May June July August Homeschool Miscellany

May

14yo and one of his friends developed an interest in the series Breaking Bad and marathoned it, and then made some “crystal meth” (coloured toffee).

This batch was apparently a test run for Halloween when he has plans to go out in the streets dressed as shadily as possible and hand some out to kids. He and the friend did have some vague plans to dress up as the main characters from the show but distance (the friend lives about 40min away) and other plans (no idea what’s happening around that time) may be challenging.

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.

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.

September Homeschooling Miscellany

Apparently doing bookwork with Dad is much more interesting than doing the same bookwork with Mum. I have handed off 11yo to JJ for maths as he’s too advanced for me, so J has been teaching him physics and chemistry and other related things. They started off in the computer room, and then 9yo decided to join them doing English. As he was passing the computer room 7yo happened to look in, I told him not to go in there as they were doing bookwork and he decided then that he wanted to do bookwork too.

Homeschooling stuff

We’re reaching the end of the year so it’s been a bit slack on the socially accepted learning front as everyone is a bit tired and over it. There’s been a lot of playing going on and in our usual fashion the 2015 program has already been modified before we could even think about starting it. Instead of doing bookwork every day, we’re alternating with cooking where the kids will choose a recipe, check we have all of the ingredients before commencing (and write out shopping list to be able to do something next session if they really want a thing we don’t have all the ingredients for) and do it themselves from start to finish. I will help with/supervise dangerous things (such as putting things in and out of ovens and anything that requires cooking on stove top) but they are otherwise on their own.

Potions

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Week has been flat tack.

But today they made potions. Supervised from a distance as today is a work day. Ingredients included a small tub of yoghurt, jellybeans, cordial (even though I told them no food items they could consume directly when they asked if they could make potions ie before they’d had a chance to gather ingredients, they tried to claim they had somehow assembled these things before I’d told them no food items), citric acid, bicarb, vinegar, hippie lice shampoo (contains only eucalyptus and melaleuca oils) and hippie plant-based detergent.

!schooling 0000C18c - C22n | Mar 4-9

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Bit of a short week this week due to Labour Day public holiday, and also (or perhaps because of that) a little bit disorganised. We did the zoo on the weekend, spent Monday cleaning the house which was rather festy. We didn’t get around to doing maths bookwork but did some Minecraft related spatial stuff. 8yo’s writing is getting neater and he is growing in confidence writing lowercase. We’re getting less freakouts about inability to form letters and other such things. He’s been having nightmares again so I’ve suggested he turn them into stories. He’s not so sure about writing horror but he has started thinking about stories he might like to write, including a self-insert Pokemon fanfic. I’m hoping to develop him out of the Mary Sue stage while he’s still young, he seems to be starting to grasp the concept of balancing characters.