biology
August Homeschooling Miscellany
This month, we started sliding back into normal. Seeing as most grocery stores have now stopped providing single-use plastic bags, we’ve ended up with a lot more cardboard boxes which get put to good use: Here after watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2 he’s made a cardboard version of the Infinity Gauntlet complete with the little stone things on top. As usual gymnastics kind of dominated our month again as our gym did regionals, which went over three weekends.
June/July Homeschooling Miscellany
Hopefully this will be the last month of not much happening as most of the chaos surrounding the closing of our business has been taken care of and there’s only a few loose strings left to tidy up now. As usual, June was dominated by preparing for and then helping out in badge tests. 11yo and one of her agemates volunteered to be errand grunts at the boys’ badge test, which basically involved running food to the judges and messages between the adult staff members and occasionally grabbing more sugar from the canteen for me.
April Homeschooling Miscellany
We didn’t do much. There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes. 13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something. I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they’re getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff.
March Homeschool Miscellany
March kicked off with Perth’s first steemup. The kids got to have some interesting conversations with new friends and encouraged to continue blogging (except for 9yo who disappeared off to the pool for most of the thing). The steem colours I sported in my mohawk so everyone knew where to go are still in! 9yo made his own “Oculus Rift” out of his snorkel mask and two toilet roll tubes (and unfortunately I can’t post pictures of it in use because he wasn’t dressed appropriately), and some “games” which involved pieces of paper being cut out roughly in the shape of the snorkel mask and taped on.
January Homeschooling Miscellany
Two weeks after getting home we were back in Jurien Bay again, this time for the kids’ great nanna’s 90th birthday party. As usual we were only there overnight and stayed in a different beach cottage with a backyard nicely set up for kids. The kids spent the day we got there playing in the backyard for a little while before having showers and getting ready for the party that evening.
September homeschool miscellany
I originally intended to combine July, August and September into one post as I didn’t think I had kept track of enough material to be able to make a post each. As it turned out I was wrong (which is not unusual when it comes to the home ed front, I always think that I have been terribly slack any given month and find out we’ve done more than I thought).
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.
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.
November Homeschool Miscellany
We haven’t really made good use of our zoo passes this year. Hopefully this will be remedied next year. 10yo stole my phone to take a number of photos of things she considered cute and as we ventured into the Asian rainforest to see the Komodo dragon and the red panda it reminded me that there are a few sections we don’t get to very often and we should probably make the effort to go into them.