For the last gazillion years life in Australia has been all about water restrictions. Dry parched earth, dust storms that blanketed the whole east coast and farm land reduced to a dismal homage to the Martian landscape. Stories of childhood days spend darting in and out sprinkler spray, water fighting with the garden hose, sliding down backyard tarpaulin rivers and bouncing carefree in the midst of an inverted waterfall shooting up through our trampolines have been told to our own children. They sit in wide eyed wonder conflicted with a sense of longing for those days and a righteous indignation for their own parents disrespect of our most precious resource.  

Long days soaked to the skin, clad in our summer uniform of swimming costumes listening to the chorus of click, click, click swish of the neighbourhood automatic watering systems sums up my childhood summers. Endless days of dry unforgiving scorching heat sums up the summers my kids have been living through. Until this year. This year the rain came down.

It has rained every day this summer. Mostly just a steady drizzle from the ever present cloud cover however some days the heavens have opened and literally spilt their guts on all of us. I’m getting quite used to drying carpet tiles as our back room is under water again. After so much time we are finally able to unite our Aussie voices and finish the song “A land of droughts and………”

Glenn was between jobs and I wasn’t feeling the best so he decided to run his own school excursion day. As our local dam with its ever decreeing water levels has been the focus of so much water related anxiety he couldn’t miss the chance to take the kids to see it brim full and spilling over. The last time we were up here just a month ago, the section behind the kids, the spill over for floods was bare dry concrete.

Warragamba Dam officially full.

Where once the water level was so low the long submerged houses of the old valley settlement could be seen piercing through the surface, now full grown trees are being consumed by the voluminous water.

The kids sketching the water catchment.

Glenn took the kids for a play at Hawkesbury Park as they followed the flooded river back home.

Sabrina doesn’t quite have the height her big sister does at the moment but she’s trying.

The end of the road for this flood effected river side pathway.

The water bursting the banks at the bridge to North Richmond.

Having a better look at the swollen river.

A pathway under Windsor bridge that you could maybe swim along if you wanted to.

Windsor Bridge, I’m pretty sure it closed again an hour after they drove over it, I know some schools sent kids home early that day to get them across before it shut.

one very exhausted chookie at the end of a long wet day.

To get into the African groove I decided, before we got into any serious learning per se, to YouTube Africa Dance. This led to a brilliant morning of walking, or shall we say dancing, in somebody else’s bare feet.

The kids found a few videos that took them step by step through a dance set to the hypnotic pulse of an African drum. Eli really just got lost in the music, which I kind of feel is true to the style.

The girls took the steps, or twists, a little more seriously.

Lilly ended up being quite the hip wiggler.

Eli found a video that taught you to play the drum, and, as we didn’t have one handy he improvised with a toy basket.

We also read a beautiful picture book called Natemba which is about a orphaned baby Vervet monkey and her journey through the African wilderness to find her family. I loved it because it introduced the feel of the Country, the look of the animals that roam it, but it also had an important conservation message to tell and one that didn’t paint all humans as evil but as part of a chain of helping hands to save a gorgeous little life.

The Author and Illustrator of Natemba is Annette lodge and is a local, yay whoo! for local talent.

Our kids had a go at water colour illustrations like the ones we found in the book. I asked them to choose one particular animal as the focus, then they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by choice and also we can go to the library and research the one they chose. Lilly chose the zebra.

Lani painted her version of the heart-warming reunion when the little vervet monkey found her family.

Eli painted a giraffe. We then looked up each of their animals on YouTube just so we could see them moving around, hear their sounds and in Eli’s case watch them fight, he now thinks giraffes are really hard core.

They all wrote down observations from the footage as well, only I have misplaced it at the moment, never mind this post is long enough and Eli’s mostly said “….and then the giraffe whipped his neck around and they bashed their heads again….” and so on, you can imagine.

We watched a documentary from the library called Families of Ghana that follows a day in the life of two children, 8 year old Deborah and 10 year old Emmanuel. Deborah lives in a poor rural community in a house full of extended family. Her life, especially the skill and effort required to pull off her daily tasks intrigued the kids. Emmanuel lives in the capital and the fact that he had a bed and running water made him just like them apparently. It’s funny, I don’t really know what they were expecting to see when we first started looking at kids around the world, maybe they thought that some countries were full of kids with magical powers or maybe they thought we would find the land of the giants, but overall their most repeated comment has been “They are just like me”

That is till we watched Deborah, her life looked hard. To be fair all we have looked at so far has been North America and South America and I know there is hardship there too, and they did get to see tribal life in South America but all the documentaries show beaming children splashing in rainforest rivers. Not trekking for hours through the desert just to get water like Deborah.

They had a lot of respect for her water balancing skills and asked to give it a go.

Lani filling up our family’s daily water supply.

Eli pointed out that both kids even the one with taps had to sweep the courtyard before going to school so he took on that job.

Sabi was desperate to do the women’s work too.

