Homeschool | 1000 Fields of Roses

At The Finish Line

…at least for this year.
Mostly.
We had the end of year reporting visit for school yesterday morning – it went well, and Sweet Bean had managed to finish the work required of him for the year. I love the feeling of accomplishment and knowing – we got there! 😀
The big stuff is done, but there’s still two weeks of term. We’ll have fun, though – a little art/history/music, documentaries and books. Who says learning isn’t fun!

Last night was also the awards night. I love seeing everyone going up to get their awards, from the littlest to the graduates (only one Grade 12 this year). Doing distance education means that we don’t see other families as much as we might do in a school situation, so it’s good to get together. The school gives certificates for character as well as scholastic achievement. Here’s Sweet Bean.

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The awards are a bit blurry but his smile’s clear!
We’re so proud of him ❤ Scholastically he does very well, but it’s been lovely to see him grow in character as well during the year.
He’ll be doing Grade 10 next year, but also starting on some Grade 11 subjects… we’ll see how that goes. Until then – time to slow down and look forward to Christmas!

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Homeschool

on December 1, 2018 at 3:55 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: Awards Night

Elementary, My Sweet Bean

This term’s workshop was focused on history – the task was to choose a person (or event/invention etc) of interest and present a 1-2 minute talk. As you can imagine, 2 minutes doesn’t leave much time to say a lot… it concentrates the mind on what’s important!
We had a host of famous characters visiting today (costumes were encouraged), including Queen Elizabeth II, Fanny Crosby, Mother Teresa, Samuel Morse, Lewis & Clarke & Sacagawea, as well as a history of the Cherokee nation, of the British East India Company, and a look at the history of dolls.
Sweet Bean went as Sherlock Holmes, to talk about his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than focusing on literature he talked about Conan Doyle’s contribution to forensic science and the way a criminal investigation is run. Here’s his talk –

He was a bit flustered about the microphone – he’d worked out an opening sequence with the pipe and magnifying glass, but he couldn’t work out how to add in the microphone… My blurry filming style probably doesn’t help!

Here’s a couple of shots of the great detective himself 🙂

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The cloak was an old skirt split at the back seam and hemmed and tucked in places, the deerstalker was two baseball caps sewn together and covered with dark fabric, and the pipe was cardboard and papier mache, with paint and a foil embellishment to finish.
A tiring day, but satisfying.
Now, time for bed…

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on October 31, 2018 at 9:09 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: History Workshop, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Drawing Life

Another beautiful day, with weather to match!
Started the day by taking Sweet Bean into town to take part in The Big Draw, which was set up in a community gallery near the main gallery here. He didn’t really want to go, but it’s only on once a year, so we went just to try it out 🙂 I think this is about the third one we’ve been to, and we’ve enjoyed it each time. All materials are provided. There’s coffee and bikkies as well…

We were among the first there, so we got to start off the collaborative work.

This was fun – there’s charcoal on the end of those sticks, and there were two smaller sizes as well. It’s quite hard to keep it stable, so drawing gets a bit wobbly. It’s also difficult to choose something to draw when there’s a huge expanse of blank paper! I like eyes… thought I’d start there.

Sweet Bean contributed a sort of Greek column (?) He likes patterns 🙂

There were other stations – this one was set up to draw the shadows.

I started on this one, but it was getting a bit crowded by then, and people were standing in front of me.
We sat in the corner at the end. Sweet Bean drew more patterns, I wrote (bad) poetry. Lovely!

Here’s the big floor mural at different stages.

I loved seeing the tiny ones diving into it all – pastels smeared over faces and hands, confronted with an endless expanse to colour at will…

We got some nice things to have for lunch, then made our way home. We’d missed the bus, so decided to walk back, inhaling the scents of random flowers as we went, and noticing a new brilliant pink flower in the communal gardens.

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Caught up with some mending this afternoon. Read for a bit. Watched TV. Generally chilled.

Beautiful.

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on October 20, 2018 at 9:13 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: the big draw

Extracting The Best From The Week

Another good week – worked our way through the rest of the experiments I’d planned to do, from seeing how yeast reacts to different environments to extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit and having a look under the microscope…

First we had a quick look at osmosis, using cucumber slices in distilled water and a saline solution. Osmosis is “the spontaneous net movement of solvent molecules through a selectively permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, in the direction that tends to equalise the solute concentrations on the two sides”. in this case water moving through cell walls to equalise both sides. The distilled water moves into the cucumber cells, the water in the cells moves out into the saline solution, making one slice turgid and the other squishy and reduced.

Next we looked at the properties of water and other liquids by freezing water, salt water, olive oil and tomato sauce, then placing them in their liquid form. The ice floated, the others sank. We were unsure of the sauce – it sort of hovered – but it was very slowly sinking. We put it in water just to see what would happen, and it sank…

Ice floats, unlike the other liquids, because the molecules freeze in a hexagonal structure, spacing them apart and making the solid less dense than the liquid.

Next was looking at the growth of yeast.

We put yeast in four glasses – hot water, tap water, warm water and warm water covered in cling wrap. As yeast is a living organism the hot water killed it and nothing happened. The tap water didn’t do much – it would have needed more time to activate.

The warm water was the best environment, and there wasn’t much difference in growth. Given more time we may have seen a difference, as the plastic kept the carbon dioxide that was being given off inside the glass, and it would eventually kill the yeast.

The final experiment – DNA!
The kiwi fruit was mashed and mixed with salt and washing up liquid, then warmed. This was to disrupt the cells and extract the DNA. DNA is soluble in water, but not in alcohol, so we added methylated spirits to precipitate the DNA. This made it possible to pull some out with a paper clip.

