Taking Stock : November

It's day two in bed with laryngitis. Yesterday I read until I fell asleep, over and over again. I could barely keep my eyes open for more than an hour, I just felt so drained. I'm feeling better today, but still taking it easy and reacquainting myself with my laptop. There have been so many good things happening of late, I thought a taking stock post was in order. 

Making: Embossed metal Christmas decorations
Creating: a beautiful engagement ring
Drinking: 'Brisbane Breakfast' T2 Tea - a birthday gift
Listening: Brave Writer with Julie Bogart podcast
Reading: 'It's OK to go up the slide', 'Teach Me To Do It Myself', 'The Bright Stuff', 'You Can Teach Your Child Successfully', 'Homeschooling for success', 'Bring Out the Genius in your Child', 'Trust the Children' 

Finished read aloud: The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, Enid Blyton

Next read aloud: The Children of Willow Farm, Enid Blyton Finished 

Visiting: the Qld Museum to see the Monkeys
Walking: through the Haig Street Quarry in Ipswich
Playing: with homemade playdough (even though I had no cream of tartar)

Growing: borax crystal geodes
Swimming: in natural rock pools at Cedar Creek Falls
Enjoying: a day spent fossicking for thundereggs with friends
Cracking: open geodes
Liking: my archery date with my nine-year-old
Wondering: at the amazing world of insects Michelle from Bugs Ed shared with us
Noticing: the confidence horse riding has brought out of my daughter
Pondering: white and wooden Christmas decorations
Buying: gem specimens for my children's' gemstone collections
Watching: The Detectorists
Painting: butterflies but making slow progress with so much else happening
Marvelling: at the chicks that our broody hen hatched from fertilised eggs
Celebrating: My 37th birthday with a date night with my husband
Coveting: new glasses
Loving: the Mulberry Planner journal that I brought for next year, but have already started using
Finding: a nice rhythm to our homeschooling in our second year
Wearing: bigger, bolder earrings than usual
Following: my children's interests 

Keeping: room for my interests 
Noticing: the way learning just shows up as we live our life
Knowing: homeschooling was the best decision for us
Thinking: that my youngest has one more year until he 'starts school', or in our case, needs to be registered to homeschool
Admiring: the APT exhibition at QAGOMA
Sorting: through the whole house in an effort to declutter and rearrange
Getting: rid of as much as possible!
Bookmarking: the new blog I created for our homeschool group
Experimenting: with different liquid densities and making a 'Rainbow Jar'
Giggling: at the silly things four-year-olds say
Feeling: excited about a few nights away in a cabin by the beach
Snacking: on in-season fresh fruit - mangoes, lychees, berries, oh my
Hearing: the peep, peep of our chicks as they free range in our backyard

Waiting: for my sister and her son to come home for Christmas

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Joining in with Pip.

Keeping a Store Cupboard

1. Labelling jars, 2. snoozing cat, 3. unusual nature find, 4. native flowers from the garden, 5. Emmy's growing horse collection.

My kitchen and store cupboard have been benefiting from my renewed energy after our holiday. I'd been feeling rather blah about the whole monotony of grocery shopping and cooking and I was turning to take away and prepackaged food more often than I was comfortable with. The country general store in the small town we stayed in inspired and challenged me with it's fewer number of items, and the higher proportion of organic, homemade and fresh produce. 

Once the holiday bags were unpacked I went to the shop with renewed purpose and brought fresh fish and vegetables for dinner. As I unloaded them I decided to completely empty and sort the pantry too. I wiped it clean, checked used by dates, refilled jars and relabelled them. As we don't have a lot of storage space in our kitchen, we also have a store cupboard in the laundry. Here I stockpile everyday items we use regularly, such as canned goods, rice, oil, toiletries, alfoil and sauces, which I buy whenever they are on sale. It's a trick I learnt from Rhonda at Down to Earth blog. It saves a considerable amount of money over time to purchase the things you use before you need them, while they are on sale, and never run out of anything because you always have a spare in your store cupboard.

When I am building up my store cupboard, each time I pop to the shops to pick up one or two things, I will walk up and down each aisle looking for the sale tags. There are always sale tags, usually 10 - 50% off, or two for the price of one. I don't buy anything I wouldn't usually buy. It's not a bargain if it is just going to sit in the cupboard. I also buy in bulk. So when 5kg of rice or 3L of olive oil is half price I am saving money and stocking up. Then I just decant what I need into recycled jars and bottles and store the rest. Buying when things are on sale means I can buy more expensive items than I would usually purchase too - like choosing Australian made, organic, fair trade.

