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. So we would be able to see if there was any mixing going on, she colour coded the water with food colouring after boiling the hot water.

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. We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up. In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.

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. The train took forever as there were a million stops and by the time we got there the kids were starving to death so the first thing we did was run off to look for food. We ate at a lovely Italian restaurant, and then found out that we went in the opposite direction of the museum. After a quick glance around we discovered there was a Chinese museum down the alleyway between the building the Italian restaurant was in and the next one over. After assuring 7yo that we would not get mugged walking down this alleyway (it was quite literally a gap between two buildings, not even any room for skips or fire escapes), we walked down the alleyway into the tiny little Chinatown which seemed primarily designed to house The Chinese Museum.

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