Adventures Of A Homeschool Graduate

Hello everyone! How are you all?

It's been a while since I've posted, but it appears that mum has been giving a few small mentions to what I've been doing at waapa. But why don't I give you my own update on it all?

Currently I'm in the process of exams. I've survived the first half of the semester! I've heard a lot of horror stories about studying at university and none of them have really materialised.
 I've been having a lot of fun though. I've already performed in two shows, I have a third coming up in under a week, and I've made quite a range of interesting friends. Of course, I've been doing much more than performing and socializing.

 The main thing I've noticed so far is that university isn't too different from homeschooling.

• Learning is self driven
     It's not quite the same as homeschooling, but quite a lot of the learning is self driven. Sure, I have to sit in a history class for an hour and listen to the lecturer talk about whatever era we're in now, but because it's only an hour there's a limit to what we can be told. Which leaves the opportunity to answer my own questions by googling and looking in the library.



• The lecturers will tell you about their passions
     In my experiences from being homeschooled, if I wanted to learn about a specific topic I would find someone who knows a lot about that topic and loves it. I've done that with voice acting - I emailed people who did it, asking for their experiences and for tips... I even ended up going to a studio to watch some voice acting in action.
     It's the same with the lecturers. The history lecturer was delighted when I told him I wanted to know more about music history, and gave me a list of his favourite history books. The music theory lecturer is also a flute tutor, and gave me a few practising techniques. If I'm looking for information on a certain topic, chances are someone there can inform me on it.

    Of course, there's the main big difference with the "socializing" (fun fact - "social" originally meant "devoted to/related to home life") side of things. Instead of going out and just making friends along the way, there's the school mentality where everyone has to have a friend.
   So there's a lot of acting from everyone. It's quite annoying. It's hard to see who people actually are underneath the persona they've come up with. Some people don't act, and most of them tend to be the people who were homeschooled for a year or two.


  It's being an interesting journey. My exams will be over this week, and then I'll be starting semester two in July. And maybe I'll be doing bachelor next year.

If people would like to hear more about being a homeschool graduate in university, let me know. I can give up dates on what I'm doing, my thoughts on certain subjects.

~Willow

New Year, Mild Summer, High School Graduate

We've had a busy Summer so far, and have been enjoying the time off, and the unusually mild weather.  (It has been nice to do some indoor activities this Summer-usually we spend most of it out and about!)  We have still been getting out to some Fringe shows, and on the weekend we made it to Opera in the Park.  We're probably midway through Fringe by now, and we're looking forward to getting to see some shows at PIAF also.

Willow discovered that she passed her aural and theory test for WAAPA, at the end of last year, when she was offered a place in their course, and her ECU portion of the application was formalised at the beginning of this year, so she's all set to start a diploma in Classical voice this year.  (We're all just a bit excited about this!)  It feels really interesting to have come full circle with one child now, and to have some idea where we are going with the others.  (Our first full year, was 2006 we were travelling, then we were back in school for half of 2007, and mid '07 we started home ed permanently, with me starting this blog, in an evolving form in 2008.)

Self portrait by Willow.

This last Christmas, Arden helped Damien make a Christmas pannetone bomb, using our favourite Perth icecream, ChiChos.

I've been doing a bit of sewing over the Summer, and have received a few sewing gifts.

I made this vintage pattern skirt out of green sateen.

And later I made a matching halter top with green ricrac.

The inside is purple floral, and I can reverse it if I like!

New sewing book and vintage pattern.

New Cushion cover.(and Irving's feet!)

Willow and I both had our birthday's over January.  She had treacle tart as her "birthday" cake and she's now 17.

And we got cute number star candles for my cherry cake.  (I felt a bit lucky that cherries were still nice, usually my birthday is late for good cherries!)

Gabriel and I have been using "Switch on your brain" again, to support him with improving his spelling.  It is one of my favourite books, and works along the same lines as many brain gym activities.  We first used it when he was about eight, and had a lot of success with improving his focus.  Recently I realised, that whilst he reads quite well, he hasn't worked out the spelling patterns of many words, so we've been spending some time working on this, and we've been supporting it with the exercises from this book.

Gabriel finally made a successful batch of bokashi, out of coffee grinds.  We're looking forward to using it in our composting bin!

Waiting for the bus to musicianship last week.  Classes are back!  And a bit of balancing fun.

 A bit of beach weather.  And a sandcastle moat.  (working on our physics.)

 

 And unusually cool rainy weather.

 Making match box cars.

First model with tacks.

Second model with wire axles, and modelling wax tyres.

-

2025

I have such pleasant memories of Willow being accepted in to WAAPA, we were both super excited.  She had a fabulous year studying there and getting her Diploma, and she was sorry to miss out on a place in the Bachelor the following year, but she accepted that maybe it was better to do something else for a while, and return to music later.

That next year she worked in a cafe, and she felt unappreciated for much of it, and found that difficult.  The following year, she got the opportunity to do a short stint in admin( it was meant to be three months), where Damien, her Dad works, and because she did such a great job, they kept her on and kept giving her more and more work.  So now she works as a team leader in online payment fraud management.