I've read that many chefs don't have much food in their own fridges, as they buy fresh what they need. I really like this idea. I used to try to just go to the shops once a week because I thought it would save money. But I just ended up with wilted veggies. Now I pop to the shops every day or two, though I still keep meat and veg in the freezer so there are always ingredients to cook with if I can't make it to the shop.

Reinvigorating my pantry and topping up my store cupboard inspires me to cook more from scratch, leave the processed items on the shelf, and make the most of the ingredients I am growing in my garden. All of which gives me a sense of satisfaction to be shopping and cooking in a more positive and sustainable way.

Do you keep a store cupboard? 

Constellations

1. Pink afternoon light, 2. designing our own constellations, 3. homeschool cat, 4. matching pictures, words and letters, 5. in bloom in the garden

Be careful what you wish for. After a busy week I mentioned to my husband one morning that I wanted a home day with the children, but that we had several things planned. My eldest woke up with tummy pains. Automatic home day!

I really needed a home day. Despite trying to slow down and live intentionally I always feel like I am trying to catch up on something. The groceries that I didn’t get to do one afternoon because my husband was working late and my children were too tired to drag around the shops. A mountain of laundry when we have had a few days out and about. A basket full of tomatoes waiting to be preserved. The daily necessities seem so time consuming at times that I wonder how we have much time for anything else. But then I write my notes in our natural learning journal, or I look back through the photos I have taken and I notice that between the dishes, laundry, groceries, cleaning and cooking, much was taking place. We have followed the children’s interest in constellations, visited the library, read several picture books and a non-fiction book,  listened to two audio books in the car (The BFG and Grimms Fairy Tales - I would recommend both), played games, taken nature walks and spent time with friends.

My to-do list remains unchecked, but I think I should write our other achievements on there anyway and tick them off. :)

Down the rabbit hole

I love watching my children fall down a rabbit hole of learning. Recently, my son has been teaching himself the periodic table because he came across it as he followed his interests and was motivated to find out more. It's only after a little time has passed that I can join the dots and see how one thing lead to another.

A couple of months ago we went to a local Gem Show. While there my nine-year-old son, Cohen, decided to start a collection of the gemstones that are mentioned in Minecraft. He had fascinating conversations with a gem cutter about the rocks and minerals. Once home, we looked them up in books and discussed the hardness of each stone. We took to rubbing rocks together while in nature, to see which was harder. This lead to an introduction to Moh's scale of hardness. From there we touched on the Periodic table. A little while later he was watching a Youtube clip about Minecraft Education, in which they discussed the new chemistry update. Cohen watched, paused, rewound and watched again, taking notes on the recipes they mentioned using elements from the Periodic table. He wrote the elements in their shorthand,  eg. iron down as Fe, as he said it was quicker that way. He showed his notes to his sister, who couldn't follow it all, so he decided he would make a good copy and share his discoveries with his Minecraft friends.

Children's curiosity never fails to amaze me. xx

Home

I had such fear about bringing my children home to home school them. It felt like jumping off a cliff into the unknown. But I landed exactly where I had always been, at home surrounded by my children, just without school. There has been a lot of self doubt since then, of the 'am I doing enough, are they learning enough' variety. Then I look back on the natural learning diary I am keeping, or scroll through the home school album I update on facebook, and I see tangible evidence of the learning that I feel is happening each day.

Even now when the self doubt creeps in again and I find myself asking, 'but how will they learn all they need to know without a curriculum'! Then their actions remind me that they are creating their own curriculum by following their interests and passions as they live in the world. It comes down to trusting that children are naturally curious about all that is around them, and that they learn best when they are interested in the topic. That they have time, love and adults modeling a joy of lifelong learning. These are a few examples that I've noticed lately for those who are interested. Just by living in the world and loving books we have naturally learnt about science, maths, history, geography, art and so much more.

We startled a gecko as I lifted the lid off the compost bin in the garden. It dropped it's tail and made a run for it. I showed my daughter that the lizard was ok and explained that they did this to protect themselves from predators. She marvelled at the way it kept wiggling, so we took it inside to show her brothers. They were equally fascinated by this discovery, so we searched YouTube and watched several videos about this phenomena. Cohen asked how long it would take for a tail to grow back. We found the answer at the end of a time lapse video of another lizard growing it's tail back. 65 days.

