The 2012 School Year has Begun

We kicked off our non school year in style with the Not Back to School Picnic at Hastings Thermal Pool. The snowflakes love the thermal pool and beautiful picnic / barbeque facilities with woodfires, so we are scheduling in a full day visit later this term, when we'll tour the caves and do the short hot springs bushwalk as well as eating and swimming.

In consultation with Daddy Snow, I have been busy preparing our THEAC Family Report. As well as being a formality required for registration, compiling our report is a good opportunity to do some evaluation and planning in a structured way. Not only did we identify some areas where we could be offering more learning opportunities, but also the snowflakes themselves had plenty of ideas about what different things they'd like to do, and while we won't be able to accommodate all of their requests, some can easily be managed. One thing they have all asked for is more one-on-one time with us, and when we do fit this in, it is wonderful to see how eagerly they seem to soak up that undiluted parental attention.

Meanwhile, we have been easing into our non school year with lots of unschooly learning and a few structured-ish subjects. For example, we have had a bit of a focus on safety topics: we got, for the first time, a pool big enough for the snowflakes to swim in, so we talked about water safety and agreed on rules for use of the pool (kids must under no circumstances get into the pool without first asking an adult to supervise, while adults must agree to supervise unless there is a really good reason not to); a tiger snake has taken up residence in our garden, so we revised how to avoid getting bitten and practiced first aid for snake bites; we had a family meeting about our fire safety plan and practiced this; and so on. Snowflake #1 asked for another go at the Triple Zero Kids' Challenge game, which takes kids through various scenarios requiring emergency services. (Co-incidentally, we ended up needing to call 000 twice in one week, so they got to see the real life version as well.)

The interesting conversations continue to happen often, as per usual. I have especially noticed that snowflake #3 seems to be thinking about things in a lot more depth than she could previously. One example is the way she is currently wrestling with her dislike of killing animals versus her love of meat. Her latest idea is that we should only eat creatures that have died of old age; of course, this led to some great discussion with the others explaining their reasons why this plan might be problematic. We don't actually mind whether the snowflakes eat meat or not - if any of them eventually decide to go vegan / vegetarian, we are quite happy to facilitate that - but that's not the point: it's just really fascinating to watch how their reasoning processes and opinions are developing.

On the less weighty side of things, I think the award for silliest conversation of the week would have to go to the great "Is it possible to do half a fart?" debate (but somehow, I don't think that would qualify as a study of fractions for THEAC's purposes!).

Camping At Last

 Well, we finally did it: our official First Family Camping Trip!

This has been in the pipeline for several years and definitely on the agenda since our trip to Bruny Island last year (hmmm, sounds as though the agenda is inside the pipeline...), but we had never got around to organising our equipment, even though it was clearly not going to be practical for five of us to sleep in the pre-children tent. Faced with the challenge of actually deciding what we needed and acquiring it, the camping project just languished on the to do list, until we were inspired by the prospect of camping with friends.

 

The equipment buying excursion was a great source of excitement in itself, with the snowflakes all contributing to the planning and purchasing decisions (although we had to veto a few ideas due to budgetary constraints). Then, a couple of days later, we were off to Cockle Creek with our renewed Parks Pass, the car crammed full of as much as we could possibly squeeze in, and three extremely thrilled snowflakes.

It proved to be a lazy few days: the furthest afield we got was to the whale sculpture at the other end of the bay, and much of the time was spent relaxing on the beach, while the evenings were perfect for wildlife spotting. All in all, the snowflakes had heaps of fun and also quite an educational experience, especially for #1 who now knows how to pitch the tents and how to set up, light and cook on the portable gas barbeque.

The School Holidays

A few people have asked me whether we stop homeschooling for the school holidays. The answer is no; as far as formal school work goes, the snowflakes seem to thrive with an easy schedule all the time rather than working hard most of the time and then having time off. In the natural learning department, well, as any parent knows, it's impossible to stop this from happening even if we wanted to. So while school holidays are probably great for children who do school, giving them the chance to do all the things that there isn't time for during school term, they're not so relevant around here for the most part.

