A Peek At Our Week - Collage Friday - May 2015

It's been several weeks since my last weekly wrap up style post so I figured it was time to share again what our weeks are looking like during this current season, with a collage Friday.

It is a busy one, right now and at times even quite frantic, but it is also a season that is brimming with co-operative learning, building relationships and setting wonderful foundations for the future.

Monday's we spend a quiet few hours in the morning at home, ensuring we are ready for our upcoming week. At the moment I am needing to spend quite a bit of my weekend in teacher planning mode and whilst I always need a break at the end of each term, I do really enjoy planning lessons, activities and excursions.

This includes an hour or so with our regular morning basket/table time routine, whilst it changes with the seasons the essence of it always remains the same. A space to come together, read, chat, draw, paint and connect.

From there everyone moves off for a couple of hours of individual work. I begin with the youngest child with some one on one time and then move to each of the children spending time with them on their current work.

Our afternoons right now are spent with a few other local families for piano and art lessons.

We've cut back this year on our after school extra curricular activities so that means Monday evenings are nice and quiet.

Tuesday's is our small family co-op days. These are such a blessing to our family and have been growing with importance and work covered consistently. We have a great team of parents that all work together very well to provide this 'micro-schooling experience' for our children.

Co-op days see us working through roughly 80 - 90% of any subject area that isn't under the umbrella of the three R's, although we cover a little of those at times too!

Currently our Tuesday's look a little like this - For the Primary Aged group, Geography Activities (mapping etc), Around The World Cultural travels, A Literature Unit, Australian History. For the High School aged group, Geography, Mind Mapping Activities, Creative Writing, Australian History.

Tuesday evenings are free also from after school activities.

Wednesday's we are back to a quiet morning, which generally flow in a similar manner to Monday mornings.

We then grab a quick bite to eat and head out the door to our local Community Gardens, where we have been meeting with homeschool families.

Wednesday evenings see my eldest off to his local Drama class. This term he has also enrolled in the musical so he has a double lesson on a Wednesday night. My middle child is also participating in the Musical so she attends that component of the lessons.

Thursday's is co-op day again. Topics/subjects currently on a Thursday are - For the Primary Aged group, Chemistry, Games Hour, Nature Study & Art Techniques. For the High School Aged group, Chemistry, Creative Writing, Nature Journals, Art Techniques

Thursday evenings are a tad chaotic for me as I spend a large portion of my night driving kids here there and everywhere! My youngest has his Drama class up first, then my middle child has hers and in between that I need to get my eldest off to his Emergency Service Cadets program and of course pick them all up when they are done. Thursday nights are fun I tell you!!!!

Friday's phew, did you make it? Do you need a nap like I do come Friday? The morning's are slow and easy. We always start our morning basket gathering very late on a Friday, we all need some of that downtime.

Those mornings, once we do get started are simply another Monday morning routine, with a few hours in the afternoon to do whatever we wish. On quiet days at home and especially now that the weather has finally cooled we try to get out for a stroll and a bike ride.

Friday afternoon's all three of them are enjoying Gymnastics. Whilst they are in class I often head off to do a spot of grocery shopping.

That there is pretty much our current week in a nutshell. Yes it's busy, but we love it and it so full of amazing opportunities and in a few short weeks the majority of the busyness will die down to next to nothing and we will have weeks at a time to spend leisurely at home. It's all about seasons and their ebb and flow, we very simply embrace the one in which we are currently in.

Thanks for joining us for a peek inside our week. I do share more behind the scene snaps over at Instagram, see you there!

Happy Homeschooling,
Kylie

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Keys, Leaves, Sandy Toes & Movies ~ Collage Friday

I rarely find the time to document a week in review type post. I love the idea of it and have tried on many occasions to keep it up weekly, it never lasts longs. I just don't have the time or the dedication to write up posts like that.

So I'm letting go of all of that and will share review type posts when the mood strikes, when I have taken enough photo's in the week and when I have the time and inclination to put something together. It just so happens that that time is now.

So here's a little collage of our week, well some of our week anyway. I'm generally too busy during our structured school mornings to take photo's.

I've numbered each photo to make it a bit easier for you to follow along.

1. We try to draw a lot here, most mornings there is some kind of drawing happening. My daughter is heavily invested in drawing animals of all sorts right now. Love to see her budding passions.

