On two different weekends, we hit up the Aviation Heritage Museum of WA in Bull Creek and the Army Museum of WA in Fremantle.  I think the boys got more out of those trips than the girl did so next stop might have to be the Perth Museum (she has a special liking for the butterfly corridor) or Art Gallery and I suppose SciTech or the Zoo can also be considerations, somewhere she enjoys at any rate.  Both these places are great, the guides are extremely helpful and are often floating not far away and are happy to answer everything about everything.

Aviation Heritage Museum of WA - Mar 03

Yeh I'm not doing the week by week anymore.

In addition to pocket money, daily bookwork is really good for basics when I'm sick or otherwise blargh from staying up too many late nights in a row and the kids are not (if they are sick they get to veg out and I try to get them to watch docos, we have recently discovered the TED Education Youtube channel and the kids have been consuming the snippets rabidly.  There are full lessons on the TED-Ed website but we haven't really explored there yet.  The animations are short (usually under 15mins) which is perfect for 5yo's attention span, and could potentially skim a huge variety of topics in 2 hours.  Just off the top of my head from passing they've watched clips on the Higgs-Boson field, icebergs, eel migration, vampire mythology, why glass is transparent and the Fosbury Flop.

As he approaches 5, the 4yo has been much less...well...4.  While still prone to bouts of 4 year old raging tantrums, he is much easier to reason with and manage because he listens sometimes.

The attitudes of the bigs hae shifted dramatically from towards the end of last year where I have no idea what was going on (but the stress I was feeling at the time wouldn't have helped) but I was fully prepared to pick up enrolment forms from the primary school down the road.

Tao seems to finally be over his writing hurdle.  Yesterday he reported that writing seems to be a lot easier, and as a result he hasn't actively resisted/refused doing bookwork when I've put out the call to come and do it.  Maybe he's also realised that if he just comes and does the two pages he can go back to what he was doing quicker than if he tries to ignore me, then has a tantrum and argues about it, then does it with all of us in a cranky mood and then isn't in the mood to do whatever it was he had been doing beforehand because the world is obviously dead set against him having any fun whatsoever.  He still needs to work on some letter formation and is occasionally writing some things backwards but it seems to be coming a lot easier to him now which is great.  I've told him it will get easier as it goes into muscle memory and his writing will slowly get neater the more he practises.

Weeks are getting slower as far as socially accepted "schooling" goes and ramping up with Silly Season.

We did our usual park meet and roleplaying and a quick stint at the library this week but missed out on a chunk of the boring every day stuff such as grocery shopping as Cub has been very 4 lately and taking him out anywhere is more unpleasant than it needs to be.

Tao has been endlessly procrastinating the bookwork lately and then "forgetting", Ru has generally kept it up.  We've shifted onto the 2014 program for pocket money at their request ages ago but they still haven't worked out what they want to do for projects, but none of my ideas are quite good enough.

Both found a cat mandible in the garden (which I initially didn't recognise as a cat mandible due to a brain fart and thinking there should have been more teeth), I suspect they may have dug up he grave of the cat that had to be euthanised beginning of last year.

Week has been flat tack.

But today they made potions.  Supervised from a distance as today is a work day.  Ingredients included a small tub of yoghurt, jellybeans, cordial (even though I told them no food items they could consume directly when they asked if they could make potions ie before they'd had a chance to gather ingredients, they tried to claim they had somehow assembled these things before I'd told them no food items), citric acid, bicarb, vinegar, hippie lice shampoo (contains only eucalyptus and melaleuca oils) and hippie plant-based detergent.

Tao made a big potion in a "cauldron" (big tin bucket with two handles, it's supposed to be a drink holder) which smelled nice and bubbled lots when you stir it.  We had a brief chat about what makes the bubbles when he dragged me out to see.

Ru assisted and then went to have a picnic on the cubby house.

We had one day where the smalls played Maths Seeds and Tao found himself a doco about octopi (or at least the bit I saw of it had an octopus glooping through a "maze" of clear plastic pipes) just because it was fun.  We had a kerbside collection recently which meant there were a lot of people kerbside collecting, including Josh who picked up an outdoor setting, three tubs, a shelving unit and two working monitors.

The 8yo white 24" iMac has finally died so Josh is now sharing the netbook with Cub.  The extra monitor has been hooked up to it and Josh had also wired up a seriously old 5.1 sound system we had that had some wires snap and we never quite got around to repairing it (then I bought new speakers).

Another disorganised week.  I did finally acknowledge the fact we don't do weekends in the traditional sense so dumping that idea.  I'm slow but I get there eventually.

8yo

• started trigonometry with Josh
• Pokemon card game with a deck he built himself
• Go Fish

6yo

• did some very simple letter transposing cyphers
• Pokemon card game
• Go Fish

4yo

• Reading Eggs and Maths Seeds

Tao wants to start next year's program this year, we're going to start driftingin a thatwayward direction once everything settles down.

Weekly-ish

All

• library
• 2x kung fu
• visit great-grandmother
• music lessons if finances allow
• doco/music video/cooking show (every night)

9yo

• 1x Khan Academy
• 1x Reading Eggspress
• 1x written bookwork
• 1x extra any of the above
• 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
• AFL Juniors (1x training, 1x game)
• gym/circus iff finances allow

7yo

• 1x Khan Academy
• 1x Reading Eggs
• 1x Maths Seeds
• 1x written bookwork
• 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
• gym

5yo

Everyone

• textas
• coloured pencils
• crayons (big ones)
• street chalk
• paint (acrylic, water, if Ru wants oil or something complicated get a small set and keep it out of the way)
• pastels
• oil pastels
• one of those huge arse dangerous sharpeners with a handle that is impossible to lose

9yo

English

• Excel Basic Skills - Spelling and Vocabulary Years 3–4
• Excel Basic Skills - Grammar and Punctuation Years 3–4
• Excel Basic Skills - Comprehension and Written Expression Year 4
• renew Reading Eggs sub

Maths