Hand Art

Kai felt rather inspired by the Rainbow Serpent Aboriginal art he did last week, and today he drew the above picture. Its a hand drawing with his favourite animal, the elephant, at a watering hole. I was so impressed I used it for inspiration to get the children to all do an ink print of thier own hands and see what might emerge. I was happy with the results!

Above top is Raven's Raven. He chose the black ink, and he knew what he was going to create before he began. So cute! Below Raven's is Monika's face. There are distinct eyes in there, and an oval face too, with a wide smiling mouth! She had a lot of fun creating this.

Above is Labyrinth's Jelly Fish. I love her interpretation! Her colour choice is also very pretty and suits her subject matter. Below is Kai's man in chicken suit. He has put baby chicks around the man too. At first he thought he had done it wrong, but then Andrew gave him some inspirational humour to work with, and it was OK. I think he did a wonderful job.

Last, but by no means least is Dante's Rooster with baby chick. It is very much the way he is with Monika, he really loves and looks out for her, almost parental in his relationship. This picture he made was great. I was so pleased with how organic it all was, a natural progression, and they really enjoyed doing the art activity.

We have been studying Monsters We Met a BBC documentary series. So far we've covered the first two in the series, and they've been making a 'natural' science journal, where they draw a picture of a chosen animal from the episode, and write a few sentences about the animal. We've covered a few so far: Demon Duck of Doom, Red Kangaroo, Caribou, Saber-tooth Cat, the Woolley Mammoth and the Devil Dragon. I've been grabbing various information sheets and pictures of each off several sites and printing them off. They read aloud to each other a paragraph from each animal - such information as diet or anatomy, and we talk a little about what they've learnt. Much like what we've done with the Life On Land series. We will be completing the Dragon Myth lapbook and unit shortly and revisiting and making a lap book about Greek Myth next. It's been great discovering different cultures with them, and we have been discussing Aborigines a lot in the last week or two. That will be nicely highlighted with an Aboriginal excersion that's been organised by a fellow homeschooling mum.

I might not be so tired after tomorrow. I finally get my sleep apnea machine and might have some good sleep so not be so dopey. One of the benefits will hopefully mean more bloggin! And lots more other kinds of things. We have also done music lessons, language, reading, writing, lots of other natural learning.

The Rainbow Serpent

Raven's drawing and writing above on The Rainbow Serpent, below is Monika's drawing.

Above is Kai's interpretation, below is Dante's drawing. I am very pleased with Kai's - he seemed to transform the ideas of the Rainbow Serpent and Aboriginal art into something rather personal. Dante's done some wonderful interpreting himself, with rock art drawings and waterholes too!

Above Labyrinth has drawn the Rainbow Serpent into a water hole, surrounded by trees, animals and people. Aboriginal dreamtime talk of how one must be respectful of the Rainbow Serpent while he is present. He can make the day turn out well or bad, accordingly to the behaviour of the people.

I encouraged the older three to write a poem about the Rainbow Serpent from our readings and the video presentation we were able to find. Labyrinth decided to go alone, whilst the boys worked together. This is Labyrinth's Poem:

The Rainbow Serpent

The Rainbow Serpent

Goes across the land

River to River

If happy he stays

If mad he goes

And if he's not mad he'll stay there

Because he is happy.

The boys came up with this together:

The Rainbow Serpent

The Rainbow Serpent

Crawls across the land

Shaping it as if it were a sculpture

He jumps from a water hole to another

He never dies, he leaves a rainbow in the sky!

We've been madly working on finishing off our dragon myth unit, completing bits and pieces and working on our overall unit presentation which is a scrapbook file book (it needs to be ready by Saturday so I can have it presentable at the statewide home education picnic).

Just our happenings in brief: We've been doing lessons everyday but one a week, we've been learning about myth, language, math, art (including painting and modeling), reading of course, cooking, walking, lots of science, our garden is growing!! We've been enjoying basil, tomato, cauliflower, brocolli, lettuce, a few berries that aren't gotten by birds (raspberries/blackberries/strawberries) and peas. We're waiting on spring onion, pumpkins, zuchhini, capsicum and more of the above - oh and kale!