Having said that, though, the one thing that is different about school holidays is that there are all sorts of interesting classes and activities available. The snowflakes have attended a number of Double Helix Club science classes, various Bush Adventure environmental workshops, and a sessions at the Maritime Museum, as well as assorted other activities including a three day sports skills camp for the older two.

With all of this to keep us busy, plus finishing up our history program and some other bits of school work from last year, not to mention pursuing a plethora of tangents that the snowflakes embark on (for example #2, who has recently taken to drawing shields for her knights, just came rushing in to ask me whether King Richard Lionheart's lions were rampant or passant [how would I know? thank goddess for the internet!], and will now spend the next hour drawing and crusading to the incongruous sounds of her brother's Latino Party Box music) we have put off our planned few days away until after school goes back.

Library Stories, Songs and Crafts

This term we have been attending preschooler Story Time sessions at our local library. Because #3 spends a lot of time coming along to activities her siblings are involved in, it's been lovely to have something that's mainly for her.

Summer Is Icumen In

Finally, the warmer weather seems to have arrived! We've been swimming at the local outdoor pool, had a BBQ with friends, and started work again on the jungle that is our garden after the wet spring and too much neglect.  We've been picking strawberries out the front, this week we got our first handful of raspberries and it looks like we'll have a punnet or two of blueberries, provided we can keep the birds off them until they ripen. Here's our Seasonal Table, where we brought in Summer on the first really summery day.

Natural Learning Co-op

Over the last couple of months the snowflakes and I have been enjoying educational activites and the chance to socialise at our co-op. Last time we learned about wet felting by making felted soaps. We're looking forward to plenty more fun and variety over the coming months.

Beltane 2011

Our celebration was somewhat subdued this year as a few things have been happening and I just didn't have the energy to organise anything exciting. Instead of our usual dance around the maypole outside, the snowflakes made a mini maypole to put on the Seasonal Table (it's just a piece of foam trimmed from some of that excess packaging you often get, painted green, with a bit of dowling poked into it and the lengths of yarn pinned into place). Instead of cooking a feast, we had some colourful cupcakes (evil store-bought ones, but they were very pretty!). Snowflake #2 ended up dressing as a witch because she was celebrating Halloween with her Girl Guides group.

And here is the maypole base after we took it off the Table and snowflake #2 decided to repurpose it as a currach for her Lego sailor:

More Moebius Noodles

Here are the snowflakes with their moebius strips. We have made them before, but the kidlets seem to find them endlessly fascinating. I was vaguely wondering what the heck they were actually for, so I had a bit of a search and found that there are numerous applications, some very complex sounding but others very simple, such as the fact that making a conveyer belt in a moebius loop allows it to last longer due to getting equal wear and tear on both sides of the material.

 

The Mirroring game was lots of fun. We were supposed to be observing the scale of movement and thus discovering whether the snowflakes had a preference for small or large actions, however the only difference we noted was that they wanted to move faster than us grownups.

Moebius Noodles Improv Fun (finding multiplication outside)

3 x table

2 x 3 = 6

4 x 5 = 20

2 x 4 = 8, 8 x 13 = 104

7 x table

Vale Nanna

Unfortunately we were not able to take the snowflakes to Sydney to attend the funeral, so we held our own funeral at home at the same time as the official one. We turned our Seasonal Table into a temporary Nanna Table, and went outside to pick a big bouquet of flowers to go on it. We followed the funeral program using the same music and photo montage. The snowflakes lit candles, placed special memory items on the table and talked about Nanna. Afterwards we held a wake at the local bakery.

A couple more odds and ends

After reading Who Sank the Boat, the girls wanted to find out whether a tiny extra weight could really sink an overloaded boat. They set up an experiment with a plastic boat to find out...

#1 took it a little further by experimenting with density. He layered honey, water and oil in a glass and then discovered that some objects will sink through just one or two of the three layers.

Here he is with one of the bridge designs me built at the CSIRO Engineering workshop.

Ostara 2011

"It’s a time for things growing and time now for flowing
A time now for sowing the seeds of your dreams."

