Wombat Season June 2016

It's been exactly a year since our dear little Sniff left us bereft.  Facebook keeps reminding me of that awful, uncertain time.  Will she pull through? Should we let her go?  Horrible decisions to make but in the end, a relief both for her and us.  Two weeks later Teo joined us.  He proved a tough one to get to know but now, nearly a year later, he has blossomed into a loving furry family member.

ANZAC day at Flinders Dog Beach

While we're at the beach here are some more pics, just coz.

sisters

P and Me and a sneaky photo bomber

It's been a busy 6 months.  P continues to impart his wisdom to adoring Catholic girls, The Snork Maiden is establishing herself as the Go-To Girl at her school, Moomintroll has been enjoying freedom and independence from me with her friends and grandparents and now speaks another language, and I have just completed my Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care.  Life has been a rollercoaster of emotion and mayhem!
Now it's Wombat Season - cold, rainy and wet. I am ready for my annual hibernation to begin.

Other events that have occurred over the past year:

1. Our cracked concrete driveway has finally been replaced with spiffy new Daybreak exposed aggregate,
2. The Snork Maiden debuted on stage as Duck in Utassy's Peter and the Wolf,
3. P and I dressed up onstage as elegant orchestra performers in Croydon Player's production of My Fair Lady,
4. Moomintroll began gymnastics classes,
5. Girls night out at AAMI Park to see Taylor Swift,
6. The Snork Maiden played at Hamer Hall with Eastern Region Schools "Music of the Masters" concert,
7. The annual Mt Beauty holiday,
8. Just Brass rehearsals and concerts and the birth of Genesis Brass,

Still to come in the next few weeks: The Snork Maiden's ballet exam results, Moomintroll's ballet exam,  the results from this year's Peter and the Wolf auditions, Term 3 school holidays!! and the launch of The Brian Street Learning Centre's Winter program - Winter Games and Movie Marathon Madness. Other home edders welcome to apply and join us.  BYO pj's and snacks!

November already?

Ok so where did the year go?  One day it's the middle of term 2 and suddenly now it's the middle of term 4! I'm certainly not going to rehash every single thing Moomintroll and I have done since April. Just believe me when I say we're on track and learning every day, blah, blah, blah...
Right now she's on a filming kick. She uses Video Star non stop. As part of her English work she's been learning some Edward Lear poetry - so far she has The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat, and The Table and The Chair down pat.  Her challenge was to present one of the poems somehow. She chose to make marionette style puppets and put on a show using the set she made in January at our ballet school's summer school.
I now present to you The Table and The Chair by Edward Lear.
Narrated by Moomintroll.
Puppeteer 1 - Moomintroll,
Puppeteer 2/camera operator - Moominmamma,
Set design - Moomintroll and Moominmamma.

Term 2 - Weeks 1 to 3

The past weeks have flown by so quickly that I've forgotten a lot of what Moomintroll and I have been up to. Thank goodness for the camera!
After our wonderful holiday in Indonesia it took us a while to get back to work. In fact it took us a whole week! But we're back on track now and after looking at the photos I am happy to see that we've actually done quite a bit.
Here's a summary:

Moomintroll's current passion is drawing and this is her new toy - Opa's old drawing board from his workdays.  She loves drawing on it and we've begun learning about technical drawing and design. I just wish we could fit in inside the house! Many hours are also spent on Minecraft and SketchUp creating buildings and homes.

Her first attempt at perspective drawing came out quite well. We followed a tutorial on this blog.
We also finally finished our Art in a Box. The items for this creation were collected on one of our geography walks last term. We painted them and the box with white paint, arranged them, then glued them onto the box.

Kitchen Chemistry 1.  Using vinegar and bicarbonate of soda we did the Dancing Raisins and Grapes experiment, then blew up balloons with varying amounts of vinegar and bicarb. We also did the Mentos in a Coke bottle experiment, much to the delight of Sniff who happily licked up the mess.

Kitchen Chemistry 2 - making a rubbery egg by soaking an egg in vinegar overnight.

Kitchen Chemistry 3 - Changing States of Matter.  Using resources such as Backyard Science, Study Jams, The Magic Schoolbus and Education.com  we investigated how matter changes. Here we watched ice melting - one cube covered in salt (below right), the other just left alone (our control).  Moomintroll was blown away to see the salted ice melting almost twice as fast as the control cube.

More chemistry. The best kind - the edible kind!  Making molecules with gum drops. Other edible experiments included baking bread and several chocolate cakes and brownies. All in the name of research of course!

Kinetic sand is getting a good workout this week. We finally took the plunge and mixed up the colours but not before making a few colourful mountains.  Kinetic sand is great fun and so versatile - art and maths in one session!

