Starting over

We have moved house (again) and this house is HUGE so a lot of things have gone on hold while we were moving and settling. This coming term we will only be doing 5 weeks of school before we start holidays so it is going to be a very packed term.

We are going to be studying China (RA will be A grain of rice - sonlightfor Zebra and Duckie and Ping -FIAR for Bunny and Monkey). Plus Duckie is wanting to study Rainbows. Bunny and Monkey are also going to be learning their alphabet and sounds using a variety of resources from all over the place I have compiled a list on my links blog showing all the places I am getting ideas from.

We have been using the workbox system modified to fit our family so will be packing these boxes full for the next 5 weeks and seeing how it really works!! I am really looking forward to it.

Its all too much

After reading the post here I decided to borrow the book its all to much from my library. They don't have it so my darling hubby ordered the book for me. It arrived yesterday. I have skim read the whole book and now am working my way through it and working out how to survive in this house! Survive - wrong word. LIVE in this house.

So my ideal school room would have

Reading area
Drawing area
Cmputer area
School desks? Jury is still out on this one. I do enjoy us working around the table - at least is all gets cleared up in time for the next meal on a desk the stuff would pile up and get messy.
Work box holders
Train/lego table
white board
timeline
world map and Australia map

This is the broad outline and I will add to it as I work my way through the book and our home.

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he builds a stone wall with his wooden blocks or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences."

- Anne Sullivan, tutor to Helen Keller

Birthday again!

Finally the birthday. Duckie requested a roast with potato gems. I had to do roast potatoes too for Peekers. It's just not a roast without the full works! Here is Duckie enjoying the highlight of a roast (according to Dad)- a chew on a bone!

And here is the cake. She picked one out of the cake book but after 2 failures I gave up on using the dolly vardin tin (I think it was a combination of the useless oven and the shape of the tin) and just made 3 round cakes which we glued together with icing and cut to shape and then decorated. It turned out pretty good if I say so myself. I am not a Barbie fan which is the usual doll for this cake. I did have a fairy doll which got lost in the move so a quick trip to $2 store and found this. $2 shops are sadly lacking in Kal. There are 3 but they are not the great source of homeschooling bits that I have come to depend on in Adelaide. But this time they turned up trumps. This doll was perfect especially for the size of the cake. Duckie Loved it!

5 months old

Birthday

Ducky is seven today! She is getting her birthday tea (and cake) on Friday as it just wouldn't work today. She did open her present from Grandpa and Grandma P tonight. She got real proper binoculars! What fun!

Super Pit

I love Slim Dusty and since Peekers took the job at Kalgoorlie we have noticed that many of the songs he sings relate to this town - he sings about the golden mile, the town hall in Kalgoorlie and many others.

Well tonight we got to experience some of the results of the golden mile. KCGM The company that manages the mines (some of them) turned 20 and held a party at the super pit lookout. It was fantastic.

Getting up close to the Super Pit, is a dwarfing experience. At 320 metres deep, about 3km long and 1.4km wide this massive man made hole in the ground makes an awesome sight.
The pit operates 24hours a day. Looking down the trucks are like tiny toy tonka trucks slowly winding their way up from the bottom of the pit. If you look closely at the photo (Click on it to enlarge it )on the left you can just see the tiny toy trucks winding their way up the sides of the pit but up close I have never seen anything so large.

There are 31 of these trucks on the site at $4 million each!

weighs 166tonne and has a fuel tank of 3,790 litres with a max speed of 55Km/ph

Photos below are of our family with the trucks

The best part about the evening (on top of the free sausage sizzle and marshmallow toasting) was the fantastic fireworks. What a way to begin our learning into the history of Kalgoorlie, which looks like being delayed in starting as Duckie now wants to learn how fireworks work!