More to come I know I need to be doing more blogs! I'm getting worse = zombie, but hopefully that will turn around when I get this sleep apnoea machine on Thursday. I will do a final post of the Dragons, with pics of the scrapbook file. Until next time then, Q.

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!

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.

Crazy last two weeks!

These two pictures are what Raven and Monika get up to. They are most of the way through the first workbook of Reading eggs, and they love it. above is Monika's and below is a particularly good example of how well Raven can write, albeit a poor scan.

Above, Dante's picture... I'll let you the reader decide what he's trying to say (in other words I'm still confused). The picture below is Labyrinth's trippy cat.

This is so cute I had to share. She's changing so very fast! I wish I could remember to be more snap happy, but with everything that's been going on its been a bit difficult!

So this has been our fortnight, we've completely rearranged the whole house, reorganised and reshuffled everything, so far its on a whole been working.

I have my study in the master bedroom whilst Andrew has his in the loungeroom. This has not been ideal for Andrew as the children like to try and use his computer etc while he and I are still asleep! Solution? We're going to have to lock them out and give them a new TV for the boys room.

Yep, that's right the boys have a room, and the girls have a room, both have functioning computers and desks to work at. Friday we'll have a set top box in the boy's room so they can have access to TV in those very wee hours of the morning.

Other than that, we've cleaned out the kitchen/laundry/bathroom. All the bookshelves are now at maximum so we need another of those. No nook and cranny has been left undone... OK we still need to clean out the fridge/main food cupboard then well be done.

As for homeschooling. well for a week that didn't get done, but I did use it to organise the homeschooling much better in anticipation of the THEAC (Tasmanian Home Education Advisory Council) visitation last Wednesday. Well that didn't happen. I was glutened that morning and feeling rather worse for wear, and the inspector was ill too. So it's been put off until tomorrow. We've done weeding and kept the watering up to the garden as needed. We've got Raven on a dairy free gluten free diet and keeping a food diary up to keep on an eye on progress/problems. More on that in the other blog.

In the last week we've been back at normal schooling again. This is our daily routine:

Writing, Reading a chapter from a chapter book and reading aloud to the youngest two, Mavis teaches Typing, Clue Finders (for spelling/eng comp etc) and Volcanic Panic/Garfield for Math. That's our morning. About once a week we do a written draft and they blog it, they all have their own active blogs now but only have a couple of posts each. We also do IT lessons, science, cooking, and they see the glenorchy homeschoolers on Fridays for a play in the park. We are still doing our mythical creatures, but I'm going to intersperse that with continuing our units on Life On Earth now that we seem to be going so well. So, that's once a week, as is mythical creatures. Last week we attempted to make dragons from air drying clay, unsuccessfully - so I'll get some Fimo on Friday.

I'm rather pleased that all is going so well, we seem to slowly be overcoming some reluctance (translation: slow writing - hell I know it isn't stimulating but they know good things happen ie they get to play PS3 or surf the net if they get it done well and quickly).

I'll update the blog much more regularly.. there is always something though isn't there? I've got my three final assessments due back at UNE in the next half month so I've actually whenI've got a spare minute been frantically reading to try and keep up! I've read The Changeling by M Mahey, followed by Goldman's Princess Bride, oh such torture, not. I'm loving it, Charlotte's Web is next! But then I've got to go read all the boring academic papers to accompany it... so over that part... but the great news is... next year I'm stopping Uni to write novels and children's books. One of my assignments came back which was a book proposal (genuine one that I intend to do next year, testing the waters so to speak), and I got one mark shy of a HD. Why wasn't it a HD? Because I didn't quote enough of the boring academics (although I included all the readings I had to do anyway). So what! I'm very aware that the overall consensus that the writers who write children's books say about academic writers... and I am a writer not an academic I suppose. (They basically say that its the academic's domain and they have no real interest in it BTW ~ I'll add here my bit... the academics are just making a living squabbling over sucessful writers).

So that's it for now, long I know but I had a bit to catch up on. Q.

Dragons: Myth or Real?

Is this myth or real?

This is the question posed to my children today. We watched the mockumentary entitled The Last Dragon a.k.a Dragon's World: A Fantasy Made Real. It fell so well into learning about myth and legend, and when Andrew discovered it, it definately made its way into our learning environment.

