Homeschool snapshot-embroidery

Thanks to a lovely friend dropping off a stitch book and a whole container of threads!

Tie-dyeing for little ones

While I let my kids tie-dye with real dyes occasionally, it’s a bit of a nightmare. This is much easier, and a good activity for a group of young kids.

Needed-food dyes and paper towel. You can get recycled, biodegradable paper towel now, which can be composted when you’re done with it.

Mix up the food dyes with water in bowls. Make the colours fairly strong, you want them to pop.

Give the kids a sheet of towel and explain that how you fold the paper affects the pattern of the dye. Suggest they try squares, triangles, crumpled balls and any other origami they can think of. When they’re happy with their fold get them to dip one corner/edge in their chosen colour-it will wick up the paper towel reasonably fast, so emphasise that they’ll only need to hold it there for a few seconds. Then remove, shake, and put another corner/edge in a different colour, as many times as you can-usually only three.

Unfold and see what pattern has appeared! Repeat until you run out of towel, most likely. Once dry use for other crafts and play-wrapping small presents, cutting and pasting shapes, mosaics, over-drawing pictures based on dye shapes etc etc.

 

You can also try ‘dyeing’ paper. This is blank newsprint our neighbour gave us, and the result of using straws to add then blow the dye around. It was used as wrapping paper for birthday presents.

  

Best of all? It all washes off straightaway. No blue cheek like my Frosty has at present.

Native Bees and other ramblings.

Native bees were always something we wanted to get, and luckily for us when we bought this place there was already a hive here-I think they're trigonia carbonaria. You don't get any honey from these little guys (well, you can, but it's in very small amounts and quite difficult to get, but apparently the taste is fantastic) but they are absolutely fantastic pollinators. And they don't sting, but do bite, as the husband discovered when he went to have a poke around in their hive, and got a headful of them in his very thick, very black hair.

They spend much of their time on the perennial basil, but as you can see above they're also partial to the kids portaluca. For those who know the plant yes the bees are tiny compared to honeybees, and miniscule compared to bumblebees-about 4mm long.

AussieBee are a great resource and also sell hives.

AND..........i've just stumbled across what looks to be an good homeschooling blog, Camp Creek Blog.  I've been mostly devouring Montessori resources lately so this is refreshing, and still my style.

It also seems i'm not the only one having a busyness hissy fit, it's a common theme-check out here and here. I'm feeling much better already, and think I understand deschooling perfectly now. I'm deworking myself. I've found myself slobbing around reading chicklit and lots of otherwise aimless stuff, but my mojo is beginning to show signs of reappearing. I have strictly shut myself up whenever i've started to berate myself for not jumping straight into all the personal projects I wanted to do, and just done whatever i've felt like. It's working!

But I did make this

A crocheted headband to celebrate getting my old 'do back again.

And I really need to stop rambling now-this was only supposed to be about the bees!

Ha! Dream on lady!

One of R’s therapies is provided by a visiting person at the school instead of home because we live out of town. At his last appointment a few weeks ago the principal came to say hello, assuming that Master R would become a student in her special ed class in two years. The rest of the kids were out playing with dad in the playground, and of course she wondered when they would be coming to school. Homeschooling, said I. Oh, said she, and it was pretty plain that she sees homeschooling as a funny little indulgence, and one that i’d get over pretty quickly when I saw how fantastic the school was. As if walls full of cookie-cutter art could somehow convince me. I declined her invitation for a tour and she went back to work. That’s about the last I thought of it.

I received an interesting thing in my postbox last week-three sets of enrolment forms and an information pack from my local primary school, assumedly for the three school age girls. Interesting because I didn’t actually request it. Interesting because I made it rather clear that I wasn’t interested in sending them to school. And so all up it was rather bloody offensive. The husband was spitting chips, it took a while for the steam to stop coming out of his ears.

So I did the only sensible thing-took all the forms in and informed them politely but firmly that I had not filled them out and was returning them because I didn’t require them now, or anytime in the future. The secretary knew who I was from the names on the envelope, so there’s obviously been some gossip about the poor misguided homeschoolers.

Hopefully that is the last I hear from them, but I suspect not. However, if they think they’re going to have an easy time of getting my kids into their school they’re going to get a nasty shock-they’re not having them. Unfortunately for them I am one of the most stubborn, contrary people they’re likely to come across!

Desk, schmesk

Who needs a desk and a uniform when you have the great outdoors, your bikini and gumboots?

Homeschool snapshot

Building cities according to the number in the square-they took this idea and ran with it, drawing their own complex little places with flowerbeds and fairies!

