Moving into winter

It's all about catching the outside days while we've got them. Simon had the afternoon off work on Tuesday since he had to work a half of his day off on Monday. Since the sun *finally* came out after a wet weekend we headed into the hills for a walk that we hadn't done before.

This morning we got out our Earthwise book and turned to the Winter pages. Something that I've often wanted to try only never gotten around to it. We made a quick version of a Pomander with an orange and cloves. I may investigate making one using other spices that I dry off as well.



And then there's a lot of the usual questions about all sorts, asking what words say, how they're spelt, figuring out how the larger numbers all fit together, writing notes and messages, playing with lego, hanging out in the garden and sandpit, riding bikes, doing some housework and cooking, watching DVDs and cutting up paper, and more paper.

Last week I ordered a book called The Story of the World (Volume 1: Ancient Times) and it arrived today (seems to be quite big in the homeschooling world). Looks really interesting so far and I really like the way it's been written - the kids were drawn in right away. Seems a really easy introduction to history with a lot of potential for delving into topics further as they want. The activity book that accompanies it should arrive in the next few days as well - kinda mixed about it as it seems to have a lot of "busy work", but my two quite like doing things like that anyway, so they can just pick and choose what appeals to them.

This morning Nathan made a kite for his cousin that he wants to post to her. I'm thinking he was inspired by all the wind outside.

Danielle then made one to take over for her Grampy this afternoon.

This afternoon Nathan got out the Set cards. If you haven't heard of these, they are fantastic and quite addictive. Nathan got these for his 5th birthday and we've pulled them out now and again and really have fun seeing how many sets we find. So far we've only played with the one colour, but I reckon he'd be ready to move on to all colours soon (me and Simon just played a full game for the first time). It's certainly not just a kids game and one that would appeal to most people. Just check out the reviews on Amazon.

A catch up...

Right, so back at the weekend...

I got the kids some more pavement chalk and they spent ages drawing roads, houses and journeys to their friends and rellies house's.

Here, I spotted Danielle transporting herself down the hallway by transferring chairs and cushions over themselves so she didn't touch "the hot lava".


On Monday afternoon we went and played with some friends we hadn't seen for quite a few months (difficulty getting together with school routines and not living all that near each other).

Yesterday we went down to the shops to post Nathan's thank you letter to my great-aunt who always remembers their birthday's and then on to the park. Danielle started collecting a bunch of seeds we had spotted a few weeks back. We bought them all home and they kids got them spinning. It's funny, as soon as I saw these seeds a few weeks ago I had an instant recall of times as a child playing with them and showed the kids how if you throw them up they will spin down (I thought Simon would remember these, but he'd never played this game).


They spent many hours playing with them and they remained on the floor for most of the day and all evening until I vacummed them up this morning.

Today was horribly cold and blustery, so we stayed home all day.

They both were making parachutes...

Then safari animals from lego...

Nathan constructing sentences on the fridge while I was doing some much needed deep-cleaning in the kitchen...

After dinner Danielle got out one of her workbooks and wanted to go through some of the counting, addition and subtraction exercises with me.

Reading at bedtime inspired them to draw what they'd eaten that day (the book was discussing eating all colours of foods)...


Nathan spent a bit of time at bedtime discussing volcanoes and a nightmare he'd had the previous night. I wonder if it's been triggered by the book Under the Mountain (although it doesn't discuss exploding volcanoes), but his line of questioning is focused on the people of Pompeii. I can't recall when this topic first came up, but it's certainly been a source of discussion from him for about a year now, and every few months he seems to revisit it. Tonight I was able to help him realise that in these modern times we have systems and ways of being alerted to some natural disasters and how we learn from history and how that can be helpful for how we now live our lives and decisions that we make.

Latest DVD's: Nim's Island...again (requested by Nathan, he loves that she's homeschooled) and Nanny McPhee.

Outdoor day

A gorgeous day here and even quite warm. We decided to head out for another walk around our neighbourhood and headed off in a direction we hadn't for a while. The kids wanted to bring paper and pens and Danielle drew a map of of all hers friends and families houses.

Nathan pounced on a bunch of leaves and piled them in a "boat with a sail".

All in a row at 9.45am

(and then we play a game of jumping on each other's heads)
After stopping at the dairy for some fresh fruit, we wandered up to look out at the sea while eating our morning tea (and had a fantastic view of the South Island).

