August Homeschooling Miscellany

This month, we started sliding back into normal. Seeing as most grocery stores have now stopped providing single-use plastic bags, we’ve ended up with a lot more cardboard boxes which get put to good use:

Here after watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2 he’s made a cardboard version of the Infinity Gauntlet complete with the little stone things on top.

June/July Homeschooling Miscellany

Hopefully this will be the last month of not much happening as most of the chaos surrounding the closing of our business has been taken care of and there’s only a few loose strings left to tidy up now.

As usual, June was dominated by preparing for and then helping out in badge tests. 11yo and one of her agemates volunteered to be errand grunts at the boys’ badge test, which basically involved running food to the judges and messages between the adult staff members and occasionally grabbing more sugar from the canteen for me. 13yo passed his badge test with flying colours.

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.

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 had to be that way whether he liked it or not, or negotiate conditions that would work better for everyone. He agreed that it might be better to do that instead. The bigs wanted to decide their own bedtime and are doing so at a reasonable hour (though every now and again I have to poke them before I go to bed).

January Homeschooling Miscellany

Two weeks after getting home we were back in Jurien Bay again, this time for the kids’ great nanna’s 90th birthday party. As usual we were only there overnight and stayed in a different beach cottage with a backyard nicely set up for kids.

The kids spent the day we got there playing in the backyard for a little while before having showers and getting ready for the party that evening. 8yo taught their 6yo cousin how to play *Exploding Kittens * which the 6yo took a few games to learn and apparently told his mother he didn’t understand but he seemed to enjoy it as he kept wanting to play.

December Homeschooling Miscellany

Early in December we realised we hadn’t been swimming for a while. After a hefty argument (JJ prefers swimming in fresh water, the bigs and I strongly prefer the beach and 8yo doesn’t care as long as it’s swimmable) we hit up Serpentine Falls with a friend and their kids.

The first thing we noticed was that the blackberry bushes had been cleared out and when we got there the top carpark closer to the falls was closed, though there were some cars in there (either ignoring the fact the gate was supposed to be shut or perhaps they were in there before it had been shut).

November Homeschool Misc

The kids wanted to go trick or treating for Halloween, so we ended up doing some quick Halloween research and reading and decided that the proper way to do things was not to do the commercialised going around begging for candy but to give the neighbours candy. However we had no time to prepare for that and 10yo’s birthday was kind of vaguely in the vicinity so we decided to do a “spooky themed” birthday party instead.

July/August homeschool miscellany

July and August were a bit of a blur as some not fantastic events occurred which monopolised my thought processes. We got reacquainted with death when my last two cats died within two weeks of each other (the one before had died Christmas last year and we had also lost a guinea pig recently). There were some extended family dramas which didn’t involve us directly which fortunately resolved before getting down and dirty with the legal system became necessary rather than advisable. Sprat was up for the semester break which is always great and the kids and I had lots of interesting conversations. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of them.

June Homeschooling Miscellany

Really nothing much happened this month, mostly because I did something to my neck which had me pretty much out of action for a couple of weeks and I spent most of it in bed, and then took it extremely easy for the rest of the month. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the types of plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophanes (all of which the kids kind of know about and have a very passing interest in thanks to Horrible Histories) were not so interesting for children (and to be perfectly honest not doing too much for me either). 12yo has been reading our Manga Shakespeare collection again though, mostly Midsummer Night’s Dream which is a favourite of mine.

April Homeschooling Miscellany

We spent almost the entire month of April on Christmas Island. This post is part homeschool log and part “travel photos” therefore more picture heavy than usual so grab a drink and a snack.

The idea behind going up for Easter was to avoid getting crabbed in as often happens when we go up for Christmas. Being a tropical island we just got rained in for a bit of it instead. Additionally we spent a fair bit of time hanging with family and general chilling. In the first couple of days we decided to go out foraging and see if we could find some limes for Mum.