We had a look under the microscope, which was interesting, although I’m not sure what we were actually seeing…

Sweet Bean had fun checking it out, then went on to look at some other things 🙂
A successful week. Feels good to have one of those!

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on October 19, 2018 at 8:11 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: Science experiments

Potato, Thriller, Queen.

The first week of the final term went well. We did a simple (but satisfying) experiment – microwaving a potato to destruction, in order to find the percentage of water in it. It was around 84%…
Here’s the potato afterwards. I put it on the patio after we finished because there was steam/smoke pouring from it for a longer period of time than I was happy with, and I didn’t want it to burst into flame in the house…

This was the first experiment from a free course on basic science, which covers the importance of keeping a journal, and looks at the applications of experimental data in real life situations. It’s from a site called FutureLearn, which has a range of topics to choose from (good for homeschoolers!) I decided to do a bit of basic science with Sweet Bean as we haven’t done much in the way of hands on science this year. Hopefully we’ll finish this course by extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit.

Yesterday we also finished the day by watching a variety of YouTube clips, starting with Queen and moving through Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis and a little bit of Elvis. There’s many more to watch, but we ran out of time…
I’ve been enjoying watching reaction videos – a young bloke watching classic rock clips (and some opera etc.) for the first time and sharing his reactions – go here to have a look! I found his channel while watching a variety of reaction videos from people seeing Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time, and just kept watching…
I realised that Sweet Bean knows Queen’s songs but hasn’t seen them live. Apart from being enjoyable I thought it was an opportunity to see what a band can aspire to 🙂 Learning a bit of rock history seemed like the obvious next step…
Here’s the first clip we watched – Queen’s performance at Live Aid in 1985.

Today I watched a few more reaction videos and decided to share vintage Michael Jackson with Sweet Bean…

The unveiling of the moonwalk…

…and the birth of a classic thriller.

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on October 13, 2018 at 8:28 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: JBLethalTV, Michael Jackson, Queen, science

All Present (And Correct)

Sweet Bean did his science presentation today, after much anxiety and practice. He tends to stress about public speaking, but when it comes to the time, he’s always very good. This term’s question was “Does the presence of music in film affect emotions?”
Here is his display, complete with multi-coloured pie charts and a laptop that had been playing a clip using acting with different music for the same scene.

All the other displays were amazing – it’s interesting to see other people’s thought processes, and hear how they investigated the things that they were curious about.

…what’s that you say? Does music in film affect emotions?
Listen to this to find out!
🙂

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on August 29, 2018 at 12:04 am Leave a Comment
Tags: Science Fair 2018

Schoolwork And Puppies

We’re galloping to the end of the first week of school…
Yesterday we went to a shared learning day, where Sweet Bean sat round a table with others in his age group, assiduously working through English lessons, discussing issues where needed, and getting more done than he would at home.

It was a lovely day, where we both met new friends… lessons were taught, both planned and incidental. We got to see a tiny puppy fed via a tube, and started the day sitting round a large table, with devotions taken by one of the teenagers, and each person praying – even the little ones. Hopefully it will be the first of many shared days…
Did I mention puppies? Sweet little babies, sleeping in front of a fan to keep cool, and squeaking every so often, presumably while dreaming 🙂 A cute soundtrack to the day…

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Homeschool

on February 1, 2018 at 9:56 pm Leave a Comment

Getting There…

On the home stretch to Christmas, and stuff to do before I can sit back and chill for a week… there’s been a lot of end of year deadlines to complete. Sweetest Bean has finished the school year, and done so well – I’m so proud of him! ❤ We went to the art gallery last Friday before the awards for school. This was Sweet Bean’s Lego creation (it ran well, too)

Here he is receiving his awards –

He’s off camping with friends at the moment, having a great time.

Miss him, but glad he’s having fun!

Hubby is working now (yayy!!), which is wonderful, although he’ll be working over Christmas. We have had blessings coming already. One of those is a prize I won, which just came in the mail today. It’s a sample pack of natural perfumes – this is how it came, and the goodies inside…

They are supposed to evoke certain qualities – I was both beautiful and intuitive today 😀

I am very tired right now, but quietly hopeful of getting it all sorted by Christmas.
Let the countdown begin!

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on December 15, 2017 at 8:44 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: Faith Awards, IME perfume, Lego

Drawing In…

…the evening, at the moment. Also the event we went to today, near the Art Gallery. We went last year, where it was part of The Big Draw – not sure this was official, but the same concept.
We did some drawing – there were old-fashioned flip books for animation, so I did one of those. Sweet Bean was reluctant at first, but soon got into it. Biscuits (and a cup of coffee for me) certainly helped! It was good to give him the opportunity to try something different, and I can also add it to his school work for the year. Here’s his “Persian rug”, made with cut out paper “mosaic pieces” 🙂 .

Despite the rain, we were glad we went. Looking forward to next year’s!

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on October 21, 2017 at 5:19 pm Leave a Comment
Tags: Big Draw, Ipswich Art Gallery

Breathe, And Be Still…

The holidays have started – for Sweet Bean, anyway. He finished up with a Sports day at his Community Homeschool day on Thursday. I think it’s the first sports day he’s ever been to – he won ribbons – excitement! 🙂 After a shaky start to the term he ended up accomplishing more than he thought he could, as well as getting a good report.

As for me, I finally got to do a couple more of my clinic practice days (I was unable to get there last time). Not only did I pass both days (while enjoying them as well), I managed the travelling, even though I had to walk from the station to the college and carry all I needed for the day. That’s the first time in a long time I’ve managed long days away from home and the strength needed to get there and back! I’ve taken it easy for the last two days…
There’s more work to be done, so I don’t get two weeks holiday. I’m feeling more confident, though.

Here’s a couple of songs I’ve been enjoying lately. Have a listen (and click through to YouTube to hear some more…)