geography
September - December Homeschool Miscellany
I had bought The Art of War in very recent history (can’t remember precisely when but I feel like it’s been at least a year by now) as 14yo had expressed a desire to read it. He didn’t get around to actually reading it until recently, when he suddenly went on a health kick (both physical and mental) and on advice of J and 18yo, started trying to get in at least a little bit of exercise, eat a healthy breakfast (the kids and I don’t really eat breakfast as we never feel particualrly hungry for a while after waking up) and read a book every day.
October Homeschool Miscellany
13yo continued on his dessert presentation experiments, jumping on the Halloween bandwagon with this “vampire” themed one (the bananas were meant to be fangs), and the goblet was a prop we’d bought some other Halloween). Towards the end of the week where we’re running out of stuff and need to do more grocery shopping, there was this much simpler but still very delicious fare (can’t go wrong with peanut butter as long as you’re not allergic to peanuts).
August Homeschool Miscellany
August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September. It started with the death of one of 13yo’s fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush. 17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to “get his life together” and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own).
June/July Homeschool Miscellany
13yo’s kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce. 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. There’s been a keen interest in blacksmithing and weaponsmithing and general annoyance that we won’t set up a forge (which he assures us can be done on the cheap and while I’m sure it can, it’s also a fire hazard and we’re in Australia) so he can get into it.
September Homeschool Miscellany
September was States month and it felt unusually close to Regionals because it was (we had the slightly awkward situation of that we needed to put people forward for states before we had the results from regionals to make sure they’d actually qualified, and to add chaos to the confusion, because it had been another unprecedented year, people were allowed to apply for states if they hadn’t done regionals (there were a number of people that missed out due to being sick or having to quarantine).
May/June Homeschool Miscellany
During May, 12yo decided to get into fruit sculpture, and made a ridiculous amount of stuff out of bananas. Because I was really preoccupied with I can’t remember what at the time, the only thing I caught a photo of was this “sword”. I did have time to make a trip to Spotlight to pick up some elastic and some fabric for 14yo to make a blanket thing that apparently only needs tying together.
March Homeschool Miscellany
I would love to say things are picking up but they’re really not. Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we’d have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we’re trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.
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.
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.