Bruny Island

We have been plotting all year to have a getaway, and it finally happened; we spent four nights on Bruny Island, and the holiday was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

I had planned the whole thing in secret, and with a little help from Daddy Snow, I managed to pack all our clothes, bedding, food supplies and other miscellaneous but essential items into the car without the snowflakes noticing. We'd told them that we were going geocaching and might have a BBQ lunch, so they only really got suspicious when after a quick find in Kettering, we drove down to the ferry terminal. The excitement when we pulled up at the caravan park and announced we were staying there had to be seen to be believed! I truly love the way children can bring some of the magic of childhood back to us jaded adults, and it was such fun to watch the snowflakes enthusiastically dashing about checking out every corner of their accommodation, just as I remember doing at their age.

The first night was a very late night because the kids were too thrilled to sleep and too loud for us to sleep, and this didn't stop them from waking up before 6am (but thankfully they settled down early on subsequent nights). We had a celebratory fruit salad breakfast, followed by a play on the beach that lasted all morning, with the somewhat bracing temperature not proving any impediment to the snowflakes' plans to swim. We finally dragged them away from the beach with the promise of a repeat visit, and sallied forth to the Bruny Island Cheese Company for a cheese tasting lunch, where we adults enjoyed the artisan cheese, while the highlight for the children was meeting Gulliver the dog, who sports the coolest dog jacket ever. We also, quite serendipidously, got to learn about stunt riding from this guy and his mates. In the afternoon, we checked out the lookout and the beach at the Neck, before calling in at Bruny Island Providore to stock up on fudge.

The next day we spent much of the morning playing chess, ludo and card games before heading out for some bushwalking. The wild flowers were gorgeous, and although we didn't meet many animals, we did spot an albino wallaby. That afternoon we looked for another couple of caches; we didn't find them (somehow we inadvertantly had the phone rounding the coordinates so that it thought GZ was 30 metres out into the water) but we had a beautiful walk along another beach where we practiced identifying the tracks from different birds, dogs and people. That night we went out fairy penguin spotting. We were incredibly lucky to be the only people there for most of the time, and we got to observe many penguins at close range, with some coming right up to us and walking under the ramp we were standing on. 

 

The following day we drove to Mount Mangana and stopped off at what has to be one of my favourite lookouts anywhere. We listened to the Trout Quintet on the car radio while we took our time breathing in the fresh air and the views. Then we continued our very leisurely drive down to the lighthouse, where we spent and hour or two walking, chatting to the lighthouse keeper, and looking around (and grabbed that cache with no problems). Next it was back to Adventure Bay for a BBQ lunch and a quick game of basketball, before returning to 'our' beach for an hour or two, where a beachball mishap forced me to swim in the icy cold water (thank goodness for hot showers).

On the last day we were lucky enough to have finer weather for the ferry crossing, so the snowflakes got out of the car and watched from the upper deck as we crossed back to Trowenna.

Here's snowflake #2 working on one of her notebooks in bed.
This was not only her first time inside a caravan, but also her first time in a top bunk.

Behind the court, you can just make out the awesome 'outdoor gym' playground.

The snowflakes loved this so much that we had to visit it again.

Admiring the view...

We counted eight different things growing on one patch of fallen log.

Snowflake #1 took this view of the tall trees.

It was probably the least cold and windy day ever at Cape Bruny

The view from the Chidlren's Grave site

Unschool Monday (on Tuesday): It's not work, it's play

Every now and again, we decide that the snowflakes aren't doing sufficient 'schoolwork', and start planning to make them do more. Generally, the response is a rather vocal riff on the theme of "We don't want to do school! We hate schoolwork!" So I guess we're lucky that they do so much without us having to make them.

This afternoon they start their game of Going on Holidays, which involves packing their bags, working out where to fly and then setting up their hotel room. Today's destination is one of their favourites, Adelaide, and the luggage includes many books to read before bed. Since they are so delighted with their makeshift hotel beds in the playroom, Daddy Snow makes up a roaring fire to keep it warm enough for them to camp there overnight. Snowflake #3 eventually decides that she would feel more secure in her own bed, but the elder two stay put.

