View From My House

View From My House
Sunset

Sunday, November 29, 2009

This is what the children have been modeling!

As this is what my husband is doing I was going to just put it in as a guest blog. On second thoughts I'll be just posting links. Rather than trying to capture all the pictures and uploading again (the words are easy, it's a simple cut and paste but all the pics - and there is rather a lot) I'll just put a permanent link on a side bar, and put a link in right here. I'll mention if there is anything you should check out in my general posts.

You can find his "posts" (it is actually a thread dedicated to it in one of his modelling forums) right here. All excepting Monika are working on models, its one of Andrew's hobbies and they are all interested in doing it so he has come to the party and sharing his knowledge/talents with them, which is all good. Hope you enjoy, Q.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Dragons Are Good!



We studied Asian Dragon myths in the last week. I accessed some myth stories here, and we then coloured in these Asian dragons in the colours of The Four Dragons. Obviously there are five children and no one wanted to miss out so Monika's dragon is an added bonus. Its a shame that you can't see what the images really look like! We did this in stages, we first used water colour pencils, then painted water into them, added highlighting markers in silver in some, gold paint in others, then we put a shimmer paint over the top of the dragon's bodys. They are really very iridescent! Anyways, Raven did the Black Dragon at top (by choice - they all chose which dragon to do from the story), next is Monika's lively dragon, followed by the Pearl Dragon by Labyrinth. Below is the Yellow Dragon by Kai and lastly but not least is Dante's Red Dragon.




Above is Raven's picture of a man outside his house with a dog, and Monika's picture below.


These are the big three's western dragons. Labyrinth has gone for a firey dragon perched on mountaintop, while Kai's is up to some practical cooking of birds before consumption.





Dante has opted for a free standing dragon, which had much more detail before he 'coloured' it in! But still great! While we haven't looked at any more myths from the west, yet, we will this following week, and hopefully be making little FIMO dragons too. We did rewatch the Mockumentary Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real. It is amazing and well worth a watch!

Friday, November 27, 2009

Dragons and Flightless Birds!

Labyrinth was rather taken by the Moa, which she has drawn above. Below is Kai's Kiwi picture, he loves them too. Dante far below is amazed by the Kakapo!


Yes, we've been studying dragons again, or rather, we haven't stopped! At the request of the children, we have decided to interlace the Life On Earth series with stories of myth and legend. So we are. So we are watching the next series, Life of Birds. It's fantastic! We've watched one so far, which focuses on birds in New Zealand, quite remarkable and interesting ~ and they say animals in Australia are wierd and strange! So, we did some worksheets that looked a bit more in depth of the above birds, and some worksheets too.
As for dragons, a later post will be dedicated to those.
Other things we've been doing: going to homeschool picnics/get together in the park, maths, drawing, gardening (we've harvested some lettuce and will harvest some Kale today to put in mashed potato!), english grammar (covered nouns, pronouns and adjectives - may not look like much but it includes all the little things like superlative and comparative adjectives, and the four types of pronouns! We go over and over them so they don't forget), they've started learning Japanese formally, they already use spanish, sign language and a touch of environmental. Other non formal learning goes on all the time, naturally, like cooking, fixing things, going to the library - the boys have discovered comic books, its great. Labyrinth had discovered anime comics a long, long time ago! We still read to them everyday, they read to each other and to themselves. Currently Dante and Kai are reading books on militaria, while Labyrinth is reading Coraline and anime still.
We've been going on walks to, along the foreshore tracks that have been made this year. Its a lovely walk, right along the Derwent River, its been really cleaned up and we see many native birds, such as black swans, sea hawks and harriers. We even caught an echidna baby living in our hedge and getting into our vegie garden to hunt out bugs! We have a variety of birdlife living around here, some in our roof, and we've noticed big bumble bees are currently hanging around the tea tree in our front yard, close to our front door - have they moved in?
I've been flat out really, I had one day off after getting in my last assignment, but I've been doing a fair bit of organising and cleaning (boring), have lots of scrapping to catch up on and applied for Advanced Standing finally.
In our immediate future for home edding, we are looking forward to stopping for a holiday soon! We are tying up loose ends, like finishing off our Dragon Myth unit, and doing some fun Christmas activities as well. We will go to about 5 Christmas parties, two of which are homeschool ones (with any luck our family one won't clash), and one of our own to officially end the school year, which has never been done here before, usually we just keep going til Christmas and then have a few weeks off. I'll be posting a bit of scrapping and holiday news over the hols, and anything remarkable that happens, but we're still at it for another week and a half. I just want a holiday!
Until next time, Q.


Monday, November 2, 2009

~BOO~









Its Halloween ~ Trick or Treat?
Oh, we do love our Scaries in this family, and what better time of year to get your freak on than Halloween! This Halloween wasn't about parties though, we had a quiet one as all of our other ideas fizzed out, unfortunately. Not to be perturbed, we decided to go Trick Or Treating, and have ourselves our Pizza night and a little party too. I haven't been wonderful lately as I've had more and more headaches and pain. I'll put that in the other blog. Teeth are wonderfully painful at times.
So here we have our Princess Monika first up, she's our resident fairy, Labyrinth wanted to be a witch, Dante is the swamp monster again, Raven is Batman and Kai our resident zombie, and there they are all together just before we went Trick Or Treating. It was indeed surprising how well that went, lots of people were impressed by them dressing up, one woman who had no treats gave them money~ how that made them pleased!
The second last picture is them over the 'loot' as they called it. There is quite a bit of Gluten Free there, so Raven was indeed happy. The last is of their pizzas. Raven ate the most I've ever, ever seen him eat, hell he ate more that I did that night (and he was in pain thought he was going to be sick after). His appetite is certainly improved greatly since going GF. And no, they didn't get to eat all that, they ate two little lollies and one big one, and we'll spread it out as far as we can.
We had a wonderful time, everyone enjoyed themselves, and Diego soundtrack in German is so Rammstein !! We let them watch Halloween goodness all night after that, and had some spooky dancing after. Q.