history
January Homeschool Miscellany
One of the good things about The Big Reset (although the kids don’t really feel it at the time) is the slow and very limited internet (my parents actually have a quota as they don’t use nearly as much internet as we do or more specifically as the kids do), which means they tend to spend slightly less time on their devices. The boys actually spent a few nights playing chess against each other and JJ, and Sprat taught them how to play a game with a Chinese name somewhat similar to Poker (the similarity that I could pick up being that you had similar collections of cards you could use).
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.
August/September Homeschool Miscellany
Comp season is one of our quieter periods and between that and juggling school transportation and crammed work days we got even less done than usual. I was going to put together a compilation video of all the routines but some combination of my phone and computer has been giving me an inordinate amount of trouble has made getting photos and videos off it way harder than it should be in this day and age and I’ve given up on that for now.
March Homeschool Miscellany
As February was ending I suspected Term 1 was going to be a write-off for the boys and unfortunately I wasn’t wrong. An additional and unforeseen problem with the school run was that even though it’s short it seems to be further destroying my problem shoulder, so I really didn’t want to drive anywhere, which given the time restrictions caused by school and the amount of pain I was in basically meant we got stuck with the Scitech homeschooling lessons I’d booked at the beginning of term, and me imposing 10am-12noon as “no non-educational videos and games” time if we were staying home.
October Homeschooling Miscellany
October started out with 11yo’s bestie staying for the weekend and them asking if we could wander around Perth for a bit after visiting a store they wanted to browse. 9yo requested my phone to take a couple of photos of things that interested him: The city has been trying to do more fun and interesting stuff so we tend to find random things whenever we go there. At the time they were celebrating the arrival of spring so there were these random bird cages there, which were apparently great for photoshoots.
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. As usual gymnastics kind of dominated our month again as our gym did regionals, which went over three weekends.
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.
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.
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).