Unschooly things

Yeh I’m not doing the week by week anymore. In addition to pocket money, daily bookwork is really good for basics when I’m sick or otherwise blargh from staying up too many late nights in a row and the kids are not (if they are sick they get to veg out and I try to get them to watch docos, we have recently discovered the TED Education Youtube channel and the kids have been consuming the snippets rabidly.

Christmas Island: Tai Jin House exploration

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] My suspected real life Crazy Dog House on the Cliff allegedly contains a museum these days. For various reasons we’ve never quite manged to get to it. Apparently neither have my parents, but as it turns out the opening hours are really awkward and you need to either be a tourist or taking time off work to go to it within the very short opening hours (Thursday and Friday 10-3).

!schooling 0000E11c - E15n | Apr 23-26

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Monday: sick. Fortunately there was JJ to help with maths. JJ was making noises about wanting to do modular arithmetic. When I passed the kids were doing basic arithmetic on the whiteboard. JJ wasn’t quite sure who was where and thought 8yo knew how to carry 10s. I said we were working on carrying 10s, he hadn’t quite got it yet but could so multiple digit addition and subtraction in his head as long as the numbers were under 10.

Home Ed Program 2013

Now with more detail and split into National Curriculum subject areas as best I can manage (because I fail at reductionism and bureaucracy seems to fail at holism; with some luck perhaps we shall collide in a catalystic rather than confrontational manner somewhere in the middle, and bonus if this helps someone somewhere in some way). The players are an 8 year old boy, a 6 year old girl and a 4 year old boy.

Schooling 0000d25c e01n apr 8 12

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Last week and a bit have been slack and uncoordinated partially due to Easter and mostly due to the sleeping pattern going seriously out of whack resulting in myself and the kids going to bed way too late (me because I was staying up late to finish stuff off and also to make sure the bigs were asleep before turning out their light, and them because I have no idea).

Fun with static electricity and other things

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] Just randomly (and because they asked nicely), we decided to go down to the park at the end of the road on bladei (okay, fine, Thursday, to be followed up by a trip to City Farmers to stock up on roo meat and mutton, and more flea meds). The day was lovely, and of course I hadn’t brought the camera, missed out on some awesome shots.

Not quiet on the !schooling front

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now] I just haven’t been writing about it. Last week, 6yo drew a picture of Venom from Spiderman with black whiteboard marker on paper, including sounding out the name and checking with JJ after writing it out. This week just gone has been crazy. Monday Stay home day. Started off fine. I opted to sleep in (ie stay in the nice warm bed snuggled up with the nice warm kids until they woke up).

Unschooly crap

[imported from livejournal and backdated] You can learn a lot from doing not much. As most people know, I do 3d. I seem to know bits of geometry, crap I never would have picked up at school, mainly coz it was in the higher level maths class and I suck at maths. Currently I’m learning a little bit about Russian history (there’s a doco on sometime in the next fortnight that might be helpful) and researching titanium alloys.