First Half of the Year!

Well I didn't mean to be so neglectful of this blog this year, but it turns out that I have.  We've had a very full year.  So I'll give a bit of an update starting with term 2.  Arden and Irving both continued with iceskating and music classes.  Arden was also busy with fencing, airforce cadets, and youth flying club whilst Irving and I took up the homeschool classes with Joy of Wood.

Arden continued to work independantly on a range of topics- including aviation studies, maths, science, and english, as well as joining in with activities that Irving and I were doing as it suited him.  Irving and I spent some time reading "Legends of Hawaii" by Padraic Colum and doing some painting, as well as doing various cultural studies.

Irving working on some handwriting styles.

Owl paintings -Arden's, Irving's and mine.

Irving and my toolbox, made during our woodwork classes.

My spoon partly made in our classes and finished at home.

Our spoons

Elastic band gun- our last item made in class.

Irving and I have done a lot of gardening this year,  He has been very interested in herbs, and is interested in any sort of gardening generally.  He decided that he wanted to make his own herb book, so we found a journal and cut out alphabetical tabs and  he's  been making notes as we grow different herbs.

Irving's herbal book.

As usual we celebrated winter solstice with an early morning fire and a cooked breakfast on the flames, including damper cooked in the embers- everyone's favourite part.

A good friend - The Whole Cake made this lovely cake for Irving's 11th birthday.  She is a naturopath and has a lovely herbal garden and knew that Irving was interested in herbs, and so she came up with this fabulous cake.  He was very pleased.

I have been continuing to work on various designs for my redbubble store  and French cakes and pastries have been a big theme.  I've been taking a painting and coffee break most weekends, and partly painting what I see and trying to do so quickly, so that my coffee is still somewhat warm by the end.  It has been an interesting experience!  There's also a bunch of my paintings inspired by Padraic Colum's "Hawaiian Myths" here.

 

Our mid year holidays were pleasantly refreshing and in Arden's case quite short, because he applied to TAFE again. He was accepted into a cert 3 in Ground Operations at Jandakot TAFE adjacent to the airport.  Irving and I had our usually 6week or so break, in which I was expecting to have to do lots of activities with him, but it seems he has finally developed enough interests that he enjoys indepedently, and so we had a bustly and relaxing break.

Term 2

 I've been meaning to post this for a few weeks, but our term was hectic and our holidays have involved doing a bunch of catch up work at home! Normally I like to keep our at home life and our out of home life nicely balanced, and this year there is a lot more out of home activity than usual.

Waiting for "The Mousetrap" to begin.

The whole family in various groups made it out to see Agatha Christie's, Mouse Trap, at His Majesty's theatre. One of the best performances that we've been to in years!

Irving was doing local history this past term, and we did a bunch of local walks and excursions, including heading to the roundhouse in Fremantle. We also did some watercolour painting to create a map of WA.

Watching Bluegrass Parkway perform in the mall.

There's been a lot of gardening happening here, as Irving has taken an interest in plants, and in particular herbs. He's even taken up writing about them! Not something I expected, but a pleasant surprise. Arden got a new pot for his lemon tree, and Irving's herb collection continues to grow.

We spent a lovely day at Penguin Island with some homeschool friends- doing the Penguin tour, and the sealion cruise, and taking a walk around the Island. The rain had really settled in the walk before, and we were *very* lucky and got a perfect day! Everyone was so tired on the way home, that there was dozing on the public transport!

In the discover centre

On the sealion cruise

View on the island.

Irving and I also ended up at Araluen helping to plant for their Tulip festival. Arden was busy doing a two day TAFE taster course, learning about tiling and bricklaying.

Planting

Arluen

Irving got one of his t-shirt designs printed off Red Bubble.

Jumping Rabbit

Arden did some chemistry and we focused on salts. There was collecting river and ocean water to make sea salt, soap making, and electrolysis. Overall it was a very interesting block. The soap was made using ghee, as Arden was interested to see how that would come out- it very quickly changed from a rich yellowy colour to a creamy colour. We are yet to try this batch, as it finishes maturing- probably we will try it later this week. (For those that don't know- soap is a salt- the combination of lye and fat). In our first electrolysis experiment we separated hydrogen and oxygen, and in our second we used a copper cathode and anode, and displaced the copper.

Evaporating our sea water

Sea Salt collection

Making Soap from ghee

Displacing copper

We all did our first Joy of Wood class with Greg Miller again, after quite a few years. This time the focus was on whittling birds.

It was our turn to host book club, as Irving's book- "Nancy Drew" was chosen for the term. Since the focus was mysteries, we found some mazes of varying levels for the kids to try out. We also had a turn hosting a week of our steam group- this time we made nib pens. There was a little bit of chaos, when we couldn't get the council's oven to work, but once we got over that hurdle, it was a fun session, with the kids getting to try nib pens and feather pens, and then creating their own pen from a feather. We got a lot of inspiration for how to make the nib pen, from the How to Make Everything Youtube channel, which we love!

To finish the term we moved onto the human body, and we watched quite a few Operation Ouch episodes, but mostly we focused on reading Bill Bryson's "The Body". We haven't yet finished, though as usual he has all sorts of fascinating stories about the development of our understanding of the body.

This week we get back into term time, with classes on again. Other than having to be out and about more, we're still taking it slowly at home, as I find taking a longer mid-year break helps us to be motivated for the rest of the year.