Done so well, my children very nearly believed it was true, the eldest two were skeptical originally, which is good. However it even made me really wish it was true. How wonderfully made! Find the wiki here and the official site here which includes a lot of learning and thinking information.

While the sun has shined, we've been very busy in our garden, which unfortunately meant I didn't get any photos yet - but as soon as I don't have dirt all over my hands/grass through my hair/and the sun is still shining I'll get pics up. I'm really pleased about how we are progressing! We've got real gardens with real plants growing, some of them are th*s big!

Every time I tell the children a mythological story, I get them to retell it in some way. I'll have to get some examples up about that too. Unfortunately so much has been happening and I haven't been keeping up to it on here! Really attempting to do well at Uni has something to do with it, that is changing though. I'm getting real serious and am putting Uni off next year to concentrate on writing a novel/children's books/poetry.

The children are coming along very nicely, and there is a the official THEAC (Tassie Home Schooling) picnic coming up on the weekend too. With any luck we will get there, but Andrew doesn't sound enthused about it, unfortunately.

Raven is a smarty pants, he can write really well, he is beginning to read, but oh so lazy. It's unfortunate. He wrote for me "A Bug" today and wouldn't write any more. The big three are slowly working through their writing workbooks, we have a routine now - chores/maths/writing/english/computing/typing/reading lessons daily as a standard, plus we have myth lessons. Although we've taken off the last couple of days to work outside and the children have been helping or playing, as they will.

I hope there may be some readers still out there! Q.

A tale of two Birthday Cakes and some Mythical Creatures

Here we have the two birthday cakes. What a story! Lets start by saying, there was a party the day before her birthday at Tolosa St Reserve. We'd invited alot of people, and surprising many said "yes". This is awesome, but it meant that I had to make two cakes to make sure there would be enough. I was also making Fairies in A Meadow too, so initially I was going to make 20 chocolate fairies which had colour (see above pic). Well, I spent one and a half days (which I didn't really have) to make those. Each time I made two, one broke coming out of the mould. I also had an enthusiastic Monika who wanted to eat them straight away. So with the problems I was enduring I made the decision just to have enough for the cake, and to do plain chocolate for the Fairies in A Meadow. Well, I had enough coloured ones to do a fantastic birthday cake, having them all standing in a circle supported by their wings. Monika got into these a few times as everyone was curious and wanting to look and they didn't keep her away! Anyways, I'd saved enough to do the cake and have plenty of plain to do the Fairies in A Meadow. Then on the day of the party I FORGOT both cakes (both Gluten Free and Dairy Free by the way, and the white choc was sweet williams that is GF and Dairy Free, so I had made up a couple especially for the party in case there was a child who needed that). So... that meant she had two cakes for her birthday instead. Below is a Bratz Pixie cake. This was meant to be with Nan and Pop when we visited them at home so she could get her presents from them. Before we got out the door that day, she'd got in and eaten or bitten into all but these two left on the cake. The others were spares of the Fairies in A Meadow. So Above?Below is the result of two days of cooking. Not quite what I was hoping for... but at least the birthday girl enjoyed herself, right?

Below is just before the final eating of the cake (she's grabbed a fairie and started plowing in before blowing out the candles, its has melted a bit onto her face).

Here's a better picture. Look at that mischievous GLEE in her face. HaHa Mum, I GOT IT!

Here is the boys at Nan's place, it was cute so I'm sharing it.

Here she just blew out the candles with the cake at Nans, she was so fast I couldn't actually catch the glow of the flames...

So this is her second go at blowing out the candles!

Getting into her present bag at Nans. This is cute little story. She's a great cleaner upper, (why else would we keep such a cheeky lass around?) Nan's got a toy bucket, and she knows she has to put toys away when its time to pack up. As a gift, Nan had given her a toy with wheels and since a large majority of toys have wheels in the bucket she immediately took the toy from her pressie bag and put it over in the toy bucket.

Nanny has now taken a little something from us. Every time she gives the birthday child a gift she now gives a little gift to the others. Here they are enjoying little lolly bags she gave to them.

