Titanic, Stars, Rocks and Craft

We have had a rather hectic and enjoyable couple of weeks around here, with plenty of outings, and some great activities.

We made it to the Titanic exhibition, over the last weekend it was on.  It was insanely busy, but still worth seeing. As everyone here is quite interested in the story, we'd been watching some of the films made about it with our favourite being "A Night to Remember", which I've also just purchased a copy of the book for us to read.

We've also been watching the BBC series "Back in Time" which we've been enjoying.  We've found some of the details interesting, but would have like to have seen the people taught some of the skills (as people of the era would have just known them-particularly knowing how to use an old fashioned can-opener).  Though we've only just watched the first episode of the weekend, and they do appear to be teaching them some skills this time.

We had a lovely simple Easter this year, lunch at home (Arden made stout pie and Willow made hot cross buns), eggs selected by everyone and purchased by everyone (we had a jar sitting in the kitchen that everyone added money to so that we  had a treasure jar for our egg purchasing!), eggs from our two favourite chocolate shops; Sue Lewis and Koko Blacks) and a night out of dancing to Shotdown from Sugartown and Johnny Law.  Damien and I have been working on learning some jitterbug, so we got to do a bit of that, and Arden has been learning the basic step, as he would like to learn a dance where he gets to do lots of spinning(he learnt recently that the focus of rockabilly is on the girl!)

Gabriel and Arden went on a geology outing around Perth; Arden came back very enthused, and I'm planning to get him a hand lens soon.  Irving and I met them after the outing,down at Cottesloe, we had a bit of a look at the last of the sculptures that were still out from the Sculptures by the Sea.

Arden has just finished doing a block on stars.  We focused on drawing multi-pointed stars; from 5points through to 12.  We also did some sewing, making fabric star decorations, and finally we finished the block with tea-light holders.

Sewing stars

My star for Irving, made from Damien's old shirt :D

Star painting with Irving

Arden's stars

Painting to make our star lanterns

Stage 1, oiled and cut out

Folding

Ready and lit!  Last time we made these was 2010 and we had a small incident with one catching alight!!!  Though it was my fault for doing small and large size candle holders (large is best!!!)  Would like to try these next time.  Might have to do them for this years solstice...

Gabriel finally finished his Zebra!

And now he's on to hand sewing a tie. 

Gingham for the lining of the tie. (Gabriel is using the same fabric for the main part of his tie, that Willow used for her skirt).

Gabriel is currently working on a block of geometry using our Wooden books.  I absolutely *love* these books; they're like little works of art, and filled with obscure and interesting information.  Gabriel has been working from the Islamic Design book.

Part of visit to the city routine presently-visiting London Court to see the knights and dragon!  (Irving loves it!)

Looking back through this, it is apparent to me that I'm not sure what Willow's been up to, other than making a video and hot cross buns, getting through her craft pile, and generally doing maths and writing and music.  She's still been  helping Arden with violin, but I haven't yet had my weekly/fortnightly chat with her.

-

2025

We spent quite a bit of time exploring the Titanic at this time.  I bought a book called "The Wreck of the Titan" which is apparently eerily similar to the story, but unfortunately we still haven't gotten to reading it.  I also recently came across a book called "The Truth About The Titanic" by Archibald Gracie.

You can find instructions to make the lanterns on this page.

https://www.bellalunatoys.com/blogs/moon-child-blog-sarah-baldwin/origami-candle-holder

Back to School

So our 6 week break is over, and we started school again this week.  It was great to get back into organised activities at home, and so much of the work was interesting.  I've decided next year, that we'll have a 2 1/2 month summer break and start mid February, as having the longer break in the middle has gotten us all rejuvenated for the second half of the year.  So we'll be looking at a 4 week break next winter.

Gabriel was continuing on with his English block we started last term, and this week we were looking at sentence structures, whilst continuing with reading "Beowulf" and Padraic Colum's King Arthur stories. 

We looked at a pictorial proof in geometry this week.

My version.

Gabriel's version.

Gabriel has progressed onto modellling for his craft project, and is currently modelling zebras, before he will eventually move onto planning his project.

Arden and I continued working through the alphabet this week, looking at the letters L and Z.  Next week we'll do a mix of activities, before moving onto the vowels.

