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.

One of them was a familiar one at Frye Park in Kelmscott.  The kids had been to it once before and we revisited it as there were some portals there, and met up with some friends.

Might try to do these as monthly things rather than semi-random ones.

Firstly, we are chick central again.  About three clutches with 7-10 chicks in each one.  Chappie's family want some of the naked necks.  This was the first lot.  Idiot hen had gone next door to brood, kids heard the cheeping and went next door to investigate.  Neighbour was astonished as she hadn't even realised they were there behind the shed, and just as well they'd only hatched that morning as she'd been dogsitting and the dog had left earlier in the day.

The picture of them is as day olds, they're now a week or so and feathering up.

According to 6yo 2d shapes have "whip" and "lengf" and 3d shapes have "whip, lengf and dep".

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 toothpick sculpture made by 10yo

Apple and toothpick sculpture made by 10yo

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 -_-

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

Perth Zoo