I stopped and noticed a lot of wild weeds and plants on our walk and was good to get in touch with what's in our neighbourhood again.

All in a row at 11am.

(and inspired by Stephanie's blog post, we will be investigating making a sundial someday soon when time allows).

Nathan was whacking around a long flax leaf that he found and after a while noticed a pungent odour released from it when it had been sufficiently beaten. We discussed how oils are extracted from many plants and flowers and suggested that he collect a variety of things to take home and pound to see what sort of smell comes out. Once home he gave them a bash around with a stone he bought home.

The results weren't very nice smelling (and he was disappointed that a lot of oil wasn't coming out and just seemed to be on the end of the stone!), so I suggested some garden herbs instead - much more pleasant!

I then had an idea from a homeschooling friend I was chatting on the phone last night whose daughter was wanting to distill some dirty water while I was on the phone to her. So we decided to attempt to rig up our own experiment to see if it would work. I suspect summer would be better, but also need to actually look up some instructions to figure a better way perhaps (I just worked in based on the cloud and rain experiments we did last year). We had a little condensation forming and running into the bowl, but not a lot (and one would be extremely thirsty by the time it had finised LOL!).

After lunch me and Danielle were flicking through one of our books and she asked what one of the pictures was. It was a flower press so I explained what it did and she raced off to collect some flowers from the garden. Since we don't have a press, we did the heavy-book-version.

I then felt like getting into my herb garden and giving it a bit of a tidy up. So trimmed and pruned a few plants (I'm sure the season is ALL wrong for doing that, but never mind), even transplanted a few that have since been crowded out by some very large herb plants (I really hope I haven't killed them off by doing that).
Here were the flowered oregano stems I chopped off.

The kids were out helping me and then moved on to filling the paddling pool and torturing each other with icy cold water.

We then headed over to Grampy's mid afternoon and Nathan asked Grampy how the canal systems worked (we'd been talking about the Panama canal for some reason). So Grampy being a real-life MacGyver had just the thing. In a couple of minutes he had set up a couple of large tubs, a water pump (hello! who just has a water pump lying around waiting for this question?) and showed in a kind-of-similar way how the water fills the locks and allows the boats to be transferred across land.

So it was a fun-filled day and just had that nice flow about it. I really wanted to get stuck into making some soap with the kids, but that will need to be another day!

Our days are feeling very driven by the weather at the moment. Fortunately there are enough sunny ones in between the rainy ones to keep ourselves sufficiently busy in many areas without feelign too contained inside all the time.

Over the weekend it was rainy on and off and quite cold. Simon took the kids down to a local car museum and then they went for a drive around discovering sights.

On Monday Nathan opened his birthday presents (a day early, but Simon was home with us so it was neat to inspect and spend time together checking out what he got). We had bought him a box of magic tricks - so many hours were spent learning them all and having a ball.

Tuesday was his birthday and I took them on a Farm Walk. We were out of the house by 9.30am and spent a lovely few hours wandering through the farm and then the tourist shops surrounding it. On the farm walk we spent ages looking and patting the baby rabbits and guinea pigs who were inside in the barn from the winter cold. Danielle was a bit concerned about where all the mummys were, but we soon discovered them outside in the usual enclosure in the cold! The farmer invited us to come back at 11am as he'd be bringing Cuddles the cow down for milking if we wanted to watch. We didn't expect to get a go too! So Nathan was keen to get stuck in and was rapt that he managed to milk her right away. Danielle wanted to, but wasn't keen when it came to grabbing her teat, so I had a go since it wasn't something I've done before either. Nathan was then totally engrossed with the milking machine the farmer put on her to finish off the milk and asked a heap of questions about how it worked, why it did what it did, what the certains noises etc were lol. We then got to take the bottles of milk outside and feed a couple of hungry calves. So all up, it made for a totally new experience which was really neat and one we weren't expecting (shame I forgot my camera!).

The kids chose a Spongebob DVD (groan from the mother lol), and they've both been spending time over the past few days drawing all the characters and making them to the correct ratios out of lego.

Today we headed out to the library and came home with a stack of "I Spy" books. We came across one last week that Nathan totally enjoyed (and Danielle a wee bit) and were pleased to see about another 5-6 books so we grabbed them. They have pages with hidden items and a list of things to find.

Nathan also came home with a "learn to draw" book and went through and drew all the types of trees in there.

