science
January Homeschooling Miscellany
After eating a lot of avocado and guacomole, we decided to have a crack at sprouting some of the avocado seeds. According to the instructions the bigs looked up, we needed two skewer the seeds on toothpicks and suspend them in water for 6-8 weeks or something to that effect. 10yo found an experiment on Youtbe that she wanted to try, which involved dropping hot water into cold water rapidly to see if they mixed.
December Homeschooling Miscellany
We didn’t get to do our Solstice Wreath this year due to a little more craziness than usual. But other stuff got done. 10yo figured out how to make fingerless gloves using her loomband loom and wool after watching a few Youtube videos: She has since either given this one to her best friend or made her best friend one and there has been a request to teach another homeschoolie how to make them.
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.
October Homeschool Miscellany
I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection. JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don’t think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did. Our bees swarmed, and made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days.
July Homeschooling Miscellany
Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother. While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour. On the first day we decided to go and check out the Melbourne Museum, as the kids love museums.
June Homeschooling Miscellany
As it turned out the other 7yo’s pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn’t “drownded”, it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting. He’s been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding. He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while “disguised” in the box he’d cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.
May Homeschooling Miscellany
11yo’s drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot. 11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn. I’m obviously taking the photo. The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!). SciTech did a class based on The Lorax and included experimenting with water saving crystals and making a paper pot.
April Homeschooling Miscellany
Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser. Didn’t get a lot of photos as we got rained out! 11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he’s any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor. He got a Hungry Jack’ voucher which was utilised the next time Nanna came over and took them out for lunch.
March Homeschooling Miscellany
7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday. The fully “grown” thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs. I organised to meet up with JJ’s family (parents, sister and her family) at Whiteman Park. We met up at the pretty large and cool playground that had a pretty tall slide tucked into one corner: The play was followed by a nice morning tea and then we separated as I’d planned to go to the transport museum whereas sister-in-law wanted to take her kids to see cute cuddly animals at Caversham instead.