August 31 - Sept 5

Just five days to go till radiation day and I am slowing down bit by bit.  I had to have a nap this morning in preparation for the second session of the Sewing Club today.  The girls were keen to finish off their projects and by afternoon tea time they were all done.

the finished articles

After tea we had a fun game playing old time school which somehow quickly evolved into a talent quest where the girls entertained each other with singing, dance, violin, piano and recorder performances. Harris, Sniff and I were the judges.

Last week we spent some time learning about Ireland and the Great Famine. When we go to the Sovereign Hill camp in a few weeks H will have to assume the role of an Irish schoolgirl from the 1850's. She's changed her name and given us all different occupations, and has thought out a story about why we left Ireland to come to the Goldfields. So P is a cobbler, I am a dressmaker and we're leaving our home in Dingle, County Kerry because of the famine.  We're even practicing our Irish accents using Luna Lovegood as our inspiration.
We took a trip to the Chinese Museum off Little Bourke St in Melbourne to give ourselves another perspective to life on the goldfields.  This museum is a fantastic resource and I'm sure we'll be back again in the near future.
We've used the internet extensively to learn all we can on this subject - this game and this site in particular were a hit with us all.

Harry Potter seems to be our latest obsession, especially the Potter Puppet Pals. Here's our favourite clip.

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.

July 4 - 24

Did it snow at your house last week?  It did at ours. The smallest residents went for a stroll in their Sunday best in the loveliest, softest shaving cream snow you ever did see.

R gradually overcame her distaste at having mucky hands and had a ball playing Snow with her dolls. After a while the dolls were ditched in favour of spelling out new words and names with her fingers in the shaving cream. This was a really nice activity for R as she needs to be actively doing something whilst learning her letters.
The past three weeks went by in a blur. P was on holidays so we all took a break from the usual routines.  We were very busy though - Man of La Mancha rehearsals/performances for P, extra ballet classes in preparation for an exam for H (which went very well by the way), sleepovers, birthday parties, family lunches, car repairs, broken window repairs, movie watching, and most exciting of all: new car buying!

June 27 - July 3

 How I love the unschooly life! To know that we have the freedom to learn and do whatever we desire whenever we desire it is so liberating, and the girls appreciate that we never run out of time to do the things they enjoy.
This past week has been jam packed with new experiences.
We discovered a shop called Habitat for Humanity near us which has a huge selection of new and second hand books and a great series of workbooks covering all things such as time, maths, english... the usual workbook stuff. The great thing is that they are small and portable (A5 I think) and have nice pics of mice - anyway, H likes them and is happy to spend some time filling in the pages. R bought a lovely book of Mr Froggy Went A-Courting which came with a CD of James Reyne singing the song and playing guitar. I have newfound respect for James Reyne now - he plays brilliantly!

Besides her new workbooks H has begun learning some music theory which will help with her piano practice, and with the use of two books called World of Mazes and  Eco-Logical Brain Games is covering geography and environmental science.
The Elements has been on the back burner lately as we've been out a lot, but the Periodic Table Colouring Book is helping to keep their interest in chemistry simmering along.

Something has clicked with both girls all of a sudden (it may have come from watching their friends in the French play last week) and now Indonesian words are coming out all over the place. R still likes to speak her own weird language but now uses some Indonesian words as well, and H is learning the days of the week. It's really becoming fun now to teach them some words as they don't roll their eyes at me anymore and tell me to stop!
As well as Indonesian we have started a Latin course (at H's request) with this book:

 It seems very well thought out so far and has really short lessons, so it's great for us beginners. Our first word is Nauta which means sailor.

Another book I found at the library is a book of opera stories.

So far we've read the story of a cruel yet vulnerable princess in Turandot and listened to most of the opera by Puccini. This was followed by a screening of another Puccini opera Madame Butterfly - a really beautiful movie that captured the girls' attention in a big way. When it was over R exclaimed in a sad voice "That was so dramatic!"  Sometimes it's hard to remember that she is only 5 yrs old :)
I have some more music and stories lined up and thanks to You Tube we can watch a number of operas in their entirety. How I love You Tube!
Our band will be doing a Russian Music concert in August so I've been preparing the girls for that concert as well by playing some Russian music. We have found that they enjoy the concerts so much more if they know the music beforehand. So far we're listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, Khachaturian, Stravinsky, Mussorgsky and lots of Borodin because his music is so beautiful. Did you know he was foremost a chemist and worked with Mendeleyev - the father of the Periodic Table?  It's no wonder he's one of our favourite composers!

Other things we've done this week were roller skating, two ballet open days, kids cardio, reading library books, an astronomy night with Dobby the Telescope who showed us Saturn and some messy objects, Headsprout episodes and making an aperture at Saturday Science.  I'll ask P to post soon about the other Saturday Science experiments they've done over the past few months.

Here are a few more drawings from Mini Marshmallow Art Lessons:

Ice cream cone by H

Cathy Fish by H

Cathy Fish by R

Flowers by H

Cathy Fish has lost her pencil by H

Cathy Fish loses her pencil again by R

Pencil rockets by H

Koala by T

June 20-26

I realize that I haven't posted many of H's maps from the MTWWA.. We were talking about it the other day and H has requested a break from the curriculum as she is finding it a bit too challenging and not really fun, especially the map drawings. I agree that some of them are difficult, even I find them hard at times, so we'll put it aside for a while (H recommends two years!). Here are the rest of her maps:

the Nile River

Greece

Italy

satellite image of Greece

I really think she's done well with these maps, but if it's not fun then there is no point in continuing with it now.
Fingers crossed that she'll be ready for it again next year. If not I might just draw all the maps myself because I think it's great!

We had a very social week this week with friends visiting, including a lovely 10 week old baby who is the latest addition to mother's group. We watched our friends perform in a french play of Snow White and also attended an entertaining performance of The Baron and the Widow by the Australian Ballet at the State Theatre.
The weekend  was spent at lunch with friends and then an attempted sleepover by the girls, but at 9pm we got the teary phone call to come pick them up.  To make up for that R suggested having a party on Sunday, so we all got up early, decorated the house with streamers, baked cupcakes, pancakes, pikelets, popcorn, got out the veges and dips, made juice and played pass the parcel and Chinese Whispers. Then we were given tickets to a Scout/Guide Gang Show for that afternoon which was brilliant and really was the icing on the party cake!