Outings

Last weekend was rather busy, with us hiring a car to head out to Yangchep national park, as Willow had won a limestone cave tour for her and some friends.  Arden and I went for a walk, as the tour was only suitable for 8yrs and up.  After we left Yangchep we went further North, and visited the Pinnacles.  I hadn't realised that the Pinnacles were such a large formation and we all found the sight quite impressive.  The above picture is a shot of some of the smaller ones.  We had been hoping to get out to see a few more things over the weekend, but Arden was sick coming home on Saturday, so we ended up using the car for useful things- shopping, visiting IKEA, etc.

This week has seen Arden working through some more Grimm's fairy tales, and the letters, 'j', 'x' and 'w'.  We're coming towards the end of the consonants- though we won't be doing the last few til after the baby is born.

Gabriel has been working on heat this week, in physics.  Everyone does tend to enjoy doing the physics, and now that Arden is 5 (compared to being 3 when I did it with Willow) he's enjoying sitting around and seeing what sort of things we're doing too.  We did a variety of things including feeling flames, making hands cold, looking at how things burn.  The experiment that is pictured, is from looking at convection currents - it doesn't show up quite so nicely in the pictures, but it gives the idea a bit.

This is one of Gabriel's zebra sketches from this week.

Willow has been sorting out accounts for her business project this week- looking at etsy, PAYPAL and ebay.  Plus she's still working on the first part of her history block- writing and researching about William of Orange.

-

2025

Both the younger two have been involved in classes that are, from a schooling point of view, way above their level.  Now that they are both older it is quite apparent that it has made their comprehension of certain topics quite advanced, due to the early exposure.  

Due to this, and also because of our early years home educating in Adelaide, where the home education scene was much more multi-generational natural learning inclined than Perth, which IMO is much more age group restricted, and school inclined, one of the aspects I have really come to value in home education is multi- generational learning.  If a child has an interest, or a passion, and they meet someone who shares that, age becomes completely irrelevant, as that topic becomes the priority in the relationship.  

I look back now, at all the incidental learning that I did with my Dad, and I realise that we were home educating/ natural learning /life learning almost whenever I hung out with him.  He was always prepared to answer my questions, expand my understanding, and demonstrate, pretty patiently, whatever he was doing.  These are some of my fondest learning memories, and I came to see through my home educating experience that there were some things, that were much easier for the kids to do, if they had me by their side having a go too.