We Made It

 At the beginning of the year, Irving decided that he would like a super long Winter break, I wasn't sure how we'd manage without the regular April holidays, but I agreed to go along with him.  I also suspected that the moment Arden was off TAFE, it might become a bit more challenging to keep focused.   Well, I was right, but Irving and I persevered, and we did our first half of the year as a single semester, and now we have a seven week winter break!  Which I am feeling really appreciative of.

We started on Ancient Rome and the story of Aeneas.  Normally we'd do some Latin this year, but Irving is keen to continue the Ancient Greek lessons that we're doing for now, so the plan ATM, is  to do Latin next year.  We used "The Writing Revolution" to complement our writing for this block, with the goal being to develop more refined sentences.  By then end of the term, we were moving on to the section on How, What, Where, When, Why and Who.  It reminded me, very much of my year 7 teacher, and how he taught us English.

We did some more copperwork, Irving decided to try another square bowl, and that he wasn't interested in trying to saw yet.

He is still a huge fan of Rubik's cube, and so this one was his new addition to his collection.  The book, underneath,  "The Invisible Rainbow- A History of Electricity and Life" we were reading as part of our physics study, we just read the first half for now, which was largely a historical background.  I have read it before, and I spent quite a bit of time checking his references, as it was really unlike anything I had ever heard about electricity before.

We continued with home school excursions with the National Trust.  This time to Mundaring Weir.  Other than it was a quite a hot day, this one was excellent and we really enjoyed the walk around the Weir, and the tour of the historic building which is now a museum for it.

The final excursion in this series was to Woodbridge house in Midland.

More sailing on the Swan River.

We moved on to some civics for a few weeks, and used "Robin Hood" by Roger Llancellyn Green as our accompanying text.  As well as an overview of the Australian Political system, we took a look at the Magna Carta and read through the original conditions that it required King John must maintain.


We also did a series of excursions to the Literature Centre in Fremantle, with our homeschool group.  The focus was on Shaun Tan's art works and books.  The classes were engaging and interesting, albeit a little short, there wasn't quite enough time to really settle into developing ideas  properly in our hour and a half length classes.

We also got to do a tour of the Alcoa Bauxite mine.  It's the third mine tour that I've ever done.  The first one was of a copper mine in Burra when I was 12, and we also  visited the Kalgoorlie superpit when we were on our way to Perth, and TBH I found that pretty horrifying.  This seemed better overall, in the way that it was managed and regenerated, but apparently it devastates the local animal population, and TBH for all their good media propaganda, it was easy to see that that was the case.

Irving was doing some weaving on the vintage weave it loom.

A kookaburra guest came and stole some food!

The local Catholic Cathedral had its front door open, which is highly unusual!  We walk past it regularly and have been told that this is because it's a jubilee year.

Willow, Irving and I had a day out to New Norcia.  We decided to walk around the town ourselves, rather than do the tour.  It was very odd.  It's apparently the only Monastic Town in Australia, but it is now largely a ghost town, and is filled with these large magnificent buildings that used to be schools or associated with them.

We had a surprise visit from my brother, on his way to Adelaide after a holiday in Bali.  So we seemed to  spend a couple of days just hanging out and visiting cafes with him!  

Irving and I were working on building truncated solids out of toothpicks.  This was highly challenging as some of them were very large!

We found this chocolate from down south, near our dentist.  This is the best chocolate I've found in WA.

We all headed out to see WASO perform John William's music over the past weekend.  So many great songs!  Everyone really enjoyed it, and it was lovely to run into some friends too.

I've started making tallow again, since the brand we were buying has stopped producing smaller quantities.  And some purple sauerkraut this time.  I love the colour that it comes out!

One of my watercolours- I wasn't too sure about how this one came out!

Arden was participating in the Dawn vigil with the airforce cadets again this year.  Damien, Gabriel, Irving and I went  along too.  It was my first time attending and reminded me of going to church with my cousins, who were Lutheran.  It was a funny experience as a German Australian, as I had generally been made aware when I was at school that I was the "enemy" with "Heil Hitlers" being directed my way from time to time.  So none of my family  ever attended despite being multi-generational Australians.  

