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.

May June July August Homeschool Miscellany

May

14yo and one of his friends developed an interest in the series Breaking Bad and marathoned it, and then made some “crystal meth” (coloured toffee).

This batch was apparently a test run for Halloween when he has plans to go out in the streets dressed as shadily as possible and hand some out to kids. He and the friend did have some vague plans to dress up as the main characters from the show but distance (the friend lives about 40min away) and other plans (no idea what’s happening around that time) may be challenging.

February Homeschool Miscellany

I had asked J to book the Aboriginal Astronomy thing at the Gravity Discovery Centre for this month’s excursion but as he had a lot of work on he kept forgetting/not getting around to it and finally booked it for next month.

Probably just as well as February has its own level of chaos with term going back in and having to settle into term routines. 18yo started back at TAFE with much more enthusiasm or at least tolerance than previously. 16yo and I started work back at gym. 14yo did not start at school as J (who is handling everything to do with that, I have completely refused to deal with anything to do with that side of things) decided that he hadn’t put in enough effort into going to bed and getting up on time, improving his writing or making sure he was on top of stuff that he “should” have from year 8 to be ready to go into year 9 to start this term, so he’ll have to actually start putting in the effort so he can start next term. An issue we’re having there is that he claims that he will do all that when he needs to but doesn’t see why he should bother til then, so they’re at loggerheads.

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).

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. After some discussion of the really hard work that went into crafting stoneage tools, he went oldschool and made a “training sword” out of a large wooden gardening stake using only a file, and braced on the outdoor set as we don’t have clamps.

April Homeschool Miscellany

We really didn’t do a lot in April because it kind of sucked. Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other. Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs.

The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I’d decided I wanted a dog. The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time.

March Homeschool Miscellany

It was another stay home month as I got too caught up in project related things and kept not sleeping, and also continually failed at finding places that we could go while unvaccinated. We did stuff though.

Like going into the TAFE and finding out that 15yo could try to get into the Cert I course that 17yo is doing next semester in preparation for going into the early childhood course sometime next year.

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.

January Homeschool Miscellany

The month opened with 13yo being inspired by Genshin Impact (a game that 15yo and I have been playing together that 13yo occasionally joins us in) and making a chicken and mushroom kebab, which is one of the food items that can be crafted or purchased in game.

There isn’t an actual recipe to follow so he just skewered and lightly seasoned and pan fried them. Was very delicious.

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).