March Homeschool Miscellany

I would love to say things are picking up but they’re really not. Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we’d have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we’re trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.

February Homeschool Miscellany

At the end of January Homeschool Miscellany we were re-establishing routines and trying to get into good habits and making new plans.

Two of those things are somewhat working out for us.

I’m still struggling to go to bed on time x_x

There were a few unexpected shenanigans quite close together which have thrown me right off with AER and hive and training which is about normal, and in way too many cases excursion days were postponed as well.

January Homeschool Miscellany

One of the good things about The Big Reset (although the kids don’t really feel it at the time) is the slow and very limited internet (my parents actually have a quota as they don’t use nearly as much internet as we do or more specifically as the kids do), which means they tend to spend slightly less time on their devices. The boys actually spent a few nights playing chess against each other and JJ, and Sprat taught them how to play a game with a Chinese name somewhat similar to Poker (the similarity that I could pick up being that you had similar collections of cards you could use).

December Homeschool Miscellany

I usually don’t do December and January unless interesting things happen as December is usually write-off month (too many end of year things happening for anything to be effectively planned and even if it could be planned we’d be exhausted as normally around the end of year things we just want to chill) and January is planning month (because my organisational skills are that atrocious that I need an entire month to plan).

August/September/November Homeschool Miscellany

I thought I’d already done August Homeschool Miscellany but apparently I’d done July and collected photos for August but not actually written the post. Oops. So everything ended up getting grouped as I’ve been struggling this year.

It’s no accident that October was left out, apparently we didn’t do anything that I could include.

Goolugatup Heathcote Museum

We initially heard that there was a museum in the building of the Heathcote Cultural Precinct when we attended a relative’s birthday party there. The precinct was a mental institution in the 1920s for mildly afflicted people and was one of the pioneering ones that broke away from the methods that seem to result in buildings being haunted.

July Homeschool Miscellany Breakdown into Educationese

I wrote July HS Misc pretty late at night and completely forgot I had told @bearone I would do this one (which is “the next one” from my last one XD) with explanations as to how our crazy shenanigans can translate into stuff to soothe the Education Department. Was going to edit the original post but it got a bit messy and I started rewriting the entire thing so thought it might be somewhat safer to do a “companion” type post. And I’ll be somewhat recycling the photos from that post (though I think I’ll just screenie the sets to make my life easier), so watch out for the fake wounds again.

July Homeschool Miscellany

WARNING: there are fake wounds made of Vaseline, flour and red food colouring about halfway through this post.

Broke the habit!

For now.

My head is still all over the place and and trying to get and keep organised is presenting its usual massive challenge, exacerbated by the fact the children have been staggering being exhausted for no apparent reason lately (a possible reason is growth spurts, because they’re lethargic and sleep a lot and suddenly they’re bigger, especially the boys).

April/May/June Homeschool Miscellany

I think I’ve inadvertently set that precedent I was trying to avoid x_x I blame covid.

During the period of “self isolation” (we were advised to not go out unless it was for essential purposes such as grocery shopping but full lockdown was never enforced), aside from occasionally trying to push bookwork (which is always destined for failure when everyone hates it so much), we all ended up just doing our own thing.

January/February/March Homeschooling Miscellany

If you know that I only clump months if at least one of them has been quiet/lazy what does this tell you? XD

_{I also did it at the end of last year I hope that didn’t set a precedent >_>}

For new readers, December is usually insanomonth when all the end of year shenanigans occur on top of silly season shenanigans, so while I still try to squeeze some things in, it usually (but not always) ends up a write-off as far as the socially accepted definition of education goes. It seems that January has become my planning month. I can’t remember if I usually take a month to plan anyway but I definitely needed it after last year, and most of it was probably taken up researching and writing up the planning budget which I’ve never done before and numbers always take longer anyway even if all I’m doing is making sure spreadsheet formulas and data entry are correct (again for new readers, I’m somewhat dyscalculiac which is why I try not to help with anything other than basic maths).

October/November/December Homeschooling Miscellany

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October. 12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it. At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone. She kept insisting she was “sick” or “too tired” but would always be better just in time for gymnastics. Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I’d made a few times previously but hadn’t done because I give too many chances). I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week. If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I could pull her out and she could go back to homeschooling, if she wanted to keep going then she had better have as close to a perfect attendance as possible for the rest of the term, and if she didn’t go the following day then I was pulling her out that day.