I keep finding toys wrapped up in sellotape (by Danielle). And a lot seem to have acorn tops stuck on them...

We made a spontaneous visit to the local markets this morning since we were dropping my parent's dog off to the nearby kennels. Eating locally made ice cream. I had no shoes for the kids, but I came up with a pair of Nathan's gumboots for him floating around the car, and found a smaller size of the same for Danielle in the back of the car in amongst the emergency supplies. She was dubbed the Taihape Fairy by a few of the stall owners lol. They wooed their way with the cheese lady and she gave them the last (but opened-and-taste-tested-so-no-point-having-on-display) block of sheep's milk feta which was YUM! We were looking at the locally made pork sausages and Nathan wanted to try an unusual looking variety (and gluten free). So I think we'll be having an international meal of cheese and sausage tomorrow!

Danielle wanted a hat for her doll and I noticed this going on...;)

(and yes, that's a sleeping Nathan in the background, guess those 5.45am starts are doing him in - coz they sure are doing me in...)
This afternoon Nathan got out a maths workbook and wanted to do a few of the things in there.

It really is almost summer

Wow, the weather has really warmed up in the past week and we've been enjoying more time out in the garden, going for walks and thinking about Christmas and the summer ahead of us.

Today we went for a walk and gathered together some materials to make some decorations and blogged about here.

We also read quite a bit, the kids played on the computer on the starfall site for a wee while and then Nathan created a game for them to play (I love how he turns a technology game back into an old-fashioned game - kinda lol). He asked me to use the hand controller and he would be the character of the game who would jump, leap, run, spit fire out his mouth etc. Danielle then had her turn.

We had some firewood for next winter delivered the other day and it went across our whole driveway. So Nathan made a path down the side for us to get down to the garden still. Later on in the day (yesterday) he then wanted to make a track through the centre and spent time working on that and carried on this morning. I'm thinking it's work in progress as there is still about a 1/4 to go.

A catch up of photo's

My mum gave me a CD of a bunch of photo's from over the past year and it had ones of our caving trip we did over winter and a few from my brother's wedding from a few weeks ago.






(I'm sure this photo makes me look wider than I am lol).

Today started as usual with me on the computer while the kids watched some TV.

I had the kitchen clean and the washing on by 9.30am and we sat down to read together.

Nathan was going through his bookcase to find something we hadn't read for a while. I spotted our Dick and Jane book and asked if he'd like to have a go reading from it. This book used to drive me bonkers from the time it was given to me by my mum (surely only bought for the trip down nostalgia lane lol) and it's been probably 6mths that I have read it. Prior to reading age, it would send me around the bend reading the nonsense sentences, but now I can see the sense in reading it together now that he is at the age of knowing some words and having the ability to sound out others. We sat down to read and got through 55 pages (if you are unfamiliar with these are books, they have pages with maybe 4 lines of writing and each line with 4-5 words on it). Each story is perhaps 4 pages long and this book is a bunch of stories one after another and each builds on what was read in the story prior. Kind of a cool idea now that I can see how it works lol. Anyway, he was so into it and it gave him such confidence that he knew almost all of the words or was able to think on them for a few seconds with just the occasional help from me to get him going that he didn't want to stop.

We then found a spider that must have somehow fallen into the washing machine and it tumbled out dead from the washing. The kids were fascinated with it's large size (well, large by New Zealand standards, but my Australian friends laughed at me lol) and Nathan raced off to get his New Zealand Life Size Guide to Insects and proceeded to identify it. We weren't too sure though and googling images of them just gives me the creeps after a while lol.

After lunch we met up with our unschooling group down at one of the local playgrounds for a few hours before returning home to let the chickens our for a run around, check out our pond to see if we could find our new frogs that we were given yesterday (but not to be seen, although Simon and the kids spotted one poking it's head out from under a lily pad yesterday evening) so I'm sure they're in there somewhere.

Random daily maths...

Yesterday I made a bunting for Danielle's wall and Nathan was asking me how I made my cardboard cutout of the triangle. So I showed him how I had made a rectangle, found the centre on one of the short sides and drew lines from the dot to meet the corners of the opposite side and how that gave me an isoceles triangle.

After feeding the chickens this morning, we stopped on the way back up the front path to the door and munched on very plump sweet peas for a while. Nathan showed me that the peas when split open had alternating patterns of peas and was adding the sides together.

We were looking at one of the sunflowers that has gotten quite tall just in the past few days, so we measured it and I popped it onto a piece of paper that we can look at once it's fully grown.

Another day in the life...

We had our home day today. Boy, did *I* need it too. It is definitely days like these that I love about unschooling and can truly appreciate the "learning through life" the "organic learning" the "natural learning" or whatever you want to call it.