My son asked to bake a chocolate cake mix. He made his selection at the shops and read the ingredients so that we could check that we had all that we needed. He wanted to use 'real butter', so I asked him how much he would need. The packet called for 80 grams for the cake mix and 50 grams for the icing. I asked him how much butter we would need to buy? 130 grams he replied, then told me that he had worked it out by taking 50 away from 80 and getting 30, adding the two 100's together and then adding the 30.

I read the children a beautiful junior fiction book about Charles Darwin and they listened intently, asked questions and later when they were drawing Cohen drew a ship and called it the HMS Beagle. I suggested we watch a YouTube clip about him and they said 'No! He is boring!' However, later in the week I read them a junior fiction book about Captain Cook. We studied the map, they discussed Darwin, exploration, maps, astronomy, botany etc. Cohen went to his room and retrieved a framed print of Australian animals, showing his sister that Cook would never have seen any of these animals before. Once we finished reading it was bed time, but they begged to know more about Cook and how he had died. The next day we started a new book about Convict Children, which included reference to Captain Cook, which they were really excited about. They told me all the facts that they had learnt the night before. They showed a lot of interest in Joseph Banks the botanist too, so I have borrowed several more books from the library with Bank's journals, prints of his work and a history of Cooks expeditions so that they can find their answers about his death. 

I found a book at the library about a Surrealist exhibition I once visited at the Qld Art Gallery. The children and I studied it together and undertook several of the projects in the book while I read to them about the different artists in the movement. They played games of 'exquisite corpse', made collage from the photocopied back pages of the book and drew into ink blots to create their own surrealist artwork. A week or so later when my daughter was having a play date, her friend admired their surrealist artwork on our gallery wall, and before long they were both making more collages and playing exquisite corpse. In the past five months the children have also completed artist studies on Da Vinci, Van Gogh, and Matisse.

Are they learning? Absolutely! 

Will I keep doubting myself in future? Probably! 

Would I give up the time, connection and joy of homeschooling? No thank you! 

Hello Autumn

1. Geisha Girl and lemons, 2. A morning of mushrooms, 3. String wrapped cardboard leaf decorations, 4. Dining room hutch, 5. Yellow mushrooms in our pot plant, 6 & 7. Pops of colour, 8. Free ranging, 9. 5 eggs a day, 10. Garden visitors, 11. Beautiful weeds. 12. A few of our girls, 13. Easter Cassia - a lovely looking weed overhanging our fence, 14. Yellow petals, 15. Quail spotting.

We have been welcoming the many charms of Autumn. One morning we awoke to our yard covered in mushrooms, unlike anything we had seen before. The cooler nights and mornings mean I am lighting candles again - such a simple, calming act. There is the scent of damp earth and wet leaves. Porridge for breakfast. Autumn books and crafts. Knitting and crochet projects rediscovered. And seemingly more time to snuggle up on the couch and read with my children.

I have so many plans for Autumn. A holiday by the beach, a ferry trip to a historic convict island, a finished shawl, a new jewellery collection, and a pile of books on my night stand. But for now I am happy just to be noticing the changes in my garden and unpacking my cooler weather clothes.

Quail play

This Mama bird has been solo parenting for the last week and a half while Dada jaunts around the French alps (aka. attends a friend's wedding and goes snowboarding). I had thought the difficulty in my inaugural two week solo parenting career with our three children would be the prospect of handling dinner, baths and bedtime by myself. Instead, adversity has been more in the form of emotional havoc, as our children endeavour to learn coping strategies to face their fears, frustrations and longings for their father. The actual day to day has been entirely manageable, but peacefully responding to their emotional outbursts has been altogether a different test, and one that I was not expecting.

New family members of the quail kind have been a welcome distraction. These six gorgeous girls have joined our six hens and made feathery nests in our hearts in no time. I had thought quails to be quite plain birds, but upon closer inspection I find them to be quite delightful and intricately patterned. They were rather baffled at their boxed car ride, and less than welcoming of their wing clipping in the bathroom. But when we introduced them to their run they joyously played in the dirt, their previous aviary having a concrete floor. 

Each day they have gifted us with four attractive eggs, which has added a third business to my entrepreneurial children's portfolio, as they are already selling chicken eggs and Golden Apple water snails. Miss Five was horrified to learn that people eat such poultry, so eggs it is.

It was a toss up between quails and Muscovy ducks - as they are great homesteading ducks whose eggs are 1.5 times the size of a hens egg and they hiss rather than quack. I wonder if we have enough room....