ANZAC Day was last week - we headed into the city to Fed Square to see the thousands of poppies on display to commemorate 100 years since the Gallipoli Landing, and in the Follow the Flag exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre we added a poppy each to remember the girls' Great Great Grandfather.

Moomintroll is reading a Nancy Drew mystery, Danny the Champion of the World, and Awful Auntie this week. I am reading another wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver called Flight Behaviour.  I can't get enough of her books!

Weeks 7 & 8

The past two weeks have been all about sleeping and resting with the two girls both sick and feeling miserable.  The Snork Maiden stayed home from school for two days with a bad cold and fever, and once she was well enough to go back to school Moomintroll's cold took off and has ended up having a mild case of tonsilitis.  Happily now she's on antibiotics and is improving daily which is wonderful seeing as we leave for overseas tomorrow!  We're finally off on our long awaited Indonesian Adventure. Sniff and Hazel have gone off to their holiday homes and we're ready to go. One more sleep!

Despite all the sickness in the house we did manage to do some work. Moomintroll still has a thing for poems and is loving part of The Wind in the Willows which we call Toad's Song. It's the bit where Toad has just escaped from jail, stolen and sold a horse and is feeling very full of himself. Moomintroll can recite it by heart and now is carefully writing it out in her english book.
Our science theme for the week was deserts so we watched TMS All Dried Up and Eyewitness Desert which led to watching 'the making of' and then Eyewitness Arctic/Antarctic because, you know, the Antarctic is the world's largest desert as Moomintroll reminded me. Other desert related work included word searches, research on 3 desert animals, a desert poster, making a cacti garden and a trip to the zoo to see the gila monster and other beautiful desert dwelling reptiles.

cactus garden

a happy little desert dweller

science and maths work for the week

To finish off our term of maths Moomintroll did some word problems about the exploits of some fierce ninjas and a librarian with a pile of books, and did a little times table test which she handled very well.  She then went on to demonstrate her understanding of arrays by building an amazing underground house with interconnecting rooms in Minecraft.

By the end of the week both girls were feeling fit enough for their Just Brass end of term concert where they performed a duet together of Bengawan Solo (the same piece we played at Opa's 80th party). At the concert Dr Jim accompanied them on the piano.

Weeks 5&6

The Labour Day long weekend was so lovely and relaxing that I forgot to do my usual Sunday night wrap up of the week. Then yesterday P and I were in Bendigo for the day with band, sharing the spotlight with the local schools band in an afternoon concert.  It went pretty well despite the poor turnout. A band concert just can't compete with a sunny Sunday afternoon Collingwood vs Carlton clash at the nearby footy oval.

Week 5:
After a morning doing our usual maths, science and english, Moomintroll and I had our travel vaccinations, which led to another science lesson on vaccines and how they work.  All went well with no side effects, just tender arms for a day or so.
Our English work this week was learning antonyms and synonyms using various sheets from Education.com.
The rainforest was our science theme. Moomintroll made a comic called Into the Rainforest. Instead of finding pictures of animals on the web she decided to dress up as the animals herself and I took pictures of her climbing trees and eating frogs.

impersonating a coatimundi climbing a tree

  She also did word searches, word scrambles, and watched our Eyewitness episode on Jungles/Rainforests. After that episode she watched the 'making of 'episode and got quite interested in that. We may have to find an online computer animation course for her soon.
Maths continued as always with tables practice using various games and songs. I introduced the concept of factors to her. It took a little while to understand but she's slowly getting it. It's great to see when a connection is made; those "Aaah!" moments are priceless.  We use Loot the Pirate Ship and various worksheets to practice factors.
Art was fun this week. We made Before and After pictures using collage, painting and pastels techniques. I found the Before pictures at Dover Samplers.

She also used the same techniques to make birthday cards for K and cousin H.

To finish off the week's work we combined English, Geography and Science by writing a report on our visit to The Rainforest Gallery near Warburton.

Week 6:
A shorter week than usual due to the Labour Day holiday. We spent the afternoon at the wave pool where we all practiced swimming laps and riding the waves.
Coincidentally our science theme this week was water based - Coral reefs and Tidal zones. We watched TMS Takes a Dive and TMS goes to Mussel Beach. We reminisced about our holiday on Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, searched for images of plankton and barnacles, watched Eyewitness Oceans and other plankton videos.

 barnacle pop up page 

pretty plankton

She also did  many word searches on different habitats and made her own wordsearches using a blank grid.
I gave Moomintroll her first spelling test based on science words we've learnt over the weeks. She got 11/15 - a great result considering I didn't give her any time to revise!
We took a lovely walk at Wombat Bend along the river. Unfortunately the camera battery died so we didn't get any pictures but we saw many birds - cockatoos, magpies, lorikeets, kookaburras, fairy wrens and many others we couldn't see but heard.
Maths consisted of practical shopping maths; she wrote down on paper everything we put in the trolley then added it all up. She's getting the hang of carrying the tens now.
A swimming lesson and Club with K topped off a fun week before we all succumbed to the dreaded lurgy - sore ears, coughs, runny noses and headaches.  Right now the Snork Maiden is missing school for the first time this term, feeling miserable and achy. Poor Dr P soldiered on to school this morning - hopefully he's managing a bit better today.