2023

 So far this year has been busier than I prefer but quite enjoyable. Irving and I have just started our at home learning routine for the year at the beginning of March, and Arden started in February. Though we had rather a busy summer- with Irving and I both starting red bubble businesses.You can find Irving's shop here. And my shop here. Irving also did swimming lesson at the beach this year, and is now feeling inspired to get his swimming at the level it needs to be to join nippers next summer.

Lots of beautiful beach days in January.

We finished reading Bill Bryson's "Down Under" over the summer, whilst sitting at cafes, after our beach lessons. :) (Though this book has some IMO bizarre comments at times- that I particularly felt the need to edit for DS9).

Arden is up to year 10 and is keen to continue with aviation related studies, and he is continuing with the youth flying club at Bullcreek Aviation museum, and recently signed up for Aviation cadets. He is still doing jujutsu and is almost at the adults belts for grading now. We are thinking that this will probably be his last year doing music classes at Cottage Insititute, as he will have a solid grounding in music should he wish to pursue it later in life. He is also doing sailing classes this year, at Hillary's Yacht club.

To start off the year, he's been largely working on music theory using the ABRSM books grade 1 to 5, in a similar style to how his sister, Willow, did. (She studied a range of instruments and voice, did Kodaly style lessons at Cottage institute and only worked on the grade 1 through 5 books from year 10). Arden's interest in music however is quite different to Willow's and at one stage he was interested in musical composition and was watching Hans Zimmer's masterclass on composing. He is very particular about being able to hear movie tracks due to this interest in music soundtracks and their relationship to the film. He is a self-taught pianist from watching youtube "piano hands" channels as I like to call them, and atm he plays for about an hour and a half a day.

Irving is up to year 5, though in my opinion is only really year 4 and a half, and so that's where he's at, at home. He is born right at the cut off date for registration and since we do Steiner inspired education, I slowed down our stories and themes over the last year, to line up to mid- year since that is better for him. So at the moment we are reading the Norse Myths by Padraic Colum and learning about runes. We've also joined a small STEAM group for a bit of a hang out- there's an activity and play, he's doing music classes at Cottage, and he's doing pottery classes too. Plus there's been *lots* of swimming! We've been down swimming in our pool at least three times a week, trying to get him up to nippers qualifying level.

We had a few event outing's during February. When we had kids really into performance, we used to attend a lot of Fringe and Festival events, though these days we have been doing this very little. Irving and I did go to the Perth Festival Opening at Lake Joondalup- which we enjoyed to varying degrees, but the location was beautiful!

On the same night Arden and Gabriel both went to their first big stadium gig- off to see the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. DH, Damien and I had gone out Friday evening and stopped in to see a friend's band, and just happened to be there when Chad Smith, the chilli peppers drummer approached the band and asked if he could drum. Since we had our mini brush with them, Damien shook hands with him on our way out, it started a bit of a thing here, which culminated with buying last minute tickets Sunday afternoon, and both, Gabriel and Arden, heading out to see the Chilli Peppers.

Our first formal home educating outing for the year, was a fun hang out session of roller skating, and it's now looking like we'll be doing iceskating lessons again in term 3, if everything falls into place. Both the boys loved iceskating when we did lesson pre-covid.

Irving also did first aid classes again this year, Arden decided not to- since it hasn't been that long since the last ones he did.

We also headed out to A Night on Bayview- WASO's performance in Claremont. We all really miss their performances on the Swan River, and the Claremont location is lovely, but we miss the preview of the coming year's orchestral performances. I've been a bit slack checking out the program this year, Arden is particularly keen to go to a few, and WASO do very reasonably priced education tickets.

Irving has really taken to pottery classes and it looks like we'll be doing them all year. He's also been borrowing books on pottery, and we've been watching "The Great Pottery Throwdown", since he's loving it so much. He's had about three classes, so far, but they are only having their first firing, so he's excited to see how his work comes out this week.

Arden and I are back into reading "Tragedy and Hope" for our part 2 on it's take on the history of ww2. And Irving, Arden and I are just finished reading "I Can Jump Puddles" as our family reading. I am looking to find the second and third sequels, so that we can get more insight into Australia at that time, from more of a first hand account. I am particularly interested in his take on the depression, as he has such a unique view on growing up in the bush, as someone living with polio. Irving has also been reading "Charlotte's Web", as a part of our friend's book club, and he's been loving it.

Arden is also doing some study on the idea of earth as GAIA- a living complex in itself, and the forces that affect it. We've started watching Brain Cox's "Forces of Nature" as part of his background research, as well as doing a range of reading.

As an update the older kids are busy with more grown up life- Willow is just being made team leader at work. She's been working in fintech since she was almost 19, initially more admin related work for the merchant operations area, and gradually with increasing responsibility doing online fraud analysis. She loves her work, and it suits her, since one of her hobbies as a home educated student was moderating online message boards.

Gabriel finished TAFE, in 2019, and was hoping to get a job in a cafe, when all of the covid stuff happened. He decided that he wasn't interested in doing more in the digital screen and media area, and instead he was interested in drawing and art- off screen, and also learning Japanese. As well as working part- time in a juice bar, he had been doing this at home, until this year, when he decided he is interested in studying at uni and he took a place in Curtin's uni ready course.