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.

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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. 

Knitting

Since we mostly follow a Steiner based curriculum at our Unicorn school, both Gabriel and Willow have been learning to knit. To teach them to knit I also had to learn. To be honest that isn't entirely true, I actually learnt to knit when I was six, and then spent the next four years knitting my dad a scarf- it was a nightmare, and that combined with my mum taking forever to knit anything, totally put me off knitting.

Anyhow further down the track, and Willow is at the Glasgow Steiner School, and loads of the parents knit, I didn't really feel ready to face knitting, so instead I learnt to crochet. I crocheted a variety of hats for everyone in the family, making them up as I went along. After leaving Glasgow, homeschooling, returning to Adelaide, messing about with schools, we decided to homeschool again and I had to learn to knit to teach the kids, so now all three of us are busy knitting a variety of things.

Gabriel has only started to knit this year, and this has been challenging for me, as I knit left handed, and I had to teach him to knit right handed. Obviously essentially it is the same, but reversed. Apparently my Grandma taught me to knit left handed using a mirror, but since I've learnt most things by watching and reversing them, I figured I could do the same to help Gabriel. Now I'm able to knit both right and left handed, but I am much faster knitting left handed unsurprisingly. Willow ended up being taught by my Mum. She went for a sleepover one weekend with her Grandma, and came home being able to knit. So for the last couple of years I've mostly helped her with dropped stitches, and showed her how to purl, but on the whole it was much simpler, as she already knew the basics.

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June 2025

Since then  I have taught the younger two children to knit too.  Another one, Arden, is left handed like myself, but I chose to teach him right handed knitting for the convenience of following patterns, if he should choose to knit more.  So far he hasn't chosen to do that.  ATM Irving and I are knitting together- I am working on knitting Gabriel a Harry Potter "Weasley Jumper" and Irving is doing his first full knitting project; a black hat for himself.

This post is back when Arden learnt to knit, and when Gabriel made himself socks.
https://unicorn-pegasus.blogspot.com/2014/12/2014.html

Willow regularly does craft work still, and probably did the most out of all the kids, so far, in her homeschooling journey.  This is when she was 15, and we were learning to sew, and she was also busy making herself a beret.
https://unicorn-pegasus.blogspot.com/2015/05/pirated-away.html

This link is a must read if you are interested in knitting, or Steiner education but wonder about the relevance in a modern education.

https://new.pyrites.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Knitting-begets-thinking.pdf

If you use the search bar, there are more posts on our knitting over the years, for your inspiration.