Sure learning happens all the time for everyone, but since we rely on this style as our primary means of learning I sometimes wonder if it really can work out longterm. I had a bit of a week of feeling overwhelmed, reflecting on and getting angsty over whether I was doing an injustice to my children by unschooling, blah blah. Yesterday morning I met up with a friend for coffee while the kids played in the adjoining playground and it refreshed and revived my soul. Then, a wonderful flowing day like today (which do seem to happen quite frequently even if I feel that sometimes they're not often enough) make it all so worthwhile.

I was also able to pinpoint where things felt off during the week - as I often read on online unschooling forums (and witness it for myself), kids *will* feel boredom and loll around and appear to not be getting anything out of the experience, but before you know it they move on into a new phase and discover new things, get creative, burst forth with curiosity and questions once again. It's amazing to just let it happen and know that they will move on past it pretty quickly and given the space and time to do so. So, after Nathan having a few flat days where he seemed tearful over many things, bored with life (even though he doesn't say so, his body language speaks it for him) and nothing seems to interest him nor satisfy him for long he seemed a changed we lad this morning too (and consequently wasn't annoying his sister and setting her off either!). Seems we had spent a few days bouncing off each others moods and we all needed a bit of balancing out again!

First up, after a bit of morning TV for the kids and internet time for me, we made some yoghurt and squeezed a bunch of oranges to make ice cubes that the kids love to chomp on throughout the day. We then decided that we'd make some little cheesey bread buns for lunch so got that going too.

We then read from our latest Laura Ingalls book "The Long Winter" and it seemed to spark a few things for Nathan.

He was asking what muskrats were and why and how they lived in mud huts. After a bit of googling, this inspired him to want to build his own. So we went out to the garden and he collected together materials for mixing together and worked on moulding it to the shape he wanted. He had decided he would make a little hut for our new frogs to have as a shelter when they arrive next week for our little garden pond. We set it to dry in the sun and when checking on it later as we went to feed the chickens, we discovered it had bird footprints in it and was partly scratched away! Still, hopefully it will survive long enough to dry out completely and see how we did.


(check out the change of clothes in between shots - no wonder I wash so many clothes a day...)

Danielle spent a bit of time working on her swinging and singing...

From reading The Long Winter we also got on to discussing seasonal changes and how animals and birds instinctively know when to migrate, when to build and extra insulate their sleeping place for the winter, and how their fur coats grow thicker and then thin out again as summer arrives.

We watched a large flock of blackbirds (about 20 of them) descend on our garden in one spot and constantly jumping, flying, leaping around for a few minutes before moving on. The kids were fascinated and it was one of the first things they told their dad about when he arrived home after work.

We wondered where the chickens were. We'd let them out to roam around but all we could hear was a huge clucking/squwarking racket coming from the nesting box. All three of them were squished in obviously trying to (or wanting to) simultaneously lay their eggs!

While doing a bit of tidying up and household work together this afternoon, Nathan was continuing to make sense of death, birth, marriage, having children and family trees and how they all fit together (including step parents and children) - these were once individual topics, but I notice they get blended and roll on together during our conversations these days.

The topic then moved on to animals in the wild and their life and death cycle. He then mentioned someone needing their heart cut out and a new one put in and wondered if that could happen - so we discussed donors. And then pondered if we could eat heart which lead onto discussing offal. He then asked about when I had broken some bones as a child - the hows and whys which then moved on to technology. Love it! I broke a bone at school and my mother couldn't be contacted, he wondered why not, so I explained how there were no mobile phones back in those days and we had no answer phone - so when the school couldn't get my mother at home, there was no other way of her getting the message. This of course led on to inventions and inventors.

During the afternoon I was sorting out booking a campsite for some summer camping in January. Nathan has been looking forward to camping again since last summer. So he wanted to write out a list of what we needed to take with us. While working on his list he was having me help spell the words out but had things click with turning a noun into the plural form (without me mentioning about nouns and plurals just yet though lol).

This afternoon the lego came out which hasn't really been played with so much recently. He picked up one of his little cars and decided to have a go at replicating it out of lego.

Later on the kids wanted to jump on the computer for a while, so I showed Nathan a new website I'd come across with some games based around animals - it had games based on mammals, birds, amphibians etc as well as what were herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. I wandered off to read a book in the sun with a cup of tea and they then switched to the Reader Rabbit Maths CD for a little while.

As he was watching me prepare dinner he was chomping away on a few of the nacho chips we were going to be using and started rattling off a few number additions based around how many he was eating and had left to eat and asking what some larger numbers were added together. A few days back we were talking about roman numerals again as they came up in one of the library books we had out. Our dominoes were sitting nearby at the time and he started fiddling with them and forming the numerals.

