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.

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!

Week 2

We had a quiet week last week with The Snork Maiden going away on her year 7 camp.  Moomintroll really missed her sister the first two days so I tried my best to keep her occupied with lots of fun activities.  The best by far was going to her friend K's house for their 'club' which mostly consisted of playing Minecraft. They were both so engrossed in their play that they forgot to eat the snacks she brought along!
Moomin's swimming lesson was also a highlight. She's moved up a class and is enjoying the challenges there as well as lots of time for 'free swimming' with bestie K.

On the workfront we were quite productive, however my plan to follow The Essentials of English  kind of fell by the wayside. At the start of the week we read a poem and discussed it together stanza by stanza. It worked well but was kind of, well, boring. In the days following I considered continuing with the book but really I was finding it hard because it seemed contrived and the language slightly condescending, so for the remainder of the week Moomintroll practiced her cursive writing, revisited our book Smelly Spelling and continued with our read aloud Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy which really is a marvelous book - funny, scary and mysterious all at once.

Our science topic was Habitats. We watched The Magic Schoolbus episode Hops Home, filled in the related worksheet, read about frogs and sea turtles.  Her task for the week was to create an informative comic strip on an animal of her choice. She chose the Sea Turtle and wrote about its diet, habitat, characteristics, etc.  She also went on a little field trip with her Grandma to the Melbourne Aquarium to see all the different animals and habitats.

As Moomin loves Minecraft so much I asked her to create a habitat in her land. She chose to build a rabbit habitat with lots of trees and bushes for the rabbits to hide under, carrot and dandelion patches for food, a pond for water and a lovely big warren to live in.  She was so into building this on minecraft that soon she was building a scene from Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, complete with Boy, Snow Queen, monsters to evade, and special quests for finding secret keys.  Minecraft is awesome - so many possibilities!

Our times tables project is coming along well.  Every day we did some practice filling in multiplication grids, using the Honey cards for really sticky facts, making up hand clap routines and using more pop songs, such as 2x9=18 to the tune of Let it Go and 8x3=24 to Love is an Open Door (from Frozen).

The Snork Maiden returned from camp happy and relaxed and begging to back to camp!

The times are changing

The snork maiden started year 7 this week. She's having a great time with her new 

friends and meeting and working with her new teachers, most of whom she likes a lot.  The routine of getting up early really hasn't been too difficult - she knows she has to get up and out the door by 8am so she just does it without any bother. It's great to see her so confident and responsible. She's grown up so much in the last few months.

The days are quieter without Snork Maiden around but Moomintroll and I have been keeping ourselves busy with the new work plan that I have put together.  

Our maths goal for this term is learning the times tables but more about that soon from Dr P who spent his last week of holidays working through a course with Moomintroll.  

I am doing the follow up games and activities with her to help reinforce what she's learned. Our favourite games so far are Tableland (a super find at an op shop several years ago and it's so old and apparently rare that I can't even find a webpage about it!), our variation of

Island Conquer (downloaded from here), and inserting certain 'sticky' tables facts into her 

favourite songs. Uptown Funk with Bruno Mars is perfect for remembering that 6 times 9 

is 54!

Using Island Conquer for revising times tables as well as teaching area

This week we began our geography course. We are going to be exploring and keeping a record of the interesting walks in our local area.  First we began by confirming where we 

are in the world by making a Geography Circle (kind of like Me on the Map).

getting the 'classroom' ready at our local park

Geography circle

Our first walk was at Currawong Bush Park where we saw mobs of kangaroos feeding in 

the early morning. The walk is called Ready Aim Click. If you click here you will find a listing of all the walks together with brochures and audio guides to download.

Later in the day Moomintroll created a lovely Word document with photos describing our walk.

Our science this term will be using The Magic Schoolbus. This blog here has very comprehensive plans on many topics/episodes.   Our first topic was ants; we've watched videos on ants, observed ants on our walk, learned the German word for ants( Die Ameise) and thought about collecting ants for an ant farm but then decided it was far too mean to 

keep them in a  jar.

