Holiday Recovery

We're back into our usual routine this week, after lots of interesting activities and outings over the holidays- the first week was really relaxing and the second week was exhausting!

Willow and Gabriel spent varying amounts of time at City Farm helping out and doing activities for the school holiday program there.  Both had a fabulous time participating in woodwork, gardening, soap making, woodwork, amongst other things. 

This week saw Willow finishing her apron finally -it looks amazing, and is just in need of an iron to finish it off nicely. (She hand sewed this).

She's now on her way to planning some slippers to make.

We finally received our JUMP workbooks, which I'm quite pleased about as it will simplify doing maths- no more copying questions out for me!  We ordered a trial pack from grade 1-8, which offered one of each workbook.  Perfect for us really, and I've been really happy with the way they arrange maths.  Just need to pair it with the online teacher guides and we're all set.

Gabriel is still working on a block on ancient Egypt and we're reading Roger Lancellyn Green's book on Egyptian Myth.  Willow is doing a musical block, looking at different regions of the world and progressing into medieval music, it ties in quite nicely with her musicianship classes, where they are looking at studying different musical pieces and learning about composers and notation.

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2025

Willow changed from doing choral classes after our first year in Perth ( at this stage she was doing choral classes and suzuki flute), and shifted over the doing the Musicianship lessons which use the Kodaly method.  We started off with a local flute teacher, but that wasn't working well for us, so we starting doing remote lessons with the teacher we had in Adelaide, then we had communication issues based off the distance, so we returned to local lessons with another teacher.  We didn't have much success with local teachers TBH- this next one was rather temperamental, and so after a break, we moved onto private singing lessons- first with a jazz singer, and later with an Opera singer.  This was all over the course of about 5 years.  

Repairs and Catch-up

This week has been hectically busy with repair work, and getting through some neglected crafts. I had a pile of clothes and bits, that almost seemed to be breeding, and with the busyness of homeschool and baby had been ignored for many months. So since we had a week of doing nothing planned, I used it to get through my pile.

The first half a dozen things were pants needing elastic repairs. Mostly this involved using my crochet hook to catch the elastic, from in the waist band, pull it back out and hook it over the button, to hold it in place. To be honest I'm rather feed up with these sorts of pants, so last week I also bought Gabriel a belt.

The rest of the pile was an assortment of toys and clothes, and now I'm nearly at the stage of being finished it's quite a relief to see it gone. There's still a doll, a jacket and a skirt, but I need to buy some thread for the doll, ribbon for the jacket and make a decision about the skirt.

I had also started making Gabriel some slippers out of felt a while ago, so I've been catching up on them, as well as Damien's jumper which has been rather neglected recently. I'm now over half way through the front, so definately heading in the right direction! Hopefully the slippers will be done by Monday, and the jumper will be done soon.