A week that seemed like a month...

Raven's picture of Eric, that's after a family vote we decided to call our kitten.

Above: Our primary and secondary colour lesson. Below: cute Kai!

Dante's birthday on the 19th - below is the RC Smasher Destroyer, one of his favourite presents...

Above is Dante's Transformer - it transforms into a tank. Below Labyrinth and Monika all dessed up and read to go to a birthday party.

So this week there was 3 birthday parties involving our children, and one birthday - Dantes! We've also been very busy doing a whole lot more. I'll begin with the parties first. Monika's lovely fairy friend turned 3 and had a tea party at Kingston Beach. Unfortunately Monika was unable to enjoy herself too much as she has been suffering even worse of late with her diahhrea. I'll be blogging about that in my other blog. That and the lovely early autumn warmth had us leaving early. I only took the time out to go put my free spotlight $10 voucher to good use - I brought choc making moulds for Easter this year because of all the allergy/intolerance in the children means it's safer to make our own - and hopefully cheaper too... and to exchange some clothes for Labyrinth. Monika slept a lot in our travels and over the next couple of days enjoyed hydrolyte icy poles.

Next party was for thier cousin George (My sister Tania's lad) who was turning 4 - a HJs pirate party. There isn't a single food on their menu that's GF, so master Raven had a LegsNBreast chicken and chips meal - but they managed to contaminate it and got him and me sick for the evening/next day. Never going back there! But at the time it was a good evening for them, and I reaquainted with many mormon people including my brother and sister-in-law, whom I never see because I don't believe in it anymore - and purely business when it comes to Michael's Mob... how enlightening and such a sense of freedom I have that I'm definately not giving up now. But it was nice to see them. George has grown tall and thin!

Friday, the day of birth for two cousins, Dante and Micheal's son Rueben. Ironic in a way as I had two friends who were inseperable long ago in a past life by those names. Dante was born 12.5 hours before! Anway, it was a day of shinanigans. Firstly the timing was off with appointments for me to take back and get another sleep apnoea machine, put off so much we couldn't get a parking spot near the pool on the domain so we went to Glenorchy Pool, it was booked out by a high school.... so we gave him his first present, the RC ship pictured above. He had a great time playing with that until a change over of batteries and lack of connection seen Andrew diving into the highly polluted water to retrive said ship only to rip a sizably deep gash into the sole of his foot. It bled for a long long time and so we went straight home to lunch and phoning around Doctors... so it was a huge boring wait before being seen and being told that it couldn't be stitched with a high likelihood of infection, most of the gunk taken out, script in hand and off to Rueben's Mini-Golf party. Dante over ate on the sweets and made himself ill, he came home to Kai who was also under the weather with high temps and a sore neck (a few moments of menigitous concern - but then his temp fell as quickly as it came. Cupcakes were his birthday cake of choice with underwater animal lollies. He felt a little sad and ripped off, but he'll have an unbirthday to make up for it later. As with all birthday traditions the birthday boy gave a small gift to each sibling - it really does work as an antidote to sibling rivalry! This is what was given:

Labyrinth - A new dress Kai - A model tank Raven - Transformer ship Monika - a Littlest Pet Shop Monkey Plushie (he had his eyes on that gift for weeks! Monika and her Monkeys!)

So some of the lessons we've squeezed in are: The primary and secondary colours, and how to make them, making and decorating cupcakes, gardening, McDonalds math (it's pretty good for free), singing, parts of speech, 3 lessons of Japanese, a lesson of Spanish, Monster's We Met Documentary, some new books, reading aloud/chapter books, PE, forming an argument, and drawing.

Finishing off our Life in the Undergrowth unit

We watched the last of Life in the Undergrowth: SuperSocieties. It was fascinating. Here is an example of the work we did, putting words into alphabetical order. We also did math and science work as well. The next set of documentaries is entitled Private Life of Plants. I've actually seen some of these on TV and found them quite interesting, but looking at the amount of episodes dedicated to our planet's plantlife and weighing up keeping the children interested throughout all of it - plus I'll be making the unit worksheets/activities/lessons to accompany I'm thinking I've got my doubts. I mean it's not quite the volume of work that birds/mammals will be but I am confident I'll be able to keep them interested in that. We'll we will see... I intend to do practical work with them (ie we're about to put in a vege garden and we have roses/jasmine/tomato plants already going - oh and lady finger banannas. So I guess I'll have to be creative about how we go about our next adventure to keep up their enthusiasm and interest. Wish me luck.

Our current watching of the David Attenborough DVD encylopedia Life On Earth, beginning with Life In the Undergrowth is currently inspiring our current theme of work. Here we have our worksheets from today, writing, drawing, maths and we also learnt about antanyms and synanyms. They chose their favourite critters to draw and write about. In order of Kai, Dante, Labyrinth.

Below is Raven and Monika's efforts. Raven is keen to write and Monika is keen to grow up quick!

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They were such a pleasure to work with today, they had a real interest in what they were doing, they were trying very hard to do their very best and they really seemed to have jumped a few bridges since the last time we sat down to such formal lessons. Since we have been doing much more natural learning I am starting to become a believer in natural learning/unschooling. They love to learn which magical and sooo important for them, I'm so glad they don't go to school to have it beaten out of them! Just positive vibes here today *)

SPACE!! unit continuation...

Up today is the continuation of our exploration and learning about space. No, won't all be about worksheets*, we will also be putting our planet system together, doing some lovely art inspired by science and attempting poetry. We are also going to attempt the huge mural that was part of the worksheets unit. So here is today's efforts (a snapshot, we actually did 9 worksheets [science, math and language] today but that would have bogged down the blog, so to speak):

*Worksheets have been sourced from www.learningpage.com thanks for putting up excellent resources!

SPACE (26 August)

We're doing a unit of study - SPACE !! This is Tuesday's efforts...
Raven's up first... Earth and Moons of Earth and Mars.



Here is Kai's work: Earth, moons and Sun.


Dante's Earth, moons and Sun:

And finally Labyrinth's Earth, moon and Sun:

Below are 2 examples of other work we did, rhyme and subtraction. We also did addition. There was so much work it was impossible to put it all on (as it was it was an hour of scanning and preparing.