We're loosely following Essentials of English:Lower Grades by Henry Carr Pearson  for our English component. It's full of beautiful poems to read and discuss, dictation practice, and has some nice writing prompts as well.

Moomintroll enjoys photography and filming so I'm trying to incorporate those skills into her English work. After reading a short fairy story on how umbrellas were invented, she made her own comic strip using Strip Designer. It's a great app but not so good on an iPod as the screen is way too small, so I've also downloaded Comic Life onto my laptop. We'll definitely use that on a regular basis.

Books we're reading this week: various Mr Men and Little Miss books, Wind in the Willows, Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy.

The Brian Street Learning Centre

The girls have come up with a name for our homeschool - the Brian Street Learning Centre. That should keep those pesky supermarket cashiers happy when they ask the inevitable question.
We even have a theme tune sung to the tune of Play School. It's lovely to hear them singing it loudly in the garden whilst performing synchronised jumps on the trampoline.  I'm sure the animals enjoy it.

This week we picked up where we left off last year with Life of Fred for maths. Both girls are enjoying the quietly humorous stories of Fred and Kingie. The level of maths is just right for Moomintroll. It's way easy for the Snork Maiden but we think the revision will be handy for her. I'm letting her get through the books at her own pace; she's already onto book 2.

We then revisited Mapping the World with Art. We went right back to the beginning which wasn't really far at all seeing as we had only got as far as chapter 4.  This time around Moomintroll is joining in too; maybe not with the map drawings but certainly the historical readings and activities. This week we made Babylonian cuneiform tablets out of cookie dough and created maps of various rooms of our house in ancient Polynesian style.
My plan is to merge MTWWA with our Around the World scrapbooks that we began last year.  This way we'll cover ancient history with present day geography/culture at the same time.

Babylonian edible clay tablets

ancient polynesian style map. just imagine reeds with shells tied to them instead of blue paper strips and stickers!

For science this week we began Taxonomy using this great free resource.  We learned about the five Kingdoms and looked in depth at the animal kingdom. The accompanying activities are great fun; we created a bean classification chart and by taping up our thumbs we learnt how important having opposable thumbs is to survival.


Our read aloud this week has been Those Dreadful Children by Enid Blyton which was a great favorite of mine growing up. I remember reading and rereading it endlessly and desperately wishing that I were friends with "those dreadful children". Actually they're not dreadful at all - the Snork Maiden said "they sound just like us!"

One thing we are making more time for is craft. Not just the cut and paste style but real, proper handicrafts that everyone needs to know.  With my help the Snork Maiden repurposed a tired old black crocheted cardigan into a very hip and happenin' sleeveless vest. Think Madonna in the 80's. Very cool.
Moomintroll tried her hand at dry felting and made a little fuzzy face which she attached to her painting from the week before.
Next week we hope to make a skirt for Moomintroll and I may teach Snork Maiden how to crochet something very exciting - dishcloths!  Which leads me to our other fun activity that we've started each morning called 'Tidy Up Time'.  I have a list of jobs that are kid friendly and the girls pick one to carry out. So far so good; the toilet is clean, the washing has been put away and the floor mopped (for the first time in about 6 months I'm afraid to say)!

Finally, our Saturday Science prac was fossil hunting. P and the Snork Maiden collected more 405million year old rocks from our favorite site and brought them home for some serious whacking with hammers and chisels. Most of us found small brachiopod and crinoid fossils and we all made a terrible mess.

a lovely neat presentation.  it didn't last long

Midwinter warmers

The last few days we've really noticed the cold and haven't ventured very far from our lovely warm lounge room. We have been busy though. We've finished painting R's planets with glow in the dark paint and they are now orbiting the sun in her bedroom. 

On our last trip to Resource Rescue I bought a heap of beautiful shiny white paper and we've been drawing and doodling and colouring the hours away. This is possibly the best paper we've ever drawn on as it's shiny coating makes the texta colours shine so brilliantly.
Today we read most of Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson and it has inspired the girls to draw and create some Moomin inspired acrostic poems:

Marvellous                                               

Odd     

Omnivorous

Magical  

Impressive 

Not normal.

Super special

No way normal

Oh my goodness!

