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

MineCrafting

Moomintroll has a passion for Minecraft, as many young people do nowadays.  I set her a challenge the other day: Could she build our house on Minecraft?  Well, after a short time talking about how our house is constructed and discussing what was important enough to include in the rooms (the tv and couch were a must) Moomintroll built it. It's pretty accurate and I particularly like the way she made the shower.
Here's a short movie I made of her talking us through our home.

After a trip to Kryal Castle recently both girls have been designing their own Minecraft castles. They are also working on rollercoasters, hotels, restaurants and farms.

After many months of searching for a healthier Nutella substitute recipe and many failed experiments with said recipes I have finally found a winner! And I made it up on my own out of sheer exasperation.  It should have known it would be easy but as usual I got sucked in by all the flashy looking blogs and websites out there showing off their beautifully presented superfood laden creations with all natural, organic, gluten/dairy/sugar/everything else - free ingredients.  I love spending time sifting through all those blogs getting wonderful ideas but sometimes the pictures are so intimidating and the instructions are so complex that it's easy to forget that I can just do it myself without a professional camera, lengthy explanations and pretentious looking Mason Jars.
So this is my recipe:
150g packet of hazelnuts
175g dark choc bits (I used Coles' Homebrand ones)
a slurp of oil. I used Rice Bran Oil as it's what I have in the cupboard and I didn't think extra virgin olive oil would taste right.

Throw it all into Vera the Vitamix who will kindly grind it all up into a lovely dark chocolately paste.
Moomintroll is happy with her chocolate sandwiches now and that's all that matters to me.

September

September came and went so fast.  We did everything and nothing; it's hard to remember how we filled our days.  Luckily, once again, we used the camera occasionally and so, here it is: September.

Our conversion to vegetarianism is continuing. Slowly our repertoire of recipes is expanding. This is one dish we all enjoyed - tofu ricotta (so easy to make), tomato and avocado on home baked power packed toast with carrot sticks.  It looked so pretty on the plate I had to take a picture :)

We've been doing lots of research into the best foods to eat so that we get all the essential nutrients we need and have been pleasantly surprised to find that a plant based diet can give us all we need, despite what the meat and dairy industries would have us believe.  This documentary (and associated website) has inspired me immensely.  This film also made me think hard about the suffering of animals caused by humans. It is so confronting and upsetting that I've only watched 20 minutes of it so far, but I hope to see the rest soon. I urge everyone to view it.

Speaking of animals, the girls and I joined up with a group of  'girly' homeschoolers and took a trip to the zoo.  We had a great day and met some new friends. The Snork Maiden was in charge of the camera with big plans for her blog, so I will just post a few pics here. The rest she can use in her Zoo exclusive ;)

Splashing Spoonbills by Moomintroll

a shot of our friends. just to show that we do actually hang out with other h/schoolers!

what better way to eat lunch than up a tree?

Our gamelan group was invited to play at Festival Indonesia at Freshwater Place.  We played for 30 minutes in the hot hot sun. Apart from a little sunstroke, it was a great day out.

setting up

getting ready

wish I'd brought a hat

After our performance the girls made their own batik using authentic tools and very hot wax. 

 

 

 Then we wandered off to Federation Square to watch a lion dance at the Vietnamese Festival.

Workwise the girls have just been going along doing their own things. Moomintroll is still working on her reading and writing and is enjoying making many short movies on PhotoBooth.  The Snork Maiden is happy with her Distance Ed maths course and has started using Mathletics. She really gets a kick out of competing against kids from Mexico!  She and P have been investigating tessellating shapes and spent a day making their own after watching this video.  What a great activity - maths and art all rolled into one!

P's tessellation

tessellation by the Snork Maiden

What else.... oh yes I had a birthday! I had a lovely day, dinner out and lots of lovely presents including Vera the Vitamix,a shiny new swiss army knife and a voucher from some very sweet, special friends.

Right now the Snork Maiden is on her first Guide camp - a three night/four day Jamborella.  We all miss her alot and can't wait till Wednesday when she comes home.

Musical rooms

We played a game of Musical rooms two weeks ago. Instead of three bedrooms we now have one playroom, one parent's retreat and one sleeping room.  Bedtime has never been easier and we're finding out interesting things about each other, like the way the Snork Maiden buries herself under the bedclothes whilst sleeping and how Moomintroll grinds her teeth and talks in her sleep. Loudly. Every night. Often about her sister and/or pasta which is strange given that she rarely eats pasta.
We've made other changes over the past weeks too. Firsty, both children have asked, in different ways, for more work to do. Several days ago we arrived home to find two large boxes addressed to the girls, full of work courtesy of Distance Education Victoria.  They were so excited and unpacked everything in the kitchen.  It made me feel a little queasy, looking at all that paperwork so we packed it all up again, just keeping the first unit out. I've read through it and it seems doable. Each unit is ten days worth of work, all nicely set out so I don't have to prepare anything aside from borrowing a few story books from the library for Moomintroll. 

The second change we've made is the decision to become vegetarian. We are into our third week and it's going very well. The Snork Maiden has shown herself to be very open minded about trying new foods. She is now eating tofu and eggplant happily. When P made a mushroom noodle soup she didn't bat an eye, just gulped it down.

Last monday was a beautiful day so we took another trip to the aquarium. This time Moomintroll asked for some work to do there, so thanks to Enchanted Learning we were armed with plenty of activities to keep us busy.  The Snork Maiden has blogged about our day here.