2. Who would have thought a pile of sand would evoke so much fun and so much chaos. This pile is right at our front door and whilst the kids have been having a blast with it, there is constantly sand all through my house. Let's just say that that little pile has been the bane of my existence this week.

3. We all had new to us piano lessons for the first time this week. We have a lovely new teacher, that is also a homeschooling mum taking us through our lessons that are all about loving to play, no drill and kill piano lessons here. It was also my first ever piano lesson. I tell you I was petrified and to be honest I still am but I think I have nailed our first song, after plenty of practice and am now ready for next week.

4. Yay a kids movie that I actually enjoyed. We went with a bunch of our homeschool friends to see Home this week.

5. Couldn't resist this cute little pic from the movie.

6. We finally completed our Room To scale drawings, we've been working on these with our art teacher for a few weeks. There is so much work in this than it first appears.

7. The kids tried their hand at some leaf resist art with homeschoolers at our local community gardens. We will be doing more of this at home soon, it was lots of fun and looks very cool.

8/9. It was bring your camera day to the gardens, the kids were snap happy, taking shots of all the weird and wonderful plants.

10. More garden craft.

11. We made a start on our Leonardo da Vinci unit. My eldest is about to tackle him as part of his history program so I thought it was the perfect opportunity for us to all learn a little more about this amazing man.

12. mmmm just realised this is a double up, not sure what happened there

What's not included in the collage, of course there is the regular but not so exciting to take photo's of, math, english, phonics, read alouds. We also had a weekly co-op day, drama classes and SES Cadets, plus there is always plenty of swimming and minecraft fun.

So that's our week in a nutshell. Hope this week has been kind to you!

Happy Homeschooling
Kylie

This post is linked to Collage Friday

The Week That Was - It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

This was the week where we wrapped up most of what we've been working on this term. Technically the last week of school for us, we are officially on summer holidays, although we do have a couple of things to attend next week. Book work at home is done, we had our last small group co-op meet and our last Christmas Around The World meet for the year.

 

We completed our Biomes Unit last week, which left some space during co-op day this week for us to take a closer look at a couple of famous people. First up, Neil Armstrong and secondly Louis Braille. Here the kids tried their hand at creating their own Braille Alphabet and then worked on writing their names in Braille.

Our unit on Simple machines was also completed, the kids explored Pulleys and Gears, here they are looking at gear Ratio.

We've had an amazing year with this group of families and have almost finished planning out our year for 2015. If you haven't tried this style of learning I urge you to give it a go. Flexibility, team work and an open mind is key, but if you can keep those things in check I am certain you will have a blast. Go grab a family or two and plan some fun learning adventures to have together next year.

We hit the shops this week, admiring all the beautiful Christmas decorations. Yes sure you could take plenty home, but where on earth do people store all of these things throughout the year??

In the end we did bring home a couple of new items and have been busy all week displaying them around the house. We enjoy admiring our, "Dreaming of a White Christmas" area, since we would need to travel a great distance to experience such a thing. Here in Australia we can only dream of all that snow, whilst we are sweltering in our heat!

Whilst we were out and about we spotted this guy so took the opportunity to have the annual snapshot taken. This is the second year in a row the B has said he won't go sit with Santa. Last year I was able to persuade him and this year I had the help of Santa, not quite sure what will happen next year. I just thought kids would sit on Santa's lap forever, don't they? Aren't they doing this even when they 30 something hehehehe ;-)

 

There was a good chunk of time spent handwriting Christmas Cards. C6, was most proud he diligently sat there (over the course of the week) and wrote out just as many cards as his brother and sister. Every now and then stopping to tell me that his hand was sore, but on he trudged. The beauty of truly finding something they desire to do!

Whilst we haven't officially been out to see the local Christmas lights as yet, we are lucky enough to have this pretty cool house just two doors down from us. As you can imagine we walk and drive buy this place several times in the lead up to Christmas.

We had another visit from Dr Joe (we are doing a 5 week Space themed Science Club). Here he discussed how liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen are used in space. Of course he had to start the show with a bang....block your ears everyone! Yes that was a balloon!

After discussing the relative size of the planets in relation to the sun....that's my son hiding behind the big white umbrella sun there. The group each made a scale model of the Solar System to take home and add to their collection of science related toys they have made over the past few weeks.

Finally we wrapped up our Christmas Around The World unit this week also, by visiting Italy and looking at all of the festivities they include in their celebrations during this time of the year.

After having visited all of those countries we simply had to end with a feast from around the world and that is exactly what we did! It was wonderful and the kids all tried dishes that they may not normally eat on a regular basis.

