and then 9yo decided to join them doing English.  As he was passing the computer room 7yo happened to look in, I told him not to go in there as they were doing bookwork and he decided then that he wanted to do bookwork too.

Easiest time I've ever had getting them to do bookwork.

Doing bookwork with dad