The Brick House

As well as going along to the Hobart group we’ve been running our own group down here. We’ve not done as much in the way of organised activities as I was hoping in our group, but the kids have been amused and I’m not feeling quite so much like the paid facilitator as I was in the beginning, so it’s all good. These are from our local group.

Teaching Megan to play Kakapo Rescue

Building a cubby

Cleaning the hall after a meet

Baking

We haven’t been making it up to Hobart all that often, but we have done a few things, including organising a field trip to the radiotelescope observatory which was a great success.

Boardgames Day

Observatory

Electronics Workshop

Seeing as it’s been a while…

I’ve been cycling through periods of being more or less engaged and organised. I was very organised around the beginning of Autumn, where I got back into the seasonal units, K started a unit on the solar system, and I did a lot of thinking about where we were going. Then we had birthday parties and a big community event to organise and I slacked off again. I did get back into the seasonal stuff before Samhain, and we had a unit on fungi, including going on a magical fungi walk which the kids are still taking about.

We incorporated ANZAC Day into our Samhain celebrations again this year.

K marched with her Guides group in the local community ceremony. Who knows how much she is getting out of it all at her age?

I’ve been gearing up for Winter recently because if I don’t, the four kids stuck inside this house for months with nothing to do will drive me crazy. I’ve been getting back into organising things for the shelves, including making some file folder games and buying a few new manipulatives.

The robot beads are particularly popular, which of course translates to them ending up all over the fecking floor no matter how many times I tell them to pack them away *sigh* They were only cheap, but that’s not the bloody point!

Of course, even when I buy purpose-made manipulatives, they’re never quite as much fun as the box of random doodads I collected from the backs of drawers, down behind the sofa and in my jewellery box, etc.

My aim is to fill the box. I’ve thought of a couple of different activities to do with this, including Treasure Hunt cards where they have to find matching items, but also alphabet sorting (by their first sound), number sorting (finding groups of the same kind of item), etc. Then of course there’s just giving them a muffin tray and letting them decide how they’re going to sort it themselves.

K played guitar at her first concert this month, the end of term student concert organised by her guitar teacher and his wife. She’s also sung with Eric at an SCA feast. Clearly she takes after her Daddy!

But she also takes after her Mummy, and there’s now a question mark over which of us is the biggest bookworm in the house. K is churning through at least one book every couple of days. She currently has three on the go. And she may have a challenger coming up behind her: H wrote out the alphabet the other day and can form all the letters perfectly legibly despite no one ever sitting down and showing him how to.

There is of course more to write. I read back over entries from a couple of years ago and it was really lovely to have that insight into our daily life, most of which I had completely forgotten about. So I’m going to try to get back to recording our day to day lives a bit more here. I’ve moved towards keeping my Flickr account as a record of what we get up to (for us and the grandparents), which is fine so long as it’s photogenic, but when it isn’t caught on camera I’d like to catch it here a bit more often.

I’ve instituted Themed Thursdays as part of the “organise stuff to do so we don’t go crazy stuck inside over winter” push I’ve been on lately. The idea is, basically, to pick a topic and pull out books, toys and activities related to the topic. The first one we did was monsters, which was very successful and spilled across the next couple of days too. The second one was castles, which wasn’t as much of an ongoing success but was still fun.

Monster Day – craft

Monster Stew

Castle Day activities

Knights on the battlements

I do need to remember that all this preparation is just there to provide a framework so that when they get bored, there is something to do, rather than have the expectation that we will all sit round the table and work through all the stuff I’ve put out so I can take photos of our productive homeschooling experience. You’d think after 9 years of homeschooling I’d get that by now, but apparently not… This week we will be doing flower fairies.

Got out the door by about 10:30am for HIP, which wasn’t bad. Still arrived later than we might have done, because H was so irredeemably aggravating that I kept having to pull the car to the side of the road to shout at him. Eventually something got through to his 3yo brain and he sat quietly…for a whole five minutes. Grah. There were the usual personality clashes at HIP, so it was a relief that Mr Bat was going to follow (in Dylan’s car) once he had done a solid hour’s work at home without kidstractions, and pick up H to bear him off to Kingston in search of shoes. H went off with Daddy at 12:15, and the rest of us lasted til 1pm, when the kid-pack could not be deterred from harassing the hen and chicks so we decided it was probably time to leave. It was very sad to say goodbye to Jo and Kai, since it’s their last week here. We did offer to have Kai down at the farm for a few hours if they need space for packing through, so we might see them again before they leave.

K brought the blocks out into the learning room after lunch and got involved in building cities with C and later H. Both K and H played Poisson Rouge. Then K went blackberry picking for at least an hour in the northern paddock with D, while H and I read books together, he futzed around on the computer, helped me with the laundry, and we started doing a stickerbook together. D and K came back and went out again with H and they were out for at least 45 minutes. Very peaceful! Later on, it got less so, so I retreated with my two to my room, and H and I finished the stickerbook while K did her Four Seasons puzzle again, and got nearly halfway through with just a few suggestions about how to sort the pieces to make it easier for her.