Science birthday party

One of JJ’s friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries. They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

Unfortunately the lemons didn’ put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ’s friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party). They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we’d need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

Perth Zoo, Scitech, a play, Museum of Western Australia and Fremantle Prison

I’m doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

While visiting relatives:

And now what follows is a ridiculous week in which we went to SciTech three times for homeschooling lessons for 10yo and 8yo, a stage play and we also squeezed in a trip to the museum on one of the Scitech days because everyone was in a good mood at the time (I won’t say anything about the trip home from that day).

Homeschooling stuff

We’re reaching the end of the year so it’s been a bit slack on the socially accepted learning front as everyone is a bit tired and over it. There’s been a lot of playing going on and in our usual fashion the 2015 program has already been modified before we could even think about starting it. Instead of doing bookwork every day, we’re alternating with cooking where the kids will choose a recipe, check we have all of the ingredients before commencing (and write out shopping list to be able to do something next session if they really want a thing we don’t have all the ingredients for) and do it themselves from start to finish. I will help with/supervise dangerous things (such as putting things in and out of ovens and anything that requires cooking on stove top) but they are otherwise on their own.

More little things

9yo displayed that he does have some organisational skills while we were playing Minecraft and he wandered off and said he had found some mines, then told me the coordinates so I could join him. He had made a book and quill to use as a journal (and would be less likely to misplace seeing as it’s in-game) in which he was writing down the coordinates of our bases and any mines he encountered (which would then be deleted once we’d finished exploring and digging them out).

History overload, and vague career plans

We binged out on history recently. I can’t remember if I mentioned instating a docos-only-before-bookwork rule to stop the kids from gluing themselves to screens and routinely refusing to come do the bookwork, but it’s been working reasonably well. Horrible Histories was the recent favourite, I think they’ve watched every dvd we have now as well as anything on iView at the time, and favourite dvds have been repeated with them singing along. As well as watching Horrible Histories, 9yo has also decided to have me read him the books for bedtime story. We’re also still very slowly working our way through the very thick Ned Kelly book.

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. There are full lessons on the TED-Ed website but we haven’t really explored there yet. The animations are short (usually under 15mins) which is perfect for 5yo’s attention span, and could potentially skim a huge variety of topics in 2 hours. Just off the top of my head from passing they’ve watched clips on the Higgs-Boson field, icebergs, eel migration, vampire mythology, why glass is transparent and the Fosbury Flop.

Attitude

As he approaches 5, the 4yo has been much less…well…4. While still prone to bouts of 4 year old raging tantrums, he is much easier to reason with and manage because he listens sometimes.

The attitudes of the bigs hae shifted dramatically from towards the end of last year where I have no idea what was going on (but the stress I was feeling at the time wouldn’t have helped) but I was fully prepared to pick up enrolment forms from the primary school down the road.