July/August homeschool miscellany

July and August were a bit of a blur as some not fantastic events occurred which monopolised my thought processes. We got reacquainted with death when my last two cats died within two weeks of each other (the one before had died Christmas last year and we had also lost a guinea pig recently). There were some extended family dramas which didn’t involve us directly which fortunately resolved before getting down and dirty with the legal system became necessary rather than advisable. Sprat was up for the semester break which is always great and the kids and I had lots of interesting conversations. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of them.

June Homeschooling Miscellany

Really nothing much happened this month, mostly because I did something to my neck which had me pretty much out of action for a couple of weeks and I spent most of it in bed, and then took it extremely easy for the rest of the month. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the types of plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophanes (all of which the kids kind of know about and have a very passing interest in thanks to Horrible Histories) were not so interesting for children (and to be perfectly honest not doing too much for me either). 12yo has been reading our Manga Shakespeare collection again though, mostly Midsummer Night’s Dream which is a favourite of mine.

May Homeschooling Miscellany

May was a pretty cruisy month for a variety of reasons. Initially, we were recovering from an April that managed to be both crazy (but not nearly the same level insanity as the end of the year usually is) and relaxing. Then everyone took turns being sick. We’re all good now.

12yo seems to be headed into the know-it-all self-righeous phase and it’s a good thing he has a lot of different aged and types of people around him to bounce things off as it tempers his views and stops him from being insufferable. We’ve had quite a few interesting political and philosophical discussions usually on car rides, which are great except when I need to concentrate at a busy intersection. Trying to get him to be more observant of his surroundings is still an ongoing battle. He went cold off gymnastics at completely the wrong time, declared he was bored and didn’t want to do it anymore. I figured he was being hormonal and told him that he was doing it this term whether he wanted to or not because I’d already paid for it. He has found his love for it again, and I have told him that while I won’t make him keep doing it if he completely loses interest in it and really doesn’t want to do it anymore, I do want him to keep doing it as it’s something that he struggles with and I want him to keep working at something that is hard for him as a lot of things come pretty easily to him and he’s not used to struggling, so needs to learn to build some resilience from somewhere. Anyway he went cold at completely the wrong time and when he should have been working hard to qualify for badge testing he did his absolute best to skive off, and by the time he got back into it, it was too late. He initially tried to blame me for the fact he couldn’t qualify but eventually had to accept that it was his own refusal to train that has led to him having to remain in t he same level til this time next year.

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.

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.

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):

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).

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.

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.

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:

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.

August Homeschooling Miscellany