Standing vigil

2014

We've recently had our annual review, which as usual I'm pleased is done, and we've pretty much finished our work for this year- Willow and Gabriel are just finishing off a few extra things. It's been very hectic chasing around our almost 18month old Irving, and doing yr 9, yr 7 and yr 1, but there's been lots of lovely work done and some really enjoyable events this year.

So after a very hectic term and year we are finally finished.

Arden finished his first knitting project earlier in the year.  A purse for his doll.  It was knitted with pure wool and then wet felted, and finished with a button.  We didn't really need to wet felt it, as Arden's knitting was very beautiful.  Often little people make a few mistakes here and there, and the wet felting helps to finish it off nicely.

Arden has been working at his cursive and print this year, with the focus on cursive.

 

I've been learning to write right handed at the same time!  The top is left, the bottom right.

 

Arden has been very lucky to go busking with some friends of ours this year.  He's been loving busking the harmonica, and has been experimenting with lots of instruments.

Gabriel finished knitting his socks.  He's become adept at following the patterns and has finally really settled into knitting well.

Willow finished her doll off finally.  She's being well loved by Irving :)

 

And she finished her weaving project: a small blanket!

She was lucky to get an opportunity to make a harp.

She also got to attend a recording session of voice overs, and get an idea of what it's like to be a voice actor.  She's also joined the Gilbert and Sullivan society with her Dad, Damien, which she is loving.  She's really enjoying getting to perform and sing on the stage again.

There has been a lot of interesting excursions and activities this year and particularly this term.  We've been to Herdsman Lake and the Literature Centre and learnt about beekeeping.  We've done lots of circus, jujutsu, basketball and dancing.  We've been to the ballet a few times (last performance is this week) and we won an incursion to the balllet (thanks ballet WA :) !) where we discovered that ballet originates from fencing! Not surprising when one thinks about it.

Anyway it's been a very full and interesting year.  With everyone progressing along nicely, and lots of fun and work along the way!

-

2025

I've continued learning to be right handed, and my writing is now reasonable albeit slow.  It seems to have had the positive affect of improving my left handed writing too I think.  I never liked my left- handed "cursive" as it was a weird mess of real cursive and "linked up letters" as the Government/school called what they introduced to us.  For some reason instead of letting us finish off cursive, since we'd already started it, they had to change everyone over to the new system, at the same time.  I've been quite purposeful with my right hand, in trying to develop an attractive cursive style, and I think this is starting to blend over to me other side, which I did not expect.

Also the above is a good illustration of the silly way schools teach things.  Implementing with poor timing, and changing things because it would be easier for some, of course we can dumb everything down, but then the children who would thrive with the challenge of something more difficult are ignored then too.  The only people who are really served in this system are those that are in the middle, "average", and how many kids really fit that mould?

This is how cursive  was mostly likely removed as the main way we teach writing ( more on cursive here).  Which seems to have progressed to beginning with printing, and then moving to cursive, and now there are people that wonder why we need to write at all.  Sadly they are completely ignorant of the fact that doing complex finger based activities and developing dexterity strengthens the brain, and learning to write is as much about that as it is about the writing itself.

Alternatively much is done for the convenience of the teacher, because TBH it is a challenge to manage children.  They are in various levels of "asleep" mode compared to an adult, and so getting them to learn in  structured group is not natural to their current mode of being.  I share some links in this post about children's brainwaves.
https://unicorn-pegasus.blogspot.com/2025/01/beginnings-and-endings-and-thoughts-on.html

We had a few fun filled years in the Gilbert and Sullivan society, whilst Willow was on her journey to getting into WAAPA.

Pirates of Penzance performance can be found here.

https://unicorn-pegasus.blogspot.com/2015/05/pirates-of-penzance.html

Iolanthe can be found here.

https://unicorn-pegasus.blogspot.com/2016/06/iolanthe-has-take-over.html

She still has her harp; it was another one of those excellent one off learning opportunities that we came across over the years.  Since Irving was very young, she did the class independantly, and managed most of the work herself, with some minor assistance.