Home and memories of Eden

IT IS WONDERFUL TO BE HOME!

It is so nice to come home to our lovely house by the mighty mighty Clarence river after nine weeks travelling, and now that we are home we realise how much we missed it here. Sleeping in our own beds and having a bathroom and kitchen right there is pure bliss. Seeing the rampant growth in the lawn and the dust bunnies everywhere not so blissful but all sorted now. Catching up with Emerald, Mr12s rainbow lorikeet has been lovely, she has missed us so much and her life has changed dramatically living with the house sitter, she has had no contact with her wild mate and babies and they are not relating to each other at all at the moment, I have seen improvement over the last couple of days though so watching what happens there will be very interesting..

I have not done another blog post because of all the dramas I had posting them on the road so will share memories and pics as they come up.

Today was our first day back at school and it was a bit of a challenge to start the day and our new term. Lost books, no ink in the printer and a computer that didn't want to play were all overcome and we soon settled into our familiar routine and the boys worked well. I am easing them into it so we only did a couple of subjects today and looked at what we will be doing this term and discussed it. Once we finished today's work we played a lovely maths game we picked up in Eden, it is called "Catch Old Tom" and made by Fran Crispin, she had a whole range of maths games and other games for sale in the tourist information centre in Eden. We enjoyed playing and it was great to reinforce Mr7s place value skills up to 1000. Playing "Catch Old Tom" sparked a lively discussion about Old Tom and the Killers of Eden.
Eden is a beautiful coastal town on the far south coast of NSW, about 1120 km away from our home in northern NSW. We spent a lovely few days there on the full moon in April and we visited the Eden Killer Whale Museum

It is a wonderful museum and the story of Old Tom and the partnership between the whales and the whalers is fascinating.

There were other amazing things to learn as well-like this interesting cure for rheumatismand this amazing storywe also learned about the tragic number of ship wrecks that happened all along our coastline, these ones are just local to Edenand I appreciated this little poster to assist us in our own whale watching today.
On our travels we developed a habit of exploring the warves it was a lovely place for a walk and always lots to see, here Mr7 'assisted' in mooring a boat in the harbour, well that's what he said he was doing.

The Australian Museum- Sydney

We had a lovely visit to the Australian Museum with our

glowing friend,

here we are looking at a Thylacene.
It was such a treat for my rural remote boys to get to see some of the city's cultural highlights, sadly we were crowded out by school groups, who were noisy and unruly.

Art in your homeschool

Art can be easily overlooked in the homeschool, some parents have shared with me how they find it difficult to fit it in, it is very valuable to your child's education though so I thought I would share some thoughts and resources here. I am passionate about art in our homeschool.

Most of the subjects we focus on have well defined procedures to follow, rules and regulations leaving little room for creativity or mistakes.
Art is wonderful to open a child's mind to freedom and play; to allow them to experiment and to use their own imaginations without any fear of getting it wrong-
ART
is
FUN,
SPONTANEOUS
and
RELAXING.

Why study Art?
Learning art provides a foundation for visual perception, the ability to recognise and understand images, these may be found in many places- art works, plans/ blueprints, symbols, words.......

Art education helps a child to develop abstract thinking skills-
the visual arts combine abstract thinking with real concrete materials
to create the idea in their imagination,
using convergent, divergent, evaluative and visual thinking skills.

Art education provides a window
a connection into people in another place and time.
Art education encourages creativity using art skills and knowledge-
in order to create children utilise other Key Learning Areas
Maths- patterns.
Science- colours- mixing, tones, opposites.
Language Arts- communication- expressing ideas, discussing art works
reading or listening to directions.
HS&IE - history- people have made art in most cultures and most times, studying art from different times is like a window into that time and kids notice details they wouldn't pick up from a book or lesson. Recreating art from times past is also a wonderful way to add depth to a study of that time and place.
Physical ed- motor skills, some art materials are heavy and use a lot of muscle- clay in pottery and sculpting a heavy base.
How to Incorporate art into your homeschool.

Children need to see art to appreciate its beauty and power-
Look at pictures together, and talk about what you see, there are many lovely books with wonderful reproductions of great artworks and libraries have great collections.
Calenders often feature an artists well known works and can be easily collected and stored till you need them.
Visit art galleries and art shows.
Study different artists and different styles of art.Making art is fun.
How often in your school time do you really get to do something spontaneous and hands on?

Art can easily be included in your homeschool days-
it fits really well with unit studies or into set subjects,
especially science- nature journalling
Geography- salt dough maps or mountains or volcanoes, sketched or painted landscapes and History.

My personal goals for my kids are to teach them to be comfortable and familiar with how to use various art materials so they are willing to use them to express themselves freely.

The materials we use, we play with, but they learn as much from the art materials themselves as they do from me.

I am aiming for my boys to find success and pleasure in our art time.

We use a lot of montemarte art materials in our home, I find they have a good range, the are good value and quite good quality for our uses. I tend to pick up things as I plan them and I include art planning in my general homeschool planning.

I also give the more precious art materials to my boys at birthdays and solstices as gifts, they enjoy having their own supplies and use them in their own time.

We also use lots of recycled materials, there are always clean recyclable things around- paper, cardboard, tubes, bottles, lids containers etc, many can be used in assemblages or art works and others can be used to store art materials.

A couple of my favorite books for teaching art
Discovering Great Artists
MaryAnn F Kohl and Kim Solga

and

The Art Teachers Book of Lists
Helen D. Hume

The Internet is a wonderful source of inspiration and ideas
here are some of our favourites.

