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Jan
12
2023

November-December Homeschool Miscellany

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off.

15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it.  I watched a couple of episodes with her and she told me a bit about the boyfriend's favourite team and favourite driver and a few of the other drivers, saying that now she at least knew who he was talking about when he was excitedly babbling about them like they were friends she should know.  We also marvelled at the pit crews basically disassembling and reassembling a car in seconds.

Aug
17
2022

June/July Homeschool Miscellany

13yo's kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce.

image 114

Was delicious warm with ice cream.  He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason.  Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding.

Dec
17
2021

November Homeschool Miscellany

I don't know what happened to October either, aside from the roleplaying games continued (I have this vague idea that I will write about how roleplaying games are good for maths, drama and general language development one day).  I think we may have also started more hardcore development of my dice system.  12yo has been making suggestions and helping test mechanics.  October may have also been the month where I found out that 16yo was doing more algebra, because apparently he thinks he needs algebra for the TAFE course he's thinking of enrolling in.  Not sure how much he's done as I think he's gotten himself a new Khan Academy account instead of resetting the password for his existing one so I'll have to try to remember to check that up when I'm compiling the report for the moderator meeting.

Dec
08
2021

TTRPG writeups: WoD Modern 2 - Vampires #1

When the kids expressed interest in playing Vampire, I told them that I hated the subsystem.  Mechanically it's not any different from Changeling, it's the lore that I don't like (there's nothing wrong with it per se, just not my style), and while you can be combat heavy with it (which given the insane strength and speed vampires have can be quite entertaining and occasionally interesting to manage), it's generally geared towards more political intrigue which I am absolutely terrible at because I'm lucky if I have Wits 1.

Nov
19
2021

TTRPG writeups: WoD Modern 2 - Mercenaries #1

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session.  I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided "Changeling is cringe").  However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.

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.

Jun
06
2018

May Homeschooling Miscellany

May was pretty quiet and boring as well.  Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well).  Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored).  As per usual when we're stuck home there was a lot of docos, again mostly concentrated on Horrible Histories and David Attenborough.  Very hard for other types of docos to get a look in against those.

9yo got back into making paper planes and made me this tiny little one complete with a pilot:

May
12
2018

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.  He and his siblings however had due to the style of homeschooling we do, almost all the time in the world to do as they liked, and if he felt that bedtime or something else was cramping his style then he could simply bring it up and we could have a chat about it and either tell him why it

Apr
15
2018

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).

Perth steemup at Whiteman Park, Western Australia   Perth steemup, Whiteman Park, Western Australia

Apr
01
2018

February Homeschooling Miscellany

The month kicked off with 9yo deciding to make his own "card game" after ages of playing Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh.  After quick playtests with me and 11yo, 11yo decided to help make even more "cards".  I use the term loosely bcause the "cards" were all A4-sized.

9yo-11yo-making-card-game

The game was fairly simple and entertaining, and after playing a couple of times 9yo decided that he probably needed more "good" cards as it didn't take very long for me to die despite the lives and death prevention things that had been added in the iteration with 11yo.