Day of the Dead, Drawings etc

OK, so it just seemed like the day of the dead with our resident zombies, above is Raven's art, below is his face art:

Below is Monika's art/face paint (this is her first ever face painting, no adverse reactions so all is good:

And here we have Kai's work/face painting. This is a really great photo of Kai! Usually he looks mournful, which would have been appropriate. Hey, his a contrary wise young man...

Dante had to be a bit different. His art/his face, a big cat.

And Labyrinth's work/face painting. She's put real effort into her Africa drawing and she kept this a secret from us for over a week! She does art therapy, and this is a fantastic example of what she can do (but rarely does for herself).

They may look the zombie part, but I sure feel like the zombie-girl lately. Been drugged out on anti-depressants, can't sleep at night, can't wake in the morning, so it makes for some interesting mistakes. That and I've still not weaned Monika so I can't actually go onto another drug. Anyways, lots of natural learning going on but very little formal I'm afraid. We've been gardening, drawing, visiting people, going out to Fit'N'Fun, cooking, using the computer and watching TV etc. We had lots of fun making music yesterday, I brought I Love to Sing, by Justine from playschool. We watched the DVD they danced while I folded the clothes. Then they played drums and made a great hulabaloo! So cute they are, and it was fantastic to see Kai get into music and laugh and smile lots and of course the little two had a ball. We do a lot of spontaneous singing/dancing in our house, I love it! Next I must post pics of our seedlings, pea plant experiment!

Just Quickly...

We are just about finished rearranging and resorting, and still doing our lessons.
Today they did their lessons, reading, writing and improv music, played on Raven's new instruments (and theirs), which was great. They seemed to really enjoy themselves, and it was all about getting familiar with the different sounds and how the instruments could actually be used...
Also, they enjoyed some time on the computers, mostly checking out YouTube, but since thats what they like doing... erg.
Raven played Monika's software, BoohBah. He likes going to the Nick Jnr website and playing mostly Dora/Diego type stuff. Of course I read to them, I do everyday - tonight was Elmo and Wilbur. Kai loves Elmer, and now does Raven.
They also really enjoyed playing with the wooden train table set.
We had a simple but rather happy and fulfilling day today. Music should fill the air everyday, it brings such happiness to the children :) Q.

A stab at fine arts today...

Above we discovered the Colour Wheel! Some colours may not be perfect but we tried our best. After we discussed primary, secondary and tertiary colours and tried them out, next came the art work! Firstly is Labyrinth's Stars in The Sky

Dante's Bird, Rainbow and Sun

Kai's Rainbow and Bird in the Sky and last but not least is Raven's Boat



And Dante has drawn Pterasaur and Raptor for fun. Well, painting was fun to but the objective here was a little more formalised - to keep it to primary and secondary colours as much as possible. They tried really hard and did really well so I'm totally swayed to do more formal art lessons with them so they can comprehend it all. Besides, they love getting into the paint on a regular basis and so they should be at their age!

Trouble on the media centre front, the problem being we are only getting grief from Vista and the USB drive is sooo slow under XP we are not sure yet what we need to do.

Other than that very little. Monika has been very demanding today and I'm exhausted from her. Didn't even get any reading lessons done, and the weather has been pretty bad. Not that I don't enjoy the thought that snow is 300 m above sea level, the rain is great for the garden (and for farming in general), and winter has us by the short and curlies. Also one of my aunties has died of a massive heart attack, but since we've been waiting more or less for several years and I didn't know her very well it becomes less real to me somehow. But my mother is going to the funeral, its upstate. I felt more the death of an online friend's father than I did for Aunty Dot. I've never met him, but I feel for her.

I didn't get to go to my friends house to discuss our possible collaboration on a children's book, so that was rather disappointing.

Other than that frustrating because we can't do/get everything I feel we need at the moment. Yeah, I know we just brought a TV, but hey, why can't we have some good things? Just because we're poor doesn't mean we have to completely go without!

Anyways... I'm going to endeavour to be more blog active and make sure I do it pretty much every day. I've been a bit strange emotionally lately, feeling a bit defeated, so I hope I can drag myself out of this and get better.

NB. I watched QandA on ABC tonight. The first question came from a woman in the audience about the baby bonus being an incentive to kill and abuse/neglect babies... Hey, whose living in the 50's here? It is a great step forward, things like neglect and abuse happen with or without the bonus. I would take the line of what support was that woman lacking to allow her family and herself to get into such a predicament. Obviously her mental health needs were not addressed and a tradegy was allowed to occur. We need more support and recognition for mentally ill people and their families. We also need to help families with new babies with not just money!