After lunch surprise gifts were waiting under the tree for everyone and they all got to take home their much loved hand made tree decorations. This was so much fun to explore with friends.

That was a very full but also very rewarding week for us all.

This post is linked up at Collage Friday and Weekly Wrap Up head over there to check out more week in review posts.

The Week that Was: Halloween Chickens & Mexican Poinsettia's

After the ups and downs of the past couple of weeks I was pretty determined that we would do our best to have a regular and mostly normal week this time round.

We did pretty well with that, still didn't get to anywhere near as much as I would've liked to but there's always next week!

Co-op day saw us taking a closer look at the Taiga Biome, via discussion, documentary clips and slideshows. Everyone completed their flip book and got to work on their collages.

We also completed an activity on the Seven Ancient Wonders of The World and covered Inclined Planes in our Simple Machines unit.

For B, this week was all about finishing off Fractions with Math U See Epsilon, I have a feeling he's quite happy to have that behind him. Now time to knuckle down and complete the remainder of the Decimals lessons with Zeta.

Fix It grammar is going quite well. At this early stage it is all review for him, but so far this appears to be the one grammar program we have tried that seems to make the most sense to both of us. He is completing a full weeks worth of lessons in one sitting, at the moment. I really like that it includes vocabulary words and the use of a good old fashioned dictionary.

If you follow along on my Facebook page you would have noticed that I recently purchased the Logic Of English program. I spent a considerable amount of time reading reviews and watching video's before jumping in and purchasing this program. It's far too early to offer much in the way of thoughts on it just yet, but so far it has had K and I practicing phonograms and jumping head first into learning cursive handwriting.

We headed out to Art Lessons again this week, where the theme was Halloween inspired acrylics. This was quite an interesting activity, the idea was to paint a Halloween scene that also included chickens, sounds a little strange huh! Apparently next week at art the chickens will come into play again so everyone went along with it.....it's Halloween in the chicken coop!!

Venus! We visited Venus this week as part of our space explorations, although we did run out of time to complete our craftivity on that one so first up Monday morning it will have to be.

Friday afternoon saw us gathering for a visit to Mexico as part of our Christmas Around The World Unit. We tried our hand at singing a couple (listening to) of traditional carols, chatted about the Los Posadas festival, marked our maps and made sure we all knew where Mexico was on the world map.

We watched this retelling of the story, The Legend of the Poinsettia, made our very own poinsettia crafts and finished the afternoon off with putting together Mexican inspired Pinata's, which are currently hanging on the tree waiting for our end of term party!

And that is another week done and dusted.

This post is linked at Collage Friday and Weekly Wrap Up

The Week I Became A Parent Of A Teenager!

This week began with an extra fun afternoon and something the kids and I look forward to each and every time it comes around. Our Roald Dahl Book Club! One of the young ladies in our small co-op has envisioned her book club for some time; between her, her mother, who tirelessly organises and preps all the behind the scenes stuff and myself we made it happen.

We meet every six weeks at their home, on a weekend. During that time everyone reads and/or listens to the audio version of the book. We've done, Witches, The Twits and this time around it was George's Marvellous Medicine.

The meeting begins with an always lively discussion about the book, the characters, the juicy bits, the funny bits and the really gross bits. Cause let's face it, there are generally at least some gross bits in each Roald Dahl book.

This time around the group got themselves into pairs and created their very own 'marvelous medicine' which they then presented to the group. So many laughs! I love that we tick so many boxes within this couple of hours but that it doesn't feel like we are learning at all. Isn't that the way it should be? We are simply a group of buddies having a great time together chatting and laughing about our current book.

We always wrap book club up with a yummy afternoon tea (everyone brings a plate) and some play time. Now that the weather is warming up nicely that play time is spent mostly in the pool!

It was our first co-op day for the term during this week also. These days are so important to both myself and the kids. We all love them and all get so much out of participating in the small group learning environment.

We have begun a unit on Biomes and will work through a large number of the Terrestrial Biomes over the coming weeks. During last term we all worked together on an Ecology unit, so a Biomes study for this term, ties in perfectly. This week we looked at the Tundra, chatted about it, viewed a slide show and completed a very cool flip flap booklet.

After a little break for snacks and a bit of an energy release we gathered to work on our Tundra collages.  Each week we will complete a different Biome collage on the faces of a box.

