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May
03
2017

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.

kids-on-plane

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.

Apr
01
2017

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):


12yo-making-box-shield

Mar
10
2017

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).

Feb
14
2017

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.

Skewering avocado seeds

Avocado seeds soaking in party cups

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.

Jan
04
2017

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:

10yo modelling a knitted glove
 

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.

7yo made a "quarry" with some collected rocks (not sure where they're from as they collect rocks and never label them...)

7yo with rock piles

Jun
23
2016

April Homeschooling Miscellany

Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser.  Didn't get a lot of photos as we got rained out!

Climbing artificial rock wall at PCYC fundraiser

7yo climbing artificial wall

11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he's any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.

11yo with his prize from the dance competition - a Hungry Jack's voucher

May
20
2016

March Homeschooling Miscellany

7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.

Placing hatching dinosaur egg in a container of water

Starting to "hatch" after a day's soaking

Dinosaur egg "hatching" on day 5

The fully "grown" thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.

I organised to meet up with JJ's family (parents, sister and her family) at Whiteman Park.  We met up at the pretty large and cool playground that had a pretty tall slide tucked into one corner:

Mar
07
2016

February Homeschooling Miscellany

We took a fishing trip to Jurien but once again were not able to go out in the boat due to the howling winds.  The boys went fishing off the jetty, JJ caught a blowfish and the same seafull four times.  I caught some godrays and the kids checked out a sundial.  There wasn't enough sun to see what time the sundial thought it was, 11yo tried to take a guess based on the position of the sun while explaining how the sundial worked to 6yo.

Sunset at Dobbyn Park, Jurien Bay, Western Australia

Checking out the sundial on the foreshore at Jurien Bay, Western Australia

Feb
07
2016

January Homeschooling Miscellany

Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.

Waiting to go in to see The Lion King Broadway Musical

We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn't see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn't restrict themselves to the stage).

In the nosebleed section at The Lion King Broadway Musical being performed at Crown Theatre, Perth, Western Australia

Jan
29
2016

December Homeschooling Miscellany

December is always an odd time of year due to having to wind up kids activities, business for the year and organising whatever is going on for Christmas so I rarely have much homeschooly to write about.

The kids had their gymnastics end of year performance, the theme was "Back to the 80s".  Costumes were fantastic, the performances were great and I completely failed at taking any good photos.  The Christmas party followed directly afterwards including a visit from Santa.

At some point 6yo figured out how the juicer went together and proceeded to chop up apples to juice.  I came out when I heard the knife rhythmically chopping on the bench.  He was using it safely so I put down the chopping board, told him he needed to use that rather than cutting directly on the bench and supervised from a distance.