So my stance is this: it is important to give a baby bonus to those who are having babies, tis a tough time and it helps ease the burden of being poor. People who have children by and large are good parents (or are trying to be) despite their annual income, this won't change with a baby bonus. We make our own lives what they are. We may have 5 children, but its not for a cash bonus it's because we love the little tikes so much we couldn't imagine life without them. The cash bonus certainly helps ease the burden of poverty a bit, and we will be spending some of the bonus family tax benefit directly on the children's education. This would not sit well with the Questioners world POV.

So tonight, I'd like to leave with you a thought. Love well while you can and regret nothing, as life is too short for any other course. Love, Q.

From Hell...

...yes, back at the trenches with those worksheets!
We did some science, writing, reading and thinking all in one today! Below is some fill in the blanks about the Animal Kingdom and its groups. What is the distinguishing features of each. The children all read out a line, then when we came to a blank we checked out what made sense out of the "word bank" and added them onto the blank space before moving on. Below is Kai at his best writing (he started writing this year):



Can't forget little Raven, here is his cute and advancing colour in skills, he was barely making marks early this year so when he insisted he be allowed to take part I really wasn't sure, but I certainly am now, he spent 3/4 of an hour colouring in these two:

Labyrinth's worksheets:

Here are Dantes:

Above is Labyrinth's work, but the three eldest did it. Its just an example really of our grammar lesson, which was homonyms. Labyrinth was very good at these, Dante and Kai a little slower, but still they caught on pretty fast, some of them they genuinely didn't know though, as they'd never been exposed to some of the words, for instance hoarse (we are likely to describe it as a sore throat or a frog in the throat which is not quite the same, I know), and wring or plain. So it was a good opportunity for them to learn some new words for their building vocabs.

As I seemed to spend too much time on the phone today to various people, that's it for formal lessons. They played heaps though, and Labyrinth tried reading a book quite a bit above her level.
We also brought a brand new harddrive, 750g, so we could replace one we are giving to a friend (who is having an upgrade) as her system just wasn't running smoothly or quickly enough for Andrew's preference, so she is quadrupling her hard drive in size to a 160g. The 750g is going into our media centre computer, and we are going to rip all of our DVDs and other movies to its hard drive so the children can't hurt the poor defenceless DVDs anymore. Its going to double as a computer for surfing and have childrens games and educational software on it, plus we have Thomas the Tank and Dora Explorer mini game units. We will be buying another cordless mouse and keyboard and making a table so the children can use it with ease. Come late mid-year we will be buying the largest Sony Bravia LCD screen that will fit into our TV cabinets cavity, so it will be all good stuff. We already have an excellent portable TV card, we ditched pay for TV because there was too much crap on it, to be honest. Yes, the National Geo and Animal Planet etc was excellent, but they were not worth the extra monthly expense, we will put that into buying DVDs to rip, including docos and educational ones (at the moment will be things like Muzzy in Spanish, Japanese and German and lots on ocean and fishies and animals, that kind of thing). We considered getting a play station, but nah, not yet if it all. Games on PC, surfing the web etc can all be done anyway, so what's the point.

For typing we have Sponge Bob Square Pants Teaches Typing, but personally I prefer Typing of the Dead. Other home edding software we have: Reader Rabbit, The Land Before Time, Dr Suess, Clue Finders, Arthur, Blues Clues, Dora the Explorer, Garfield and others that I can't recall and I'm too lazy to get up and look for them at the moment. Oh, there is crappy Bratz, but honestly, that doesn't really count, does it?

Considering buying a sewing machine, yes I who broke more than one in class (I won't say exact amount because it's embarressing), but I'm convinced that it was all the sewing teacher's faults for not teaching me properly (as I can sew a bit now, and I even did a TAFE course for about 2 weeks and none of them got broken). I just want to make cushions and toys and use it for scrapping (and making curtains), just fun stuff really. I don't think I'll ever be patient enough to make clothes, but we'll see... the stuff in the shops gets me down and in my head is much better than mass produced crud anyway. Plus Labyrinth is very short and her figure is strange, so nothing fits, she has a thicker, stronger more athletic body, so she has to go for 10-12 sizes but they are all too long! She is also designing clothes at the moment, so maybe.

The ways we change... and grow and learn...