We also took a closer look at Edmund Hillary, Mt Everest and glaciers. Did you know that Mt Everest is actually growing every single year? Pretty impressive stuff!

The day rounded out with the introduction of our Simple Machines Unit. We discussed the terms Power, Force and; Work and put them into action with a couple of simple lifting experiments. I introduced the topic with a couple of very short clips found on you tube. From there we looked at Friction and completed a simple experiment on the amount of force required to move an object dependent on the level of friction that was in place.

Midweek saw us bouncing and chatting our little hearts out! The kids simply love these giant indoor trampolining centres and with the weather warming up quite quickly we wanted to get in a visit before the heat inside this place becomes unbearable. It was a lovely opportunity for the mums to connect with friends both old and new. These little homeschool outings truly are just as important for the mums (parents) as they are for the kids.

However the highlight of the week was most definitely our first born, turning 13. Did you see that? 13, I said, yes 13. I am now the parent of a teenager. Everyone tells you but you don't really get it until you experience it for yourself. Those years of little sticky fingers and muddy feet and tiny kisses and cuddles truly do fly by.

One minute you are up to your armpits in nappies and running around after toddlers, the next you are off buying your child their first mobile phone in peparation for the inevitable times ahead that they are off doing their own thing.

B13 chose to head to one of our newest attractions with just a few close friends, they climbed the walls, raced around the go cart track and tagged each other in laser force. All in all a fun couple of hours.

Later that afternoon all of our friends and family gathered to celebrate with him. The kids all got into games of backyard laser tag, smashing the pinata, enjoying birthday cake, dipping strawberries in the chocolate fountain and just plain old having fun! He went to bed one very happy teenager.

I took a look back at one of the first posts I ever wrote on the blog with an image of B in it. He's 7 in the photo on the right and working on one of his first pottery pieces. This was taken back in 2009. The photo on the left is one from his 13th Birthday party with his beautiful Great Grandmother, that turns 90 in just a few short weeks.

 My heart swells with love when I look back over the photo's on the blog, which truly is the number one reason I keep this little space going. A spot to reflect, to document and to count my blessings, which I do, every single time I sit down and look at it, because my life is full to the brim of blessings.

This post is linked at Collage Friday  and Weird Unsocialised Homeschoolers

First Aid, Pottery, Dancing & Samurai's

We've had a somewhat topsy turvy week here with the mess of the break in still being sorted. So we certainly didn't get to everything that was on the list, but you know what, that's life and life happens. Everyone has had many valuable learning experiences regardless.

At the beginning of last term B joined our newly formed local Emergency Services Cadets, so far he has thoroughly enjoyed the experience and is learning heaps along the way. Towards the end of the term he had the opportunity to sit for his First Aid Certificate, these were presented at this week's meeting. Loving that we now have someone in the house that is First Aid qualified!

Scratch got more of a workout this week, he began designing a Hobbit game. Typing practice is a regular thing here, yep even for my boys, just a great skill to have I think! He is very close to being done with MUS Fractions and has already made a start on Zeta, working in both books gives him a bit of break when the lessons get a little heavy going.

We reconnected this week with some lovely art teachers that we used to go to classes with a few years back. Their studio is a little out of the way for us but B gained so much from his time working with clay I really wanted the younger two to have that experience.

He began work on a report about Genghis Khan and continued to munch his way through The How To Train Your Dragon book series. He's nearly done, I think he will be heart broken when there are no more. We also started IEW's Fix It Grammar program this week. Grammar is a bugbear for me. I do see the value but really dislike the dry, drill and kill way that most programs teach the concepts. It's too early yet for any thoughts about Fix It so I'll save those for a few weeks time.

Miss K is plodding along with her academics, things don't come easily for her in this area, but she is making slow and steady progress. There's always read aloud practice and phonics work, she is working through MUS Beta at the moment and decided that she would tackle a Draw Write Now book I had here on the shelf. Not sure how long this interest will last. We have also recently begun Writing With Ease, to help her work on oral narrations.

Creativity is absolutely her thing, for the full 2.5 hours we were at the clay class she didn't flinch, complete focus. We were lucky enough to be given yet another hand designed bouquet from the garden this week and she literally spends hours upon hours on the trampoline.

C6's academic time is still very laid back and I try as much as I can to allow him to take some of the lead. I prepare items that I'd like him to look at and have a go at but he generally makes the choice on what he will actually do. So far he is grasping concepts with relative ease so this approach is working well for both of us.

