Saturday, December 1, 2012

Recent Activities

Well we've mostly finished our organised school work for the year, which is just lovely, though Willow has a couple of things to finish off with Damien.

This week has seen us doing another woodworking project, making a stool, with Greg Miller.  It was a lot of fun, though rather a long day.  Our teacher, hadn't done the project with a larger group before and we ran a lot over time......I ended up spending almost 7hrs on mine, and Gabriel and Willow spent less time.

This is Gabriel's bench/ foot stall.   His is designed to use whilst practising his guitar.

Normally Gabriel loves doing woodwork, and certainly by the end of the end of the project he was doing very well with it, but he got overwhelmed initially with some of Greg's explanations about angles and measuring during his demonstration, and it took him a little while to recover from getting confused.  (Gabriel hasn't yet done that sort of geometry.)

Willow's bench will be used in her bedroom.  Both Willow's and mine involved legs on 10degree angles, which made them slightly trickier to put together.


My bench is currently being used for my laptop.


And finally whilst we were out today, Arden got to do some woodwork with Damien.  He did lots of hammering to make a mini wooden boat.  The nails sticking out sideways are apparently jets of water.


Willow has finished off all her chemistry experiments this week, and she seems to have generally enjoyed it.  These pictures are from making solutions of salt and sugar, and leaving them to crystallise.

Sugar crystals
 
Salt Crystals


Gabriel got an introduction to Pythagoras this week, with some sketching of his thereom.



This week also saw us having homeschool review, so that's done for another 12months.  It's always interesting to look back over the year, and see what we've done, but it's also nice just to get through the process and know that we're all good for next year.