Radical

Kool!

Super small

Naughty

Irresponsible

Frightened

Fearful

..and while we're on the subject of poetry, R wrote this a little while ago:

My name is Mr. 4

And I want to be a 5,

To be a firefly.

My name is Mr. 4

And I swim in the floor,

And I swam to a wild boar,

And I went inside the wild boar's jaw,

And he closed the door.

And the wild boar

Ate me up.

So I was in his tummy. 

It was all squidgy

And he had a ball inside him

So I could play with it.

The End

We've also been cuddling on the couch with the Hemulen, reading inside wardrobes and eating large amounts of chocolate brownies.

The girls have decided that I need to change their names on this blog, so now R will be known as Moomintroll and  H is the Snork Maiden. I guess I'll be Moominmamma and P will be Moominpappa. We already have Sniff and a Hemulen.
So there you have it - the McMoomin family.

Oh yes, one last thing. Whilst I was reading aloud today Moomintroll grabbed the camera and filmed this while she listened:

..a nice insight into the mind of a free spirited 6 yr old child!

Always learning

Despite the girls spending alot of time doing this ...

... their brains have been in overdrive since we got back from our holiday.
R is suddenly checkmating me at chess, spontaneously spelling words off the top of her head and contantly sharing insights that are beyond her years. 
H is immersing herself in all things bookish, learning about grammar and her spelling is taking off too.
At a recent trip to the aquarium they shared all their knowledge about marine animals with our friends.  I am amazed at their ability to retain and explain all the facts and figures they soaked up at Heron Is.  What really impresses me is that they don't need to write things down to remember them. They hear it, find it interesting, file it away in their brain somewhere and that's it. Done. Remembered. For ages!  Unschooling does indeed rock!

Botswana was the next destination on our Around the World trip.  After the decidedly "meh" attitude whilst in Mexico it was a welcome change to go to Africa.  We watched our Wild Africa DVD a few times, read a book by Alexander McCall Smith about Akimbo and the Lion, and listened to great music via the AccuRadio app.  H enjoyed spending our virtual money on airplane tickets and a two night stay at the Mashatu Game Reserve in Botswana. She also did some extensive research on the country, typed it up using her emerging typing skills learnt here and printed out copies to paste in their scrapbooks.
R was keen to do some writing and made some puppets of an African man, meerkat and a crocodile.

Here are some snippets of life around here.

Clockwise from top right:  Happy Birthday P!; chess anyone?; currently reading about Marco Polo's adventures; chilling out with good friend W; Nutmeg the bunny; beautiful colours from our prism on a sunny morning; spot the real animal; what's going on behind those beautiful big blue eyes?;  another doodle.

Dinner with friends C and W turned into a henna tattoo night:

Facing fears

Our holiday to Heron Island is drawing nearer! We are all very excited but the girls both have great fears of sharks and are quite worried about encountering some when we are there.  In an effort to help them past their fear, we took a trip to the Australian Sharks and Rays Centre not far from here.  Here we found a huge number of Fiddler Rays, Estuary Rays, Black Rays, Southern Eagle Rays, White Spotted sharks and Nurse sharks.

All suited up and ready to go. The sticks are used to feed the rays and sharks.

 A Black Ray

 Fiddler Rays

White Spotted shark aka gummy shark

After three hours feeding and patting these beautiful animals, we all agreed that our favourites were the sharks.
The girls say they're not afraid anymore and were both very proud of themselves for facing their fears.

Lately H has been absorbed in books. R lamented that H was "becoming just like mum and dad - always with your nose in a book!"  I told her that in a few years time when reading wouldn't be hard anymore she'll be just the same, but by the end of that sentence R had already run out of the room. Sigh.
Anyway, H has discovered Shakespeare and is loving reading his plays.  Well, when I say reading his plays I don't mean his actual plays, but a series of Shakespeare's play rewritten for kids.  They are written by Andrew Matthews and have wonderful illustrations by Tony Ross. So far she's read The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest.  And by sheer coincidence her uncle P is performing in Hamlet soon, so we'll definitely take the girls to see that.