The pool has well and truly gotten a work out this week. It's still quite chilly but you know kids!

We spent our entire last term with a focus on Knights so I really wanted the kids to understand some of what was going on in other parts of the world at around the same time. We began a brief intro to the Samurai by reading the applicable chapters in SOTW Book 2, checking our world map for place reference and printed off some of the mini booklets available here.

The Qld Fire & Rescue Service brought their smoke house (van) out to us and gave the group of 30+ kids an excellent Fire Safety Presentation.

Seriously I cannot believe it is this close to Christmas! We started a Christmas Around The World unit and will work on that once a week for the next 7 or so weeks. I needed something that had ALL of the prep work done so I headed to Teachers Pay Teachers and found quite a few different units on the topic. I ended up choosing two, one of which had a powerpoint included and the other had super cute journal pages that I knew I wanted to use. These units are aimed at young children, but we are still having fun with it.

Each week we talk about the different things that kids do from that chosen country, traditions that may be different to ours. Find the country on a map and look up Google Earth, listen to and sing traditional carols. We complete a journal page and a couple of simple crafts to go along with it all. A nice way to round out the year!

Last night we helped celebrate a special friends 40th Birthday at our closest German club. We had a blast and the kids had a fabulous night. Lots of dancing, massive meals, loads of people and lots and lots of noise!

And that about wraps up another week for us.

This post is linked at:

Collage Friday

From Lion Kings To Break Ins

We are currently on term break at the moment, which means a nice little break from planning lessons and facilitating our days. Things are all pretty carefree here right now. Since I have some time on my hands I thought I'd get to work on a week in review type post.

Our week began with a bang! We've had our tickets for The Lion King for some time now, waiting patiently for this day to arrive. Our children are regular theatre attendees, they've seen and been a part of some fabulous productions over the years but this was their first experience inside a theatre of this size. It was really quite exciting!

The production of The Lion King certainly did not disappoint us in any way, each and every one of us had our eyes and our hearts glued to that stage. We can't wait to see what's coming next!

We headed into the city much earlier than we needed to for The Lion King, this gave us some time to check out the Jemima Wyman Pattern Bandits exhibition at GOMA. It was full of patterns, kaleidoscopes, tessellations, camouflage and more.

The kaleidoscope hall was particularly fun and interactive. Odd shaped screens all at different heights so that people of all ages could easily interact with them.

Each screen had it's own camera and gave the kids a kaleidoscope image of themselves that had them giggling for ages.

As you moved closer or further away from the camera the image changed quite dramatically. They had to work to position themselves to get a great looking image. This exhibition was loads of fun!

Quite a bit coding happened this week after I saw a magazine at the store. B13 got straight to it as soon as I handed him the book. It covers scratch in a little more detail, SmallBASIC and gives them a start on Visual Basic. He will continue to work through it over the coming weeks.

The kids attended a school holiday program at their Gymnastics/Free Running centre. They were originally only booked in for one day but they loved it so much they begged to go again! They are goofing around at break time here!

We spent time catching up with friends, no photo's to share though, as I was too busy catching up ;-)

 

More holiday fun at their gymnastics centre, it's tricky to get any decent photo's when they are always moving so quickly in there.

We have a budding florist on our hands and K10 has been whipping up handpicked and created bouquets quite a lot of late. Always lovely to bring inside some of the goodness from outside.

 C6 was pretty chuffed that he got in his first quick dip of the season. Still a bit chilly but he was all smiles regardless.

We got to spend the day with my sister and her gorgeous kids! Always love hanging out with these guys. It was our first trip to the beach for the season also. Once again water was freezing, but it was lovely relaxing on the sand, soaking up some gorgeous rays.

Whilst we were out enjoying a lovely day someone was at home breaking in, going though our belongings and stealing our beloved items. What a terrible thing to come home to! Consequently we have spent much of the weekend clearing up the mess that an experience like this entails. It will still be some while before this is all behind us.

So what's a girl to do when you are somewhat down on your luck and feeling a little blue, besides picking yourself and carrying on of course. Well a little retail therapy always does the trick!

Given that we are in the think of the Middle Ages with our history studies this year I have been thinking of this series for some time now and decided to take the plunge. We've only watched the first couple of episodes but so far we are enjoying it.

So whilst our week didn't end so well we are very much looking forward to a much smoother, less eventful week ahead.

This blog is linked at:

Collage Friday