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!

Split-Pin Dinosaurs

Today we made these Split-pin dinosaurs...

When the OH got home Shmoo excitedly showed him our dinosaurs and told him that the Velociraptor was for Beanie but we couldn't let Beanie actually play with it because he might eat the "little, sharp, pointy things" that we used to hold the pieces together. I asked Shmoo if he remembered what those pointy things were called. He hesitated for the barest second before confidently replying "Boobs!". Erm, I think he meant 'brads' LOL.

Birthday Photos

Loo's 4th birthday...


Lots of pressies - clothes and battery operated toys from the rellies; puzzles and pencils from mama and daddy; and fossils and a dinosaur book from Trevor & Tina.

As per Loo's request - a strawberry dinosaur cake with 'sparkly sticks'. And it was a day for special treats... strawberry gelato. Also, jelly cups with dinosaur sweets (he's a little obsessed with dinosaurs!).

 

Then we took advantage of our first sunny day in a long time. Playing outside with the baby kitties.

Helping Daddy in the garden and building things.

THEAC

People keep telling us how relaxed the Tasmanian Home Education Advisory Council is regarding registration but it still surprises me that we haven't heard back from them yet. Still waiting for them to get back in contact with us to give us a date for our first monitoring visit which is supposed to occur sometime in March (and it's now nearing the end of March!). I've been nervous all month waiting for that letter LOL. I suppose I should just be grateful that they don't make it difficult for homeschoolers like the boards do in some other states, huh?

Am still trying to find the method of record keeping that suits us. Having spoken to other Tas homeschoolers, it's good to know (once again) how relaxed THEAC is about all this. At the moment I'm just keeping samples of Shmoo's work, a list of library books we've borrowed, a photo album of education-related photos, and checklists of the completed components of our unit studies. Am pretty sure this will be satisfactory for THEAC.

All the time I'm having to adjust my expectations of this homeschooling thing... the expectations I have of Shmoo. We've ended up taking more of a natural learning approach than I expected, because that's what works better for Shmoo. At the same time, the unit studies approach has been working well too... I choose a something that the kids have been really into lately, load up on subject-related library books, loosely plan some fun activities and 'excursions' and we take it from there. They've been really enthusiastic about the themes so far (and the next theme is dinosaurs - they loooove dinosaurs, particularly Loo who will be having a dinosaur birthday on Friday!). Anyway, whatever we're doing, so far it's working well!

Autumn Equinox

We were trying to come up with some last minute, budget-friendly (free!) things for the boys to do for the autumn equinox.

I cut some vellum to fit around some old glass jars and then Shmoo and Loo used it to do leaf rubbings (love the Stockmar block crayons... such gorgeous colours and so nice to work with). Of course, once again I forgot to take photos of them doing it.. Shmoo's is on the left, then Loo's, then the Bean's (I did Beanie's for him - he's still at the age where he just wants to eat or rip everything!).

Popped a tealight in each one and we had them on the table during dinner. We were also going to scrounge around for some change to buy some marshmallows to toast over a fire but the weather hasn't been cooperating so we might do that for the winter solstice instead.

Reading

My boys amaze me all the time with how much they are learning... and most of the time I don't even realise just how much they are learning! Loo** has made a great start with phonics and is starting to sound out written words. We've been reading a page a day out of Kingdom of the Sun, a gorgeous book about the planets that we borrowed from the library, and today Loo spontaneously sounded out the word 'Mars' and eagerly asked for more words to read.

**I can't believe he turns four in just over a week! Four!!

Moon Biscuits and Other Things

Shmoo has certainly learned the names of all the planets much quicker than I expected him to.

Shmoo and Loo's moon phase shaped biscuits.

Leaf rubbing.

Moon, Moon, Shiny and Silver...

Making the different phases of the moon - wrapping cardstock cutouts in foil. We were originally going to glue little bits of foil on to the cutouts but it seems that foil does not like to stick to paper.

The end result: new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full moon, waning gibbous, second quarter and waning crescent.

Our phases of the moon hanging up.

 

Tonight we used the telescope, borrowed from the Launceston Planetarium, to have a look at the moon. (It's handy having an astronomer friend!)

And this is what we were looking at (I had to flip the image as it was reflected upside down in the telescope). Pretty cool, huh?! Shmoo correctly identified it as a waxing gibbous moon ("do, do, do the waxing gibbous. The waxing gibbous!"... as in The Funky Gibbon? Surely my kids aren't the only ones who are obsessed with The Goodies?!).