This afternoon we headed off to meet up with our unschooling group and had a lovely afternoon out catching up with friends. Nathan and Danielle were down running around their lovely property and collected a bunch of large autumn leaves - Nathan has many plans for them! LOL.

We're almost through our Under the Mountain book and lining up which book to read next.

Thursday

The rain was gone and the kids wanted to get out for a walk this morning. So despite the icy Southerly breeze we decided to walk around the block. Both kids took turns walking the dolls stroller and we collected some lovely autumn leaves to do something with in the next few days.

We wandered past a local cafe we hadn't been in for a while, so popped in and had a coffee and a sweet pavlova/berry slice thing between us before heading back home for lunch.

Nathan received a birthday card and some money for his birthday that is next week and was busy planning what he could buy with it. So he wrote out a list of things that he wanted. Tomorrow we'll go out and find out prices and he will decide whether to wait and see if he gets anymore birthday money to get one of the big things or whether to settle on one of the smaller things with the money he already has.

This afternoon the kids had a friend come over to play.

Today the rain returned with a vengence - and thunder thrown in for good measure. Was cold and wet for a lot of the day.

We got out our Earthwise book again and looked for more autumn activities to do. We came across Baked Apples and with our abundance of apples from Monday's collection it seemed perfect.

So we mixed up a range of tasty ingredients to poke down the hole where I had cored the apples. We used peanut butter, chopped up dates, honey and cinnamon.

Nathan then carried on in the kitchen playing with his volcano, vinegar and baking soda.

We had been to the library yesterday so sat down to read heaps of books in front of the fire. They then wanted to do some workbook pages - Nathan's into a maths one and a spelling one at the moment, and Danielle's book is full of fun matching or counting exercises.

Nathan then spent a bit of time writing out messages and notes with my help.

After lunch the kids did manage to get out for a quick play in the sandpit.


Mid afternoon a friend come over to play.

After dinner we've been sitting around and I read to us all from a book called Under the Mountain. Simon is keen to sit in on the story too as it was made into a TV series when we were probably about 10 so it has been neat to relive it via the book which neither of us has read.

Apple picking

This afternoon we all headed up the line a bit to go and pick some apples. A fellow homeschooling friend had done some last week with her kids and I thought it would be a nice afternoon out for us too.

The kids were right into it, each had their own bucket, and a lot of the trees had low down branches that they could collect from.

Yesterday I noticed Danielle was making up a game - she'd collected together things to take to"school". We have a book called Brown Bear Barney and I suspect that is what she was imitating.

(love the half eaten apple and photo of her and Nathan).

Just a pic of my two goobers as we were about to set out for a walk the other day.

It's official

I have had my exemption to homeschool approved! Nathan will be turning 6 in a couple of weeks time. It felt scarier for me when he turned 5 since that's when other kids all start school and it was evident at that point that we were taking a different path to most, so I haven't really felt too weird about making our journey official.

My application was written in an openly unschooling fashion and instead of providing a timetable or schedule or routine I just wrote about a "typical week" of natural learning that goes on and made it clear that we don't plan it and it happens any time. OK, so the week I wrote my application seemed to cover all the Learning Areas that they require, so it felt very easy to put together (I used a few of the days prior to this post and then a few days after completed it nicely in a genuine week of learning).

Can't say EVERY week feels like that but it seems of little issue considering the leaps I seem both kids making even when we seemingly don't "do" things often. Danielle went from not writing at all (well aside from scribbles), to suddenly wanting to write and knows more letters than I realised. Then I hear her randomly chanting high numbers (I recall Nathan surprising me the same way after he learnt high numbers from playing on the playstation and having me count out as he scored points). He's recently completely figured out reading the digital clock (from asking me every morning if it's time to get up yet and clock watching till it ticks over - I ain't very unschooly before 6.30am lol). He's figured out how to read prices at the supermarket from playing his Reader Rabbit CD rom.

Yesterday I decided to get out the cuisenaire rods to show him the different number combinations that make up 10 (a moment of guilt that other kids his age are probably learning about that at school - roll eyes at myself) and what do you know...I didn't really need to point it out, he got it right away. Just confirms to myself anyway, that despite not doing those things he'll get it in his own way and I may never know whether or when he figures those things out. Just because he's not showing it in a schooly way, doesn't mean he hasn't figured it out or whether it's even relevant that he has learnt it anyway. It seems silly to me to think that he wouldn't "get it" anyway when he needed to know it...