THEAC Monitoring Visit

We had our first homeschool monitoring visit today and... it went really well! We had a lovely THEAC rep who homeschooled 5 children herself and is very supportive of natural learning. We had a chat about what we have been doing and I showed her Shmoo's work samples (random writing and art samples plus lapbook projects); his weather recording folder and graphs; our homeschooling photo album; unit study checklists; and our term 1 progress report.

She loved all of what we showed her and said that she knew that the council would be 'very impressed' with what we've done. So, yay! Such a relief! I was pretty sure we'd be okay but it's just nice to know that we're doing alright because sometimes I feel like I'm just not doing enough, you know? Especially since we've dropped a lot of the workbooks as it just wasn't working for Shmoo.

We're officially approved homeschoolers!

[Although, I had one of those frazzled moments at first as the Bean was screaming the whole time because he's at that separation anxiety stage and objects to strangers in his home and then Shmoo refused to say hello and hid behind the curtain in his bedroom for the first 10 minutes. Gotta love 'em LOL.]

Home Ed Friends

We had a playdate today with the lovely Allana and her gorgeous daughter. The kids had a great time chasing each other around, bouncing on the trampoline and playing with the kittens.

Allana made some funky trousers for Shmoo and Look so will have to get the boys to model them and post some pics!

Wings Wildlife Park

Our friends, L & P with their kids J (2) & D(9m), from Launnie were holidaying in the area for Easter so we met up with them at Wings Wildlife Park today...

  

Dinosaur Egg Fossils

We bought a couple of dinosaur egg 'fossils' from the QVMAG shop yesterday so that the boys could pretend to be paleontologists.

Lesson #1: Paleontology is definitely not an indoor activity.

Lesson #2: My 4 & 5 year olds do not have the patience or strength to be paleontologists.

Banging the eggs together to crack them didn't work but a little assistance from Daddy armed with a screwdriver made the exercise a little shorter. Revealing... a triceratops!

Lesson #3: Screwdrivers and paleontology do not mix... Oops, a double amputee, beheaded Seismosaurus.

Superglue fixes everything!

QVMAG

Today we went to the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston.

The perception tunnel. Very cool. The bridge is perfectly stable and still but the tunnel around it moves and makes you feel like you're swaying from side to side.

   

The boys loved the old diesel train.

There was also a dinosaur eggs & babies exhibit on but it was $15 (the other stuff was free) and it was the same exhibit that we visited at the Imaginarium last year (which I could have sworn I blogged about but stuffed if I can find it!). Anyway, instead of redoing the same exhibit we just got some extra dinosaur stuff from the gift shop :)

Homeschool Monitoring Visit

Our 1st homeschool monitoring visit with the THEAC representative has been scheduled - Thursday, 28th April!

All In a Day's Work

Measurement.

Using 10m of string marked @ 1m intervals to measure out the tallest and longest dinosaurs.

Argentinosaurus was about 40m long - from our front fence all the way up our driveway to halfway along our shed.

 

Geography (checking out a new book)... This is Turkey. Not the kind that says 'gobble gobble'. Hmm and where is that on the big map?

  

Taking apart a broken set of scales. This covered lots of areas from weight to skip counting, to literacy ("Look Mama, a capital 'A'"!), to music.

But, most of all, they just had fun

Getting Better

• Loo is looking much better thankfully. Still a bit sore but healing up nicely.
• Shmoo's reading skills continue to impress me. He asked to read the book 'Hist' by CJ Dennis the other day and when we sat down with it he read most of it by himself, needing very little help.
• Yesterday we went to our homeschool group's 'playgroup in the park' and the kids had so much fun. The Bean loved stalking seagulls and trying to eat gumnuts and it was great to see Shmoo & Loo becoming more comfortable with approaching other kids.
• Today Shmoo and I sat down and tallied up some of the data that he's collected through his weather observations and drew up some bar graphs. We had 437.5 mm of rain in January alone! Impressive!