She may need a little more practice.

I don’t think we would survive for very long on the little that actually made it back in her bucket.

Lilly was fascinated by the scene when the little girl washed the clothes she’d worn that day, she didn’t even know you could wash clothes by hand, how sad is that? Lilly grabbed shorts from the dirty linen bin, some detergent and a bucket and set to work. After she washed them she rinsed them and hung them our to dry. later when Grandma and Granda were around she came careering into the family room an explosion of excitement crying “I washed my shorts and they really came clean and now they are dry!!!” then very proudly wore them to her drama class.

After thinking about it for a while Eli decided that the girls efforts with the tiny bucket were simply not good enough compared to the kids on the video. He didn’t make it down the stairs….

… I was below, it got very wet very quickly,hmm.

There is a series playing on TV at the moment called Last Man Standing. The show takes western athletes to compete in tribal contests in remote areas of the world, this week was Ethiopia. Now it’s not really a kids show, there is blood, lots of blood actually, a little swearing and superstitious beliefs and practices but that said we don’t want our kids to be unaware of the world around them, we are not afraid of them coming into contact with values that clash with our own. We are educating them in the way we believe God wants them to live their lives, they can see our values by the way we live. They know we find swearing offensive and a corruption of the English language but they also know people do it and they will hear it occasionally. They have to learn how to process that without copying it, same with drinking blood and scarification, like I said not really a kids show but an eye opener for someone who didn’t even know it was possible to hand wash clothes.

They have also started working on an African Lap book but they aren’t really worth showing yet.

I lead a preschool group at our church called Junior Jivers. It was a big decision for me to take it on, bearing in mind I have four children tagging along with me wherever I go. Four children for whom I bare the sole blame if they grow up to be uneducated heathens.  It may have been more sensible to decline, I’m sure no one would have thought any less of me for saying the work was too much and I didn’t have the time. But groups like this are so important, I really believe that.

My three older children grew up in this same group and they learnt so much, not just physical life skills but they learnt of the love of their own creator, both taught to them in weekly themes and expressed to them through the caring attitudes of a gaggle of loving mothers/grandmothers/dads/grandads. I wanted Sabrina to have this too. Who was I to deny her something the older ones still talk about just because I was a little busy. So I took it on, I was hoping to have another leader by now but God will provide in his own time. To get by I dragged my Mum in and I beg help from the leaders of the second Junior Jivers group run on a different day. 

In the meantime God has taught me to see that a ministry that I once thought could really interfere with our schooling is actually benefiting it.   

Each term we choose a theme, at the moment we are working through the days of creation. This week was day two: the sky and the sea. The kids in the above photo are catching falling feathers, that were blowing in the wind, while the playschool song ’Like a Leaf or feather’ plays. The big arm is Lilly showing the little kids how to put the feathers they have caught into the bucket. I have noticed that both Lilly and Lani are learning to become servant hearted, they help me set up, pack up, hold signs for me and love looking after the babies.

After singing and dancing to water and sky songs we ended the morning with water play which the big girls refused to be left out of even if they barely fitted in the paddling pool. 

There is always a craft too, this week we brought home rainbow clouds.

Eli doesn’t come with us unless its a week he thinks is really cool, like when we went to the fire station. Instead he goes to Granda’s house and learns wood working. Granda is building his own shed (it’s as big as my house and so very cool) and Eli is very proud that he cut and put in some of the noggins.  We got Eli a set of working tools scaled down to kid size for his birthday so he could be just like his Granda. Last time he went there he also came back with a wooden Zombie that he designed and made himself. 

Anyhoo back to Junior Jiving and schooling. Instead of trying to jam too many different concepts into their heads I chose to work off what we were doing in the first half of the day in the pre-school group. So till the next theme is introduced we are looking at the sky and sea for our science unit as well. Today we focused on clouds and the water cycle.  

I could see Lilly especially just wasn’t getting it so we headed into the kitchen for an impromptu experiment.

Our pan became a water catchment and the hot plate the heat from the sun causing evaporation, turning the water from its liquid state to a gas.

Then I held the pan lid (so cool that it was glass and we could see what was going on) over the steam. I asked the kids what was happening.

“Nothing…nothing…oh oh water, look I see water!!!” (gotta love their excitement)

We talked about the water vapour condensing in a cooler environment then Eli calls out “that’s what happens in the clouds, then the droplets get bigger and heaver till they fall out”

“Yep that’s it, brilliant, can you remember what it’s called”

“It’s rain but you want me to say….cloud preparation?’”

ooo so close but he’s getting it.

So we waited to see if our cloud/lid would produce any precipitation, and if you look closely it rained!

We have also listened to and made up a groovy wavy arm dance to go along with this really cool song. The songs they write introduce so many amazing things to kids and are so fun to listen to, this one shows the three states of water. They Might Be Giants are just the bees knees really.

We’re not finished with water yet but it’s a pretty decent start.  

