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Oct
10
2015

Homeschooling miscellany

Another collection of stuff that I usually don't get around to posting at the time either due to being in the middle of something or because it was a little thing.

Banana and tooth pick sculpture made by 10yo

Banana and toothpick sculpture made by 10yo

10yo and 8yo with sculpture made of apple and toothpicks

Apple and toothpick sculpture made by 10yo

Spoon doll made by 8yo

Oct
02
2015

Day trip to Jurien Bay

Do you know how hard it is to do a coast to hills transect with three kids under 12?

Not that hard actually if you go with their interest levels.  I would have liked them to observe how the vegetation and soil changed as we went from the eastern outer metro to the coastal part of the Wheatbelt.  They were mostly interested in getting to the beach so we just ended up pointing out sand dunes that were covered in vegetation and having quick chats about why the vegetation is important for holding the sand together, and how the soil colour changed from browny-red clay to sand to white sand.

Heading towards Jurien Bay, Western Australia

Sep
15
2015

Museum

8yo has made it into the "Sunflowers" group which is a group of Level 2 girls who the coaches decide are good enough for competitions.  Level 3 is the official competition level for the PCYC clubs (I have no idea about in general) so the Level 2 girls get to go along to the comps for fun and get a medal based on their overall scores.  8yo participated in her first comp and got a silver.

Jul
30
2015

Science birthday party

One of JJ's friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries.  They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

8yo and 6yo with lemon batteries

Unfortunately the lemons didn' put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ's friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party).  They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we'd need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

Jul
19
2015

ko sipna 2 the sequel

10yo: can I do memrise?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: can I go give Daddy a cuddle?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: na go'i ko sipna
6yo: what does that mean?
Me: no. go to sleep!

I wanted to wrangle the permission attitudinal in there but couldn't recall it off the top of my head. Also needed an .i but eh.

Jul
09
2015

Guinea piglets

Guinea pigs

This house is more Menagerie than The Menagerie was.  Newest additions from left to right: Popcorn, Lucius and Nightshade (which may actually be Knight Shade as I suspect it was named after a Skylander), belonging to 8yo, 10yo and 6yo respectively.  We've had them for three days so far and they're settling in slowly.  Cats completely do not care about them.  Tali has sniffed them both in the cage and in my hand and been great.  Angus just wants to bite them. Which then of course stirs Tali up and he wants to play too! Working on that -_-

Jul
04
2015

Perth Zoo, Scitech, a play, Museum of Western Australia and Fremantle Prison

I'm doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

Jellyfish in the Swan River, Perth, Western Australia

10yo writing notes and drawing a diagram of Southern White Rhino at Perth Zoo, Western Australia

10yo and 8yo looking at the display in the hands on cart at Perth Zoo, Western Australia

May
28
2015

Ferrets, fishing, horsing around, one awesome quarry, and stuff like that

Photos from the last couple of weeks.  After 10yo had sent off an enquiry email to WAFFS, they put is in contact with a lovely lady in the area who let us play with her ferrets and answered all the questions we had and then said we should head up to the AGM the following day if we didn't have any plans as people brought their ferrets to these things.  We didn't have anything on that morning (unfortunately parents in law were off travelling so we couldn't visit them while we were in the area) so we trotted along to go have a look.

10yo patting ferret at WAFFS AGM

8yo cuddling ferret at WAFFS AGM

Mar
26
2015

Liddelow Homestead, John Oakey Davis Park and some miscellany

The City of Gosnells recently had its Homegrown Festival, but due to many clashes of things the only thing we ended up making was the Liddelow Homestead Open Day.  It has a really cool corridor.

Corridor in Liddelow Homestead, Gosnells, Western Australia

There was also a stove which the kids didn't initially recognise as such, we spent a few minutes talking about what it might be before I told them what it was, and we then discussed how one might control the temperature of the stove when cooking.

Old woodfired stove in Liddelow Homestead, Gosnells, Western Australia

Mar
16
2015

Homeschool catchup post

The day before we flew out to Christmas Island, we went on an excursion to the Art Gallery of Western Australia.  They accommodate homeschool groups easily and the programs the kids did were great and seem to have been enjoyed by all.  To make running things easier for the staff, the kids had been divided into pre-primary to Year 3 (5-8yos) and year 4+ (9 and older).  The older group went for their activity first while the younger one went on the tour.  The younger group got split into two and 8yo, then 5yo and I ended up in a tiny little group consisting of ourselves and 8yo's then-6yo friend.  The tour guide got peppered with a billion questions as both girls are very interested in art and did a great job fielding them and the additional and often random questions from then-5yo.