April-June Homeschool Miscellany

April started with 19yo and 17yo’s first concert. 17yo had found out about a Stardew Valley concert and as she loves the game she asked if we could go. 19yo was interested in coming along for the ride but 15yo refused. However the system wouldn’t let me buy three tickets and forced the purchase of four, so 17yo invited one of her besties (who has not played Stardew Valley and knows nothing about it) along. Bestie came along because she likes classical instruments and is in a school ensemble (I call them baby orchestras).

February Homeschool Miscellany

After ending January on a high, I was looking forward to finding more expensive excursions that the kids would be interested in and working out what cheaper or free things I could sprinkle in between.

And then vaccine mandates dropped which basically meant we weren’t “allowed” to do much of anything. Fortunately the kids were still “allowed” to go to gymnastics and TAFE, and in that time 17yo managed to regain his backflip (he had it last year, then lost it in the second half of the year), and on the same night got the double.

November ProgBlog #3: out of whack

I have done literally nothing on either project since the last progblog.

This time I got distracted choreographing a “fight” scene for the big boys. And because I’m a bit extra it’s easier to visualise, I 3d’d it.

It’s mostly just positioning I’m visualising as I’m just going to tell the children my ideas, though I’ve casually expanded to seeing if I can still animate flips (the answer is yes and I really should have started parenting to empties a lot earlier, I went through an overly long period of time where I was going out of my way to avoid adding extra things into the scene in a bid to make things less cluttered and confusing, but it’s a lot easier to snap an empty to a surface and I find it a lot easier to just use the root bone when there’s drastic position changes such as inverting).

Stag leap 2

Little Miss Pixietrix liked both her pony version and Zara doing stag leaps so much that she asked for one of herself in a similar pose. I save the base poses I use so I just pulled it up in Blender again, adjusted the arms and hands, we found a camera angle that she liked and then I did this grumbling all the way through as I have trouble doing real people, everyone has to be turned into a character XD Anyway here is Pixietrix the human in her club leotard doing a move she won’t learn til level 6 or so I think.

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.

November Homeschooling Miscellany

Fallen a bit behind on the regular homeschool blogging! I actually started this one in early December but didn’t quite get around to finishing it so here it is now.

We started playing Ingress (we’re Resistance) and have so far discovered a myriad of portals in familiar places and three new parks. One of next year’s goals is to try to go visit a new area at least once a week. We also met up with a bunch of local players at Pioneer Park and they gave us stuff, and 10yo gave one of them a Jarvis virus that he’d managed to pick up from one of the green portals we’d hacked. We’ve been doing a lot more walking as a result which is a nice bonus as we do quite a few activities already.