Coloured Pencil Art

Colored Pencil as Professional Art Medium

While colored pencils were once considered to be primarily for kids, throughout the years they have been steadily gaining respect amongst artists, galleries, and collectors. Artists are exploring the creative potential of this art-making medium, while art collectors and enthusiasts are marveling at their output!

Art Attack a fantastic collection of ideas taken from the popular television show- loads of fun to be had here.

smART kids and interactive site from the smArt museum in Chicago, very educational.

Watercolour secrets a free ebook

A selection of inspirational arty blogs-



Kathy Barbaro's Art Projects for Kids this is a fabulous blog, a real favorite in our homeschool, make sure you search through the older posts.

Jessica Camis' Art Smarts for Kids

Deep Space Sparkle, Patty's art lessons for kids.

Charva LeBarton's Art Teacher

Art with Mrs Smith

Teach Kids Art

Artist of the Week This one has not been updated for a while but still has some great resources.

Yaegl significant Aboriginal cultural sites

The boys and I have started our new year of homeschooling.

Mr12 is starting high school level work at home and Mr7 is doing year 2-ish work. We are using some wonderful curriculum materials and the boys are very keen to use it.

One of the topics we are doing is Australian History and using 2 different spines-

Our Sunburnt Country from Downunder Literature

and

Australia, the wide brown land for me! from Adnil Press



we are starting out with Aboriginal history and headed off today on a tour of our local Aboriginal Peoples Significant sites. Our local mob are the Yaegl people around the lower Clarence but we might also look at Bundgalung people who traditionally occupied land north of the mighty mighty Clarence Rv and spend some time with some Gumbaynggirr people who have a wonderful cultural centre at Arrawarra and a yummy bush tucker cafe.

Our tour today was a self drive one


and we picked up a little pamphlet from the Maclean tourist info at Ferry Park


We learned so much
this is Ulugundahi Island behind the boys
it was an aboriginal mission in the early 1900s and Ulugundahi means ear in the local Yaegl language because the island is shaped like an ear.


This is Reedy Creek, the first Goorie camping area in Yamba
Mr7 thinks the semi permanent structures on the beach would be much nicer to live in back then than the big brick residences that dominate this lovely area today.





walking through our magnificent coastal bushland

we ended up on some magnificent beaches


and the boys found some sticks!

Mr12 had to test out his strength, picking up huge logs and rocks and pushing and pulling at everything he thought might budge.

So this was our wonderful homeschool classroom this afternoon

Miss Emerald has an Egg!

Our lovely Emerald and her handsome Sapphire have finally laid an egg. We have been watching all the mating and nesting behaviour and have been eagerly awaiting the first egg, so it was with great joy Mr11 ran down the hallway to share the good news first thing this morning.

Sapphire has been very vocal and active all over the neighborhood this morning , we think he must be telling everyone. Our birds have free access in and out of their cage, so he really can share his good news all over the neighborhood.
Mr7 also observed the kookaburra couple we have been watching in one of our trees and noticed the gentleman kooka feeding his lady this morning, just like Saph has been feeding Em this morning, so he has surmised they might have laid their first egg this morning as well.

This has of course interrupted our day and our chocolate study, we simply had to research every thing about lorikeet breeding and there are endless questions about kookaburra breeding still to be answered, but I have manged to lure the boys back to the table with a bowl of chocolate salad, this is a bit of a Rockpool tradition, and is basically a bowl with mixed pieces of block chocolate in it and it did the trick nicely and they are now writing up and drawing food webs.

Chocolate

It is the first day of term for NSW school students today, and it has been raining heavily for weeks, everything is wet and mushy, so it was a happy homeschool family who could stay at home today and watch the rain falling out our windows, although we did feel sorry for the kids trudging along to school whilst we were in our nice warm house and about to learn all about

C.H.O.C.O.L.A.T.E

I found a 12 lesson study guide at the Chocolate Exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago complete with history, recipes and quotes.I added a couple of likely lads, and some lovely books from the libray and we are set and as chocolate comes from the rainforest, we have a sweet week of school this week.

We have been getting some lovely visitors from the rainforest as well
This friendly lady King Parrot, or Queen Parrot as the boys call her is almost eating out of my hand and she gets right into Emeralds cage, but only when our rowdy lorikeets are not home. I wonder if she might be an escaped pet she is so quiet and friendly.

I am having a lot of trouble getting to update this blog living here, the only internet connection I have is a very very slow dial up and it doesn't cope very well with pictures. So I am sorry but blogging will be very erratic here at the moment and so will visiting everyone elses blogs.

Lunartics

Today we have been learning about the moon and all things lunar, so we became the lunartics :-)

It was Mr7s birthday on Saturday and we celebrated at a local pizza parlor with some friends. One of his presents was this wonderful book
Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11
It is such a wonderful book all about that amazing first flight into space, it is so well written and full of information. WE have read it and reread it, it is Mr7s new favourite book.

I also came across this great free offer from NASA
DVD Journey to the Stars
it comes with lesson plans and activity sheets.

We have our annual Clarence Valley Home Educators sports carnival coming up next Monday and I have been working on a paper mache surprise for the day.

Galaxies

Today we learned how galaxies are continuosly expandingThey are getting bigger and bigger

and eventually they explode.
Mr11 has a smart new haircut.

Mr almost 7 made a rocket

and tried to power it with a balloon

and he made some beautiful galaxies with glitter.