We gave Monika a COOL SCHOOL, similar to the DACS (digital art creativity studio) from Fisher Price. She loves it in short bursts. It takes the place of a keyboard for use in a PC, in fact it has a little keyboard, and a place to do 'writing' etc. She also got a Dora CD expansion pack for it, and a Littlest Pet Shop, way too young of course, but she wants to play so bad when the others do, so why not? She's over shoving every little thing into her goblet, so there is no danger there. As per our family tradition, she gave each of her siblings LPS toy each too, with the exception of Kai again, who got a Bee Beany Bear, which he was wrapt in again.

The Party: Here is the Dragon Pinyata, that Andrew put so much effort into making and it was the highlight of the BBQ party! So cute isn't it? Its paper mache and plaster of paris.

And here is the Pin the Tail on the Dragon game:

Here is naughty Monika trying her best not to be caught on camera.

Here is the costumes, theme: Mythical Creatures (I took photos of all the dressed up children, but I won't be posting them here without permission): In descending order, Kai is a Marine Orc, Dante a Swamp Monster, Labyrinth the MerFairy, Raven is a Tengu (Japanese Shape Changer - in this case he is a Raven), and Monika, the Fairy Princess. Monika and Labyrinth have new wings from the fairy shop. Beautiful aren't they? They can do anything to them, sleep in them wear them in the car, trample mud into them and they'll come up good as new with a wash in the washing machine. Great, aren't they?

The Mythical Creatures of course is an extension of the learning we've all been doing. We have not moved on from Greek Myth yet, we are amazed at how much there is to learn, that and it is on top of their other lessons, and sometimes we jsut don't get time to do it. That's all for now, Q.

Blogging.... and stuff

Its pretty nuts around here at the moment, while I have recovered enough to be typing again (Yes, real broken bone, but easily recoverable, no operation/cast just therapy - it was a cracked radial head = LUCKY!), there have been other issues.
I've been heavily asthmatic since breaking my arm, and flu/gastro has ravaged the house. It hasn't been pretty. Raven, as usual, has suffered the greatest and the longest. Poor little tacker.
On an upper note, we have started our myth/legend unit... we're discovering The Greeks right now. How niave I've been not to realise we owe so much to these very sophisticated, hugely intelligent and innovative people. Theatre, style of governance, free thinking, sport, recreation, religion that is intergrated throughout everything and of course philosophy.
I'm yet to get back into scanning/taking pics. That will be sooner than later now. The children are all starting thier own blogs, the youngest two will be doing photo/video blogs while the older two can show off their skills they are yet to learn on other forms of blogging as well as those types. Just set those blogs up today, yet to make posts, but at least they are ready minus pics - which will also arrive soon.
Labyrinth is turning 10 on Thursday, and we'll celebrate at home then on Saturday we'll be having a greater family bbq, inviting the cousins etc. The weather is totally unpredicatable, so we shall see how that happens.
I'm sorry to have been so lame about getting blogs up, but that should now be a past issue now my arm is this much recovered, cheers, Q.

Just a very quick update

There's some changes happening, very exciting!
We'll be embarking on a new long unit concerning Legend, Myth, Folklore and Fairytales from around the world. I guess its partly inspired by Steiner education, partly to inspire the children to be immersed in the wonderful world of story that is part of as many cultures as possible. As we study each mini unit, we'll complete a lapbook, do various activities to bring alive the stories using whatever the story inspires us to do and mark it onto a location on a map, defining it by type, and reference to location of the corresponding lapbook.

The following few weeks will be dedicated to Greek and Roman Mythology. Labyrinth will get a chance to learn about the meaning of her name, however well leave Dante's to modern Italy (Inferno).

The littlest are very much enjoying ABC Reading Eggs (we are using a free trial and brought the first kit). We use Muzzy too. The older children will still be doing the everyday basics the 3 Rs of course, but Andrew has decided they are ready to begin to learn computer programming skills, and start blogging and fundamental web building skills, so with any luck you might be seeing a bit more of them!

Other than that I've been sick probably due to my lower immunity due to my arm, won't find out if I need surgery until Tuesday which will hopefully put many concerns/queries to rest.
I am finding this so slow! I wish I could use a voice recognition for this blog!

Anyway, until nect time, Q.