Week 4 - Bed School

Most of this week was spent doing Bed School, after Moomintroll was stung on the ankle by a bee. Usually when she gets stung it's sore for a few hours and nothing more, but this time her body began building up an immunity to bee stings. For almost 5 days she was in real pain with a hot, itchy swollen ankle. It reminded me of my swollen ankles in the last months of pregnancy!  Hopefully the next time she gets stung (and she will - she always does!) the reaction will be minimal. Well, that's what this article says anyway and it seems like the author knows what they are talking about.

Anyway, Bed School was quite fun. We arranged ourselves on Moomin's bed with pillows and blankets and worked our way through some reading comprehension sheets following the story of Jason and his appearance on a tv game show, grammar sheets and some maths sheets on arrays.  Our multiplication facts method is showing some good results now. By the end of this week Moomintroll was able to fill in another multiplication grid without too many hesitations and without using the red pen (meaning that none of the facts were considered 'sticky' anymore. Yay!). She even survived a grilling from her Auntie with a smile on her face :)
Multiplication.com continues to be our favourite site. The short stories and mnemonics work very well for Moomintroll's visual/aural style of learning.

The Magic Schoolbus episode this week wasn't as engaging as previous weeks. The topic was Urban Wildlife. She watched the episode twice, filled in the sheet and found some short videos on Splash and that was as far as we took it.  

We finally finished Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy. It happened as we sat nestled on the couch out on the deck during a rainstorm. Very atmospheric and really added to the excitement of the book's ending. We're sad it's come to an end.  Moomintroll spent most of the week thinking about a design for a book related T shirt and on Friday this is what she came up with.

Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy T shirt

A swimming lesson, 'Club' with best friend K, a spontaneous trip to the Eureka Skydeck, a successful school swimming sports for The Snork Maiden, a family BBQ at school, dinner out at an Indonesian restaurant and a lovely 80th birthday celebration for our dear Opa finished off another whirlwind week!

view of St Paul's from Skydeck

Flinders Street Station

Week 3

We started our week with a girls night out at Etihad Stadium to see these five lovely boys:

It was so much fun and the atmosphere was terrific! An amazing night out with lots of singing and screaming. All three of us needed Slushies from 7 Eleven afterwards to soothe our throats.

Monday started slowly after our big night out. We began with the next episode of The Magic Schoolbus - The Magic Schoolbus Gets Swamped.  As you can guess it was about swamps and wetlands and how important they are as habitats and as a natural flood control.  The video led on to watching other videos about wetlands on ABC Splash and Study Jams. Moomintroll's interest was piqued by more related videos on Study Jams so we then learned about Biomes. Happily the pdf I had bought on Teachers Pay Teachers had some interactive notebook pages on all the different biomes on Earth.  This pdf is really handy and well worth the $20. Moomintroll seems to enjoy filling in the foldables and decorating them, and I get a kick out of doing all the cutting and pasting. Everybody wins!

I bought another pdf as well for maths and we've been using the printables in Moomintroll's maths notebook to reinforce her times tables work as well as introduce the concept of division and inverse operations.  So far so good.

For our weekly Geography walk we visited The Domain Wetlands in nearby Templestowe. Here we also did a little science experiment which involved observing the wetland habitat, collecting pond water for our Pond in a Jar (from 365 Science Experiments) and getting wet, soggy shoes.  Moomintroll is the photographer on our walks and she does a great job of cropping and enhancing her pictures once we get home.

Manna Gums

young curious kangaroo

wetlands

wetlands

pretty plant

Pond in a Jar

weird burnt tree

Mullum Mullum Creek

In my quest for a more exciting English curriculum I have subscribed to Education.com.  This site has a wealth of information on all topics for all year levels and Moonintroll really seems to enjoy these as well.  This week she did a reading/comprehension exercise on The Happy Prince,  read and analyzed Jabberwocky, and learned about contractions (the grammar kind, not the other kind!).
Books we're reading are still the same as last week - Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy, various Mr Men books, Wind in the Willows.

Both girls are continuing with Just Brass this year.  They are working on Thriller at the moment!

The Snork Maiden had another happy week at school. She aced her English test, did heaps of maths homework and found a new friend to walk home with who lives just 2 streets away!