This evening while we read a few more pages from The Long Winter he picked up another book we had started but put aside (The Hobbit) and said that The Hobbit had more pages than The Long Winter. But after showing him how to flick to the back of the book and compare them we discovered that there was a difference of about 50 pages.

Such simple things to be talking about and learning from - but no less significant...

Crazy busy times

Wow! We so need a quiet day at home but it's seeming next to impossible lately. We've been catching up with friends, making time for family, playcentre, 2 x different sorts of homeschooling meet ups a week and it doesn't leave a lot of downtime. It's all fun, fun, fun but Nathan has been asking for some time at home so this week I have managed to save one day where that will happen.

However, there always seems to be time for drawing and reading.

I discovered this, this evening after returning from dinner at nannie's house.

I haven't seen Danielle draw a map before, nor much more than people, so it was neat to find it. She rattled off to me who was who and what all the features were.

This afternoon Nathan and I wandered around our herb garden as I was checking out what I had growing. He was quizzing me on what they all were and was having a sniff of them all.

The kids found an old sprinkler in the garage and set it up for a wee run around in in the gorgeous warm sun and devised ways to stop the water without turning off the tap (squeezing the hose or grabbing a cardboard box and using it to shield them as they put it over the top etc).

Last night we went down to a local event to watch the fireworks display for Guy Fawke's Night. The kids had a great time out and even managed to stay awake for the display which didn't kick off till 9pm when it got dark.

We've finished reading On the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls-Wilder and I picked up the next in the series to begin soon. In the meantime we've been reading a few other short stories and poetry at bedtime.

Out of the house day...

We headed off to do the grocery shopping this morning and a few new conversations were had - guide dogs, donations and petrol prices.

After getting home and putting away the chilled and frozen items we gathered together what we needed to go off to the local outdoor pools for meeting up with the homeschooling group. The kids had heaps of fun (even Danielle who fell under twice but was quickly plucked out by me before she took in any water - I'm consistently amazed at quickly and quietly and how little she struggles when she goes under...). Nathan was introduced to 4 other 5 year old boys and joined in a game with a bunch of other kids his age which was retrieving some battens that were tossed for them to bring back.

We came home and had a rest from all the sun by reading a bunch of books including some library books I'd grabbed for them last night. We then moved on and played a game where we took turns building beetles.

Once the day had cooled off and the garden was getting a bit of shade we went down to let the chickens out for a roam around while I resumed a little weeding and thinning of some carrots (which Danielle decided needed to eaten right there and then). Nathan had taken a small table, some paper and pencils down with him to do some drawing. He spent a while drawing under the shade of a tree and then climbed up his pear tree, found a comfy possie* and sat up there drawing and thinking for a while before announcing that he never wanted this tree cut down.


*I've just learnt something - I know that word is slang for position, but just googled the spelling since it's the first time I've written it and found out that it was made up during WWI by the Aussies (but was probably the Kiwi's who made it up...;)).

Last weekend we went away and the kids experienced a bunch of new things. We flew down to the south island for my brothers wedding. It was their first time on an aeroplane which they thoroughly enjoyed, before jumping in the car for a 4hr drive which had a bunch of interesting things to look at on the way.

The day after the wedding we went for a drive around the area and looked at the hydro dams which were right next to the town we were staying in. At one of the dams there was an information centre which had a fantastic educational set up with working models of how hydro power stations work to create electricity. Both kids had heaps of fun pumping, winding and pushing levers to get the model to work.

They then went for a paddle in the very cold lake before heading back to the house we were staying in.

The Performer

We had our meet up with our unschooling group today. They all came over to our house and Nathan had plans for entertaining them.

He woke this morning and was straight into designing a puppet show set to put on a show for his friends. He didn't have a box to use for the show, but cut a large hole out of a piece of A4 paper, got out the finger puppets and had me attach the sheet of paper into a doorway and hid his chair around the corner so he could reach his arm out and have the puppets appear through the hole.

He then arranged all the dining chairs in rows in front of the puppet show, bought out his CD player and chose a song to put on so he could do a dance as well.

He wanted to make a gluten free cake to serve up, then made a sign for the door announcing it was a "Dance Show".

When everyone had arrived, he had them assembled and sitting in their seats while he prepared ("quiet please, and no giggling, but you can run around until I'm ready" lol).

He began by announcing the start with one puppet and then moved on with an impromptu show. He did some gymnastics, a little dancing, found a coin and did a magic trick, got out his juggling sticks and did a few tricks with those, played the African drum and then announced the show was over.

He did great!