Skip to main content
Jan
06
2021

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).

Jan
03
2021

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.

What we didn't know was that the museum was really, really tiny (one room) and we had to wander through the art gallery to get there.

Aug
19
2020

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.

Aug
12
2020

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).

July was pretty cruisy but as everything is pretty much back to normal (I think we're still meant to be social distancing as the marks in checkout lines and the enlarged aisles in bigger stores are still present but seeing as we've never had community transmission ever more and more and more people seem to be forgetting/ignoring this) we've been doing more.

The garden has been doing fantastic and my little nephew keeps asking to come over so he can raid.

Apr
09
2020

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 >_>

Jun
08
2019

April/May Homeschooling Miscellany

By necessity we ended term 1 pretty quietly with the Scitech homeschooling lessons.  Occasionally one or both boys missed some lessons due to colds, which I didn't realise at the time was a taste of things to come.

at the traino with fly glasses

After one of the lessons both of them got to, 10yo decided to blow some pocket money at the Scitech shop on some compound eye glasses.  There was some hilarity when both of them had a go with it the first time.

 

One of the last two lessons involved programming an extremely basic AI to win an extremely basic game, and the paperwork task was to graph the robot's wins.

Mar
08
2019

January Homeschool Miscellany

We were still on Christmas Island for most of January so it was still mostly geared towards being with family.

water balloon fight at grandparents place, Christmas Island   toasting marshmallows, Lily Beach, Christmas Island

Feb
07
2019

December Homeschooling Miscellany

The teenager made the decision some time this month that he needed to be more responsible and started voluntarily practising basic life skills.  One involved cooking up a batch of sausages for lunch (plus both boys just felt like sausage sizzle apparently), and while he was about it he decided to experiment with steaming some of them.

Dec
12
2018

October Homeschooling Miscellany

October started out with 11yo's bestie staying for the weekend and them asking if we could wander around Perth for a bit after visiting a store they wanted to browse.  9yo requested my phone to take a couple of photos of things that interested him:

9yo-photography-perth-wa

The city has been trying to do more fun and interesting stuff so we tend to find random things whenever we go there.  At the time they were celebrating the arrival of spring so there were these random bird cages there, which were apparently great for photoshoots.

Oct
10
2018

September Homeschooling Miscellany

One of the things about not learning in an institution is accepting that the stuff taught and learned in institutions isn't the grand authority on all that's worth learning.  I know this, but sometimes I don't really know it.  Like on her day, 11yo said she wanted to get her nails done.

My immediate response was "pick something educational".

I'm not sure why mouths sometimes just randomly fire off before engaging the logic part first as not only would it make a lot of things so much easier, it would probably also make the world a better place in general.  11yo has spent a couple of years studying makeup artistry, nails were part of that, so we would learn how nails got done professionally.  Also, I got her to research the nail places at the shopping centre we were going to in order to get some idea of prices.  As it turned out none of them had prices on their websites (which is really annoying) so we had to do actual legwork.