So what do they do once they've had enough of the Holidays game? They invent a new game: Doing School Homework. I have explained about homework because #2 wanted to know what that heading in her diary was. Recalling my own homework days, I reflected on how fortunate they are to have so much unstructured time, but evidently they feel that homework is something to try on for size. When I go out to check on them, I find both of them earnestly working away on their self imposed assignments. #1 is writing out the alphabet, analysing which letters he thinks look the messiest and systematically practising them by the pageload. Meanwhile, #2 is copying out the numbers 1 to 100; this is the first time she has ever managed to write all the numerals without reversing any of them.

Since they don't go to sleep until almost 10pm, I'm expecting them to wake up late. I'm wrong: #1 is thumping around by 6.45am. I investigate, and discover that he's looking for his times table chart. He wants to laminate it, and no, he can't wait until after breakfast, he needs to play with it now!

But, of course, none of this is schoolwork. Because they hate schoolwork.

Betting workshop

The elder two snowflakes have been asking about betting. 

No, we don't take them to play on the pokies. It began with one of those typically meandering conversations all parents have with their kids, where we started out discussing which dog breeds we all like best, what dogs are the easiest to train and what sort of dogs people we know have. We moved onto greyhounds and dog racing, thence to horse racing, what do those numbers at the bottom of the screen mean, and why don't we bet on the horses so we can make lots of money?

I thought it was sufficient to explain to the snowflakes the reasons why their parents don't take part in any kind of gambling, but Daddy Snow decided we needed a practical session to demonstrate the potential drawbacks of betting as a career! He played the casino, while I was given the role of bookie at the races. The punters were each issued with a stock of tokens. After about half an hour of roulette and racing, the adults had amassed small fortunes. Snowflakes #1 and #3 were completely penniless, while #2 had managed to win back some of her tokens in spite of an earlier run in with the loan sharks.

Hmmm, probably not something that's on the curriculum at the local primary school, but I'm pretty sure they all learnt something.

The Long Stick: plearning with stuff they find lying around

Last week the snowflakes found an extremely long stick in the dry creek bed up the back, and dragged it to the back lawn. 

They decided that the best thing to do with it was planting it. Unsurprisingly (to me), it didn't stand up, so the kids spent about 20 minutes moving half the woodpile to stack around the base of the pole for support. When they finally got it stabilised (by putting more ballast on the opposite side from the wind), they crashed it down "to see what noise it will make". Then they repeated the activity but this time planted it in a purpose-made hole in the sandpit. They discovered that wetting the sand made it easier to bed the bottom of the pole in, and they now didn't need any pieces of wood around it.

The next day, the pole was used a lot for practicing climbing. Snowflake #1 contrived to climb up almost halfway, #2 not so high, and #3 had a go with the others holding her up. 

Later, it was down on the ground again, and I thought interest had waned, but no, a few days later it was resurrected as a seesaw. This wasn't quite a success, as the stick was too flexible and tended to bend rather than rock up and down, however, after a bit of trial and error, the snowflakes did manage to adjust the leverage to compensate for their different weights. We also planned how we could make a better seesaw.

Subjects unschooled: physics, engineering, physical education, strategic planning and teamwork.

Spring has sprung!

Although the warmer weather appears to have come and gone already, we had a lovely afternoon of Spring activities to celebrate the new month.  We cleaned off the Seasonal table, put Winter to bed and put out some beautiful bright Spring colours (thanks Grandma, I knew that bit of cloth would come in handy some time).

The snowflakes made egg carton bumble bees to feed on the Spring flowers that #1 had picked from the garden.

We read a book all about Spring, and learned about how Spring is different in each part of Australia, especially in the North where the traditional indigenous seasons are tied to various natural occurrences. We discussed how the earth's orbit and axial tilt cause the seasons. Then we did a practical demonstration using an orange (push a skewer through it to create an axis, then score with a knife or draw on the equator and Australia) and a lamp, after which the earth was eaten for afternoon tea.

 

We got out the oragami paper and made tulips to add to our Spring Table. We also listened to 'Spring' from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and watched a version of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (now #3 has decided she wants to learn ballet).