5 Days of Lunches

Big Button Numbers

Making extra-huge numbers with buttons on an abacus.

Picking the buttons is half the fun. Also super good fine motor work for little fingers.

745,357,263 Awesome!

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Everyday it looks like this...

Without fail every 'home' day at home school involves some reading. Often it's what we start our day with. Each reading our own, me reading to him, or him reading to me. Or all three.

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This week on the homeschool web...

I liked this article “Can you imagine them at school?”. I think her description is pretty apt... which is kind of weird to me because I'm not totally anti-school- weird paradox?

I'd like to try a Mystery box with Will and Tama, I think it would be fun!

Some natural material art inspiration.

I think we need a digging pit!

Free Science Experiments!

A bunch of links to places for learning online. I want to have a look at Khan Academy with Will.

I want to do the bird Collage in this post with Will and Tama- very cool.

Also cool is this Tree of Life Chart... so pretty and interesting.

Big Picture Science has a free downloadable Tree of Life Chart you can make yourself.

Spelling activity

I'm trying to do a spelling activity connected to Will's weekly words each day. A lot of them are fairly bland but this one was kind of fun. I love these old school letter cards. These were Les' but I had some too!

Magical Blocks

This is the last 24 hours at our place....

 We adopted these blocks into our family yesterday from their last family who had out grown them. These are International blocks- played with in South Africa and Perth by South Africans, Aussies and now Kiwis!  We got a super good deal for around 200 blocks- really really happy! 

Will started building a catapult with them in the five minutes we had at home after we dropped the blocks off and went to do the school/kindy run. Then he and Robert worked together to make a Theme park.

 Tama made the letter 'T'.

And then became a skip bin rubbish truck.

This morning  they worked on some more bits before they got dressed.

 And a dinosaur park after breakfast. They 'filmed' a narrated Dinosaur show after Kindy. With performances by the T-rex and Tricertops.

This afternoon it has become some sort of fantasy land which hides a number of precious Orbs which need to be hunted and found.

The only bad thing about these blocks is trying to get them to stop playing so they can eat or leave the house. :-) 

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This week on the homeschool web...

The lovable learning blog has some great ideas for Montessori inspired homeschooling.

Home grown books products are lovely!

The Montessori Child online store is Australian based.... yay!

Learn with play at home has some cool ideas. I'm keen to try cows and bulls with Will.

Designing with loose parts at Happy Crafty Family has a list of ideas for items to collect.

And some more cool physical resource ideas at Let the Children Play.

A great article about how we view socialisation.

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This week on the home school web...

I need to translate to Australian the ingredients for this Super Easy Gold Slime.

I need to do this visual schedule it will help both me and Will!

And taking note of these tips for highly sensitive parents will also be very helpful!

If you have a small person who you think may need speech therapy to articulate some sounds (as we do) then this is a handy article with the basics.

Book marking this Audio book I think Will might enjoy: George and the Big Bang

If you are an Australian Based Home Educator then HEN (Home Education Network) is a great resource- it's Victoria Based- but you don't have to be.

Decimal sets for making tens.

 Montessori Golf Tee Clock

Golden Decimal Beads

 Wooden miniatures - there's one for every letter of the alphabet- but I can imagine some other cool uses for them.

Fraction circle sets. 

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I think....

'Freedom to Think' should be our home school motto.

Image drawn by Chris Riddell from Freedom to Think website which is a super cool concept encouraging and sharing children's creativity.

The Expo

The Expo

On the weekend me Tama and Dad went to the WAHS reptile expo. At the start there were some questions. I think I got them all right. 

We got fairy floss and a sausage. 

Fairy Floss

Before we went inside we saw a show about venomous snakes there was a tiger snake and many more the show was cool.

 Blue Tongue Lizard

Then we went inside.

Then we went into the bugs’n’things tent my favourite part was holding the snakes and lizards. One of the snakes I held was a water python. The snake felt scaly, it was yellow and black. 

 

Bobtail Lizard

It was very fun at the expo. 

The end.

By Will

We're doing it again!

After a chat with Will's Occupational Therapist last week about her findings from Will's in-class observation we made the very easy decision to take him out of school and home-school him for the foreseeable future. Maybe only six months, maybe 2016 as well (with Tama) or maybe longer- we'll evaluate as we go along.

I should say from the outset we don't have a problem with our primary school at all, in fact I rather like it and will miss the people quite a bit. But what we believe is that Will's educational needs are not best met in a busy classroom full of children, noise and distraction. And because he has a mum at home who is a teacher- we may as well take advantage of that. The added bonus is that if we are homeschooling next year then Tama can join us which will be great as I don't think at four and a half he is ready for the full on academic programme in the West Australian pre-primary programme.

In comparison to New Zealand starting to home school in Western Australia is a breeze. We gave the Homeschool office a call and they emailed the registration form to me as well as the Curriculum documents I requested. I filled in the form (2 pages of basic details like address, birthday etc) and posted it back to them with a copy of Will's birth certificate.

In three months we can expect a visit from the homeschool moderator for our area. She will check out our programme and our progress.

The people I spoke to on the phone were positive and encouraging and they are available to help should I need it. The stark contrast to the New Zealand way of doing things is quite something!

That said it hasn't been without it's challenges. I have set up a skeleton curriculum in the space of 5 days and am working on fleshing it out now that I have done some assessments on Will and have a feel for where he is at. I gave away or sold all my very 'teachery' resources when we moved to WA something I am regretting a bit now- what I would give for the learning objective cheat sheets that I had- or even better the WA equivalent. I said last week that teaching is like riding a bike- I was wrong!! It's like trying to relearn a second language that I haven't spoken in quite a while. I am also trying to adapt my teaching style as I develop our curriculum as well. My personal views on education have changed a lot and I'd prefer to be quite unstructured in our days- but I can see that wouldn't be a good approach for Will.

Probably the biggest challenge will be the constant companionship- I was very much enjoying the 'kindy days' and will miss that space from the constant chatter!

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new blog

hi everyone I've got a new blog. the website is mereniassaddleclub.blogspot.com
i don't have many posts yet but you can still look at it soon it will be up and running hope you have agreat time looking at it.

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