An uninvited guest

This beautiful but very stressed out kookaburra became stuck on our deck one morning. I'm glad the dogs were indoors at that time or it could have ended badly for the kookaburra!

There must be a nest nearby because we hear them everyday now somewhere over our back fence.

Some other strange looking people showed up too, and they were wearing my clothes! The sad thing is that the clothes looked better on them than on me.  P's wardrobe got raided as well.

I remember dressing up like this when I was young and loving the feeling it gave me. I particularly liked dressing up as an old man with a pipe.  Looking back I don't know why I enjoyed it so.  Why do kids want to grow up so fast?

The girls have been accompanying us to The Sound Of Music rehearsals. It's nice to hear them singing along while we play. Last Sunday they discovered that if they stayed in the kitchen after our tea break instead of coming back to the rehearsal room, they get to polish off all the yummy snacks!

On Saturday while I was having forty winks, the girls busied themselves finishing off the canvasses they'd been working on over the past weeks.  Much laughing and giggling and whispering went on just outside my bedroom window and here are the final masterpieces which are hanging in our entranceway:

H's painting

R's painting

Yesterday saw the inaugural and highly anticipated meeting of the Sewing Club. As I've never attempted to teach other people's kids how to sew, we made sure the club was small (3 girls) to begin with. As I reflect on the experience I have decided that the club is more than big enough!
The girls began making notepad/pencil rolls and they did pretty well considering they had little handsewing experience.

Funny how they all picked the same way to decorate the outside...
Our next meeting should see them finishing off their rolls.

August 9 - 24

I've had  a few questions over the last weeks about homeschooling from various people - why? what about testing? will we send them to high school?
I find it very hard to explain without coming over all airy-fairy or defensive because homeschooling is such an integral part of our lives.  It comes naturally to us, as naturally as breathing and eating. We don't question how or why we do those things, we just do them.  It's the same with education - in a rich environment and with gentle guidance, it just happens.
P and I want our girls to grow up to be self aware, self confident and in charge of their lives.  By allowing them to choose what they want to learn and when and where they want to learn it -  free from coercion and pressure, we believe that they will become the people we hope them to be. In their own time.

 Here are some pics from our day today.

Yesterday we set up this experiment: to see what effect food colouring has on white flowers.

This morning, the flowers were red,

blue,

and yellow.  Then we put the red and yellow flowers into the blue water, and the blue flowers into the red water, and waited a few more hours.  There was no change in colour for  the flowers placed in green water.

While waiting for the flowers to change colour, we did some reading. Building words with R...

.. lost in Harry Potter's world.

concentrating on Headsprout whilst eating an orange.

Eventually a change in colour!  The yellow flowers became orange,

and the red ones turned purple. Success!

 As for testing and high school, we see no real value in placing kids in a stressful position to find out what they know. If they know it, and they know they know it, and we can see that they know it, why test them? And that's the great thing about home educating - every day we see them growing and learning and applying new skills.  Why on earth would we want to send them away every day for 8 hours and miss out on that? And who would do the lunchtime dishes??

July 25 - August 8

A few shots of life around here lately that I have forgotten to post:

Firstly a day out at Bundoora Park where H had a pony ride.

The closest R will come to having a pony ride:

I made friends with a very beautiful goat

Two sleepy and loving cousins having a sleepover

Permai had it's long anticipated performances of Wayang Kancil on the 29th August.  The day went brilliantly and each performance was different and exciting to be in.  I didn't take any pics as we were all too busy getting dressed and getting nervous! But I did find this one here of Pak Eddy in action:

We were filmed by Channel 31 and appeared on the Indonesian television show Nusantara last Sunday, and once I work out how to copy it I'll post it here.

Yesterday we visited Station Pier in Port Melbourne to see the Navy ships. We boarded the HMAS Perth
and were led around through the ship by the many friendly navy people.  It was an eyeopening experience for all of us and we even remembered to use our extensive Latin vocab over and over again - "Sum nauta." (I am a sailor.)

The girls worked a little more on their Periodic Table colouring book today which led to H doing some further research on Helium.  This is her glog.