Here's our modelling.

 

And our painting for the week.


This is my lamp painting.


Arden's lamp painting.


Willow is onto working on her computing block.  Damien is taking her through the basics of hardware, and she's teaching herself touch typing using Ktype and tux type.  (Damien works in IT and we have linux as our operating system at home.)

I bought a few new books recently: "The Little Prince" and also "Between Form and Freedom" and also "The Nourishing Traditions Book of Baby and Child Care."  We've all been enjoying "The Little Prince", and it's been our lunch time read for the week.  Arden is particularly enjoying it.  I wasn't sure how much I'd like "Between Form and Freedom" as I'd come to realise quite some time ago that homeschooled teenagers are different from schooled ones, waldorf or not.  Generally this book is a schooled child's book and not a home educated child's book.  There are bits I'm finding really annoying, but there are a few good bits in there too.  The last book I haven't had much of a chance to look at properly yet, but I cut out all pasteurised dairy, after reading that this can cause some babies discomfort when breastfeeding, and Irving is certainly cheerier now.  I wasn't having a lot of pasteurised dairy (milk and cream at home are raw) but now I'm pretty much sticking to raw.

-

2025

The teen situation is definitely different when home educated, and I really would focus on the educated word there, and not home schooled.  I've now met quite a range of people doing both now, and the home schooled ones end up with more of the schooled kids issues.  Feeling controlled, lacking autonomy and intrinsic motivation over their lives is something I have come across a bunch of times.  These things are particularly an issue from what I have seen if they are over scheduled.  Obviously if their schedule allows for flexibility to do other things and to explore in their own time, as well as doing structure, then this won't be an issue.

There are quite a number of people that move to home schooling here in the teen years.  Interestingly in Adelaide, the more experienced home educators, use to almost discourage it, because the way the educating happened there was more of a natural learning approach and that can be difficult to transition into, when all one has ever known is school.  I do like that a lot of people step out, even in high school here, with the support of a programme, because I think learning outside the mainstream schooling system is still an enormous step in the right direction, and TBH it is what we started with, although from the Steiner system, and in the early years.

Socially it can be difficult hanging out with the kids that have had a hard time at school, because they can bring the chaos of their school issues with them.  I've also learnt, over the years, that there are some great schooled teens to mix with, and generally these are the ones that have high parental/multi-generational involvement in their lives.  Hold on to Your Kids is a great read on this topic, and whatever education model one uses, it is an excellent read on how to maintain good family connections with one's children.

Astronomy, Drawings, this last Week

We've had a bit of a quieter week this past one; there was a public holiday Monday, so we only did main lesson, since Damien was at home.  We also had a look around town to see what was happening for WA day.

Gabriel moved onto his astronomy block this week, and we did a few interesting exercises out of the book that we're using.  My only complaint about the book, is that is doesn't translate some of the sections for the Southern Hemisphere as well as it could, for someone learning astronomy.

These are our moon calendars, taken from an exercise out of the 'Sky Phenomena' book, and adapted to suit the Southern Hemisphere.

We also had a drawing session where we imagined what it might look like to see the full earth from the moon- this is my picture.

 This is Gabriel's picture.

This is Arden's picture of outer space, that he did at the same time.

And here are Gabriel's zebra sketches, and shading experiments from this week.

Willow has been working on setting up her etsy account for her business, so we've been opening bank accounts and sorting out PAYPAL for her.  She's also ordered some new wool for further projects, and is awaiting it's arrival.

Gabriel

We finished off Gabriel's geometry block, and are now onto ancient Rome.  Story wise we are reading Padraic Colum's, "Adventure's of Odysseus and Tales of Troy".  We're using this as a connecting book between learning about Ancient Greece last year, and progressing onto Rome this year.  We are also using Charles Kovacs book on Ancient Rome.

Gabriel has also almost finished his first sock!  And has started his main craft project for this year.  He's decided that he would like to make a zebra, so he's onto the early stages of the project; lots of drawing.


Geometry

 Some book work on Ancient Rome.

Drawing a zebra

We also headed out to the Museum last week, for a class on Ancient Egypt.  Gabriel really enjoyed it, the focus was on burials and mummification.  Plus I think he was pleased to be one of the only people that knew about the Rosetta stone.