Homeschool Snapshot

Making volcanoes and blowing up balloons with bicarb and vinegar.

Science mania

We went to a Questacon 'do here at the library the other day, and science is the new obsession of the house. The kids all had a ball, it's well worth going to one if you get the chance. Am not happy I didn't know about it when we were in Canberra last year!

Science of course, means experiments. This was a nice easy one to do with young kids.
The bottom is treacle, middle is coloured water and the top is vegetable oil. If you put it in in the order treacle-oil-water you get a better result as you can see the layers seperate. We then dropped in some Lego (which you can see), a marble, a frozen pea, and numerous pieces of pasta (numerous because Shorty kept dropping the ones he wanted to eat in there, forgetting he couldn't retrieve them.) They sat on different levels so we could have a good chat about weight and density, which has carried over to then talking about floating/sinking in the bath and sink.

My little genius

Tonight, the kids wanted a mint leaf each-the horrible things were still hanging around in the fridge from my birthday cake. So D pulled the bag out and there were three left. 'OK' he said to the kids, sitting them on the bench. 'There's two of us parents and four of you kids-how will we share three mint leaves?' With barely a second's hesitation Gabrielle replied 'Chop them in half and then there'll be six!' I am so impressed-she's two months shy of five years and this is about the fifth example she's given us of being able to work out fractions. She can do basic addition and subtraction, and even added up 8+4 the other day-in her head, no fingers or manipulatives required.

The bit that impresses me the most is that no-one has ever sat down with her and attempted to teach her maths. Never. We do a lot of cooking with all its half and quarter cups, and we talk about maths we encounter (like adding up all the bits of fruit we have, or dividing up items so everyone in the family gets some), but that's about it. But they just seem to absorb everything intuitively, process it all then apply it properly-they don't need to be 'taught' in the conventional way, simply exposing them to lots of different things really does do the trick.

I was so dismissive of unschooling to begin with. How on earth could simply being give you an education? Don't you need textbooks and tests, rote learning and spelling lists, and experts to tell you what you 'should' be learning at each stage? But since deciding to try unschooling (after all, they're so young that if it all fell apart it wasn't going to put them behind-they're still not supposed to be at school) i've gained a lot of confidence in it. Kids really do just learn massive amounts from being given quality items and experiences and some basic guidance and explanation-and what's better, it's all retained. They want to learn it so they do, and because they're applying the knowledge in a practical way it sticks with them. It's given me lots to think about in relation to my own education, but i'll save that one for another day. For now i'll just continue to wallow in pride at what my kids can do :D

My Homeschooling Epiphany

Like most people, when first faced with homeschooling I thought eek! Why would you want to do that!? But after a few more years parenting and a lot of reading i'm sold on the idea.

The biggest thing so far has been the mindshift needed-and I think even a lot of homeschoolers don't make that mindshift. Namely, homeschool doesn't have to be anything like school, and that's the beauty of it. I like to be prepared, so even when my eldest was three I was looking around, trying to work out what people were doing with their kids, what curriculum to use, what they 'had' to learn by each age by going to the state education websites.

And one day it clicked-I want to homeschool to provide my children with a different education. I think most schools fall far short of what they could achieve in terms of depth and breadth of education, simply because they are limited by how they are set up. We don't have those limits, so why impose them on ourselves? Why give ourselves the same goals of say, Australian history in Grade 4? Homeschooling allows us the total freedom to introduce whatever concepts and areas we and the kids want at the time we want in the way we want. We don't have to work to a strict schedule, we can take advantage of times of interest and teachable moments and build on it. I can introduce things that schools just don't really-good quality literature is the best example.

We're not restricted to skimming over piles of subjects to give children a 'taste' of everything, with no time to stop and explore more-if they like it, they can immerse themselves in it. If they're loving something, they don't have to stop just because the bell rings, and if they're really hating something, we can put it aside for another day when the mood is better. On a larger scale, they're not limited to a few weeks of one area, the same as they're not forced to do anything they're not ready for. I do think this will avoid the typical 'hates'-'I hate maths' usually translates to 'I had a lot of trouble/needed more help/was behind so i've learnt maths is nothing but a chore'. And education isn't something that you just do at school-it's lifelong and fun.

It's working beautifully so far-we don't push anything but they have such a thirst for knowledge that we don't have to. They want to learn about everything, even at their young ages. Even after only about a year of making a conscious effort to provide a rich environment for them and put lots of educational things in their path for them to take up if they like, ignore if they like, they have learnt so much.

I'm convinced!