April

Geometry again.  Working on circles with Arden and Irving.

A couple of Arden's.

Mine.

Irving's.

Arden working on measuring and ruling.

Working on numbers with Irving and Arden joining in.

Visiting Cottesloe beach, as part of our astronomy studies.  We went past the sundial to examine how it works, and then spent a lovely afternoon exploring the waves and rocks on one of the last hotter days of the season.

At Perth Airport waving off big sister, Willow, as she headed to Melbourne to volunteer at Supernova.

At the Shipwreck Museum in Fremantle.

Out doing some rubbish clean up along our section of the Swan River, on part of our studies on waterbirds and our local area. 

Along the walk we came across this bust of Nicholas Baudin which fit nicely with all our maritime studies of WA, and our visit to the Shipwreck Museum.  I like it when life offers synchronous moments like this!

Pizza by Arden for dinner

Making hot cross buns for Easter.

Sprouting some seeds(borage and cornflower) in egg shells and cottonwool.

Some reading, a favourite of mine, "The Little Prince".

Spontaneous experiments with sound.  Rubber bands of varying thickness and jars/bowls.

Irving working on hammering.

We sat and watched this Cactus flower open over the course of 10mins one morning.

I finally finished this blanket in time for the coming winter.

Outings

We're currently on holidays- we decided that we like having a longer break during winter, so we've taken four weeks this time.  Turns out it is very useful, when we've ended up with so many events on!

We all went to see Spare Parts puppet theatre perform "The Little Prince", which is one of our favourite books around here.  The  puppet show was nicely done we thought, but we thought it was a little sad, how the kids couldn't just run with the imagination in it, and had to box it into reality.  The whole "that's not real" type of thing. 

We also had a homeschool excursion to Wilkinson's homestead in Gosnells, and took a walk along the Canning River.  The Homestead outing covered a good range of topics, fruit picking, making do and olden days school.  The kids all liked getting old fashioned names.  It was a very wet day, and we were lucky that it stopped raining before the end, so that we could pick some lemons and oranges to bring home.

Willow and Gabriel both performed in their Circus' schools latest show- Clowns vs Ninjas.  It was quite entertaining, and Willow certainly enjoyed the Ninja role.  She likes lego Ninjago, so the Ninja theme appealed to her very much.

Arden was excited to go for his first try at iceskating.  The rink was rather small and quite busy, but with the little people session it was still fairly good for space.

Arden and I have been on a few bird watching nature walks- around King's park, near the River and at Herdsman Lake. 

Observing ripples in a giant puddle.

Down at Herdman Lake.

Back to School

So our 6 week break is over, and we started school again this week.  It was great to get back into organised activities at home, and so much of the work was interesting.  I've decided next year, that we'll have a 2 1/2 month summer break and start mid February, as having the longer break in the middle has gotten us all rejuvenated for the second half of the year.  So we'll be looking at a 4 week break next winter.

Gabriel was continuing on with his English block we started last term, and this week we were looking at sentence structures, whilst continuing with reading "Beowulf" and Padraic Colum's King Arthur stories. 

We looked at a pictorial proof in geometry this week.

My version.

Gabriel's version.

Gabriel has progressed onto modellling for his craft project, and is currently modelling zebras, before he will eventually move onto planning his project.

Arden and I continued working through the alphabet this week, looking at the letters L and Z.  Next week we'll do a mix of activities, before moving onto the vowels.

Here's our modelling.

 

And our painting for the week.


This is my lamp painting.


Arden's lamp painting.


Willow is onto working on her computing block.  Damien is taking her through the basics of hardware, and she's teaching herself touch typing using Ktype and tux type.  (Damien works in IT and we have linux as our operating system at home.)

I bought a few new books recently: "The Little Prince" and also "Between Form and Freedom" and also "The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care."  We've all been enjoying "The Little Prince", and it's been our lunch time read for the week.  Arden is particularly enjoying it.  I wasn't sure how much I'd like "Between Form and Freedom" as I'd come to realise quite some time ago that homeschooled teenagers are different from schooled ones, waldorf or not.  Generally this book is a schooled child's book and not a home educated child's book.  There are bits I'm finding really annoying, but there are a few good bits in there too.  The last book I haven't had much of a chance to look at properly yet, but I cut out all pasteurised dairy, after reading that this can cause some babies discomfort when breastfeeding, and Irving is certainly cheerier now.  I wasn't having a lot of pasteurised dairy (milk and cream at home are raw) but now I'm pretty much sticking to raw.

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2025

The teen situation is definitely different when home educated, and I really would focus on the educated word there, and not home schooled.  I've now met quite a range of people doing both now, and the home schooled ones end up with more of the schooled kids issues.  Feeling controlled, lacking autonomy and intrinsic motivation over their lives is something I have come across a bunch of times.  These things are particularly an issue from what I have seen if they are over scheduled.  Obviously if their schedule allows for flexibility to do other things and to explore in their own time, as well as doing structure, then this won't be an issue.

There are quite a number of people that move to home schooling here in the teen years.  Interestingly in Adelaide, the more experienced home educators, use to almost discourage it, because the way the educating happened there was more of a natural learning approach and that can be difficult to transition into, when all one has ever known is school.  I do like that a lot of people step out, even in high school here, with the support of a programme, because I think learning outside the mainstream schooling system is still an enormous step in the right direction, and TBH it is what we started with, although from the Steiner system, and in the early years.

Socially it can be difficult hanging out with the kids that have had a hard time at school, because they can bring the chaos of their school issues with them.  I've also learnt, over the years, that there are some great schooled teens to mix with, and generally these are the ones that have high parental/multi-generational involvement in their lives.  Hold on to Your Kids is a great read on this topic, and whatever education model one uses, it is an excellent read on how to maintain good family connections with one's children.