We have been studying our world. We started last year in a very similar way to the presentation in this video.

This is my globe, it doubles as a bed side light. Eli likes Australia to point to him while he sleeps.

I didn’t quite have the gazillion dollars needed to buy all the Montessori equipment so I made the continent puzzle out of felt.

We also used a wall map of the world from the post office.

After all of the kids including Sabi could easily identify the continents we went back to the first one in the song, North America, and started looking at the individual countries in it. We watched videos, borrowed library books, cooked and ate food, listened to music, attempted traditional dances and finally made a lap book to document our discoveries. It took about a term to visit Canada, USA and Mexico.

Then we moved onto South America and did the same thing only we chose three countries and focused on them after a brief review of the whole continent. One of the countries we chose was Brazil. On top of library books we also watched the movie Rio and researched Carnival. We made our own masks and danced to Brazilian music.

After reading the Great Kapok Tree we spent a fair bit of time looking at the Amazon rainforest. We even built our own mini rainforest in the school room with painted very big cardboard rolls. Other books we read from South America were Up and Down the Andes, My Name is Gabriela and Ghost Hands.

We’ll be heading into Africa next and Lani is quite excited she’s always loved lions, I’m just not sure how I’m going to find documentaries on them that wont traumatise our zebra loving Lilly.

Our church has been laying new carpet. This means the biggest cardboard rolls we’ve ever gotten our hands on are just laying around the place and since we are studying the continent of South America, and looking closely at Brazil, when I saw them I immediately thought tree trunks.

This activity didn’t just serve as a huge visual reminder of our journey through the Amazon it presented numerous learning opportunities in itself.

The kids knew they needed brown but we had only the primary colours. I asked them if they could talk to each other and maybe do a few experiments to see if they could find brown, they had remembered the basic colour mixes but couldn’t think of two colours that made brown. Lani had a moment of inspiration when she remembered seeing brown when Sabi had gotten to their paint pallets and mixed all the colours together. So after a few trial runs that were too red they got the colour they were after.

It also turned out to be a fairly messy activity, like that’s a surprise.

This may not be top of your list of bonuses. However with one child who adores mess and will seek it planed or not and another who has been known to freak out over glue/paint/water touching his skin it proved to be a brilliant safe time to give in to obsessions and challenge phobias respectively.

Oh yeah and as the tubes were round and had to be held while painting them it was also good for all that bi-lateral, crossing the centre line, using two hands and both bits of your brain stuff….I should really listen better in class.

plus it was fun

Bet you can’t tell which child adores messy play. By the way bubbles are included in messy play in my world once you’ve seen what Sabi can do with a bottle of detergent, the kitchen and the time it takes Mummy to go to the toilet you would consider them a ticking time bomb too. But in the above photo she was being reminded (once again) that mess can be fun, but we do need to clean up after ourselves.

And then we learnt to fly.

Like an Amazon bird

or Amazon super hero?

before we all came back down to earth and made dinner.

I was totally failing at keeping my ASD seven year old in the room long enough to even hear the words we were trying to learn let alone attempt to spell them. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in the lesson. He was, he couldn’t wait for his turn to write on the board and squealed with excitement every time he got a word right first go. It was just that he was equally interested in jumping on the trampoline, skipping, swirling the skipping rope, trying to catch the dancing spot of light on the wall, discovering what was causing the dancing spot of light on the wall, explaining the properties of reflective material, listing the occupations in which the wearing of clothes made out of reflective material was a requirement………..and it was really starting to tick the girls off.

The lesson was taking too long and I was about to cut my losses, send him off in search of a butterfly or something and hope the fallout later when he realized I had gone on and schooled the girls without him wouldn’t be catastrophic. Then inspiration struck. I realised that one of the word families we were working on was the `ood` family. Yay I know that family, those weird squishy, tentacle faced, hive brained singing dudes, I know them and better than that Eli does too. At the moment Eli’s absolute top of the list special interest is Doctor Who followed closely by Minecraft and Gymnastics. Basically he’s in his element killing Creepers whilst wearing Eleven’s skin and standing on his head. If that last statement makes no sense to you then you need to hand your nerd licence back in, it’s been revoked. Anyhooo I quickly scribbled up an Ood on the whiteboard and the change in Eli was instantaneous. Without being asked and with overflowing enthusiasm he began to write all the words he could think of with ood in them. Those staring red eyes were like some kind of attention drug and Eli was hooked.

Mr Ood has not been allowed to leave our board all week. Instead he stays, demanding the best out of his pupils and has now become a crucial part of each spelling lesson coming up with ingenious if not childish sentences containing the word on our list. Now I’m racking my brain to think of other ways to let the Doctor into our lessons.

Book Week is a magical day, yes it is a day to celebrate the hard work of talented Authors and Illustrators. A day to appreciate the characters they gift us after many creative hours labouring over the birth of a new life albeit a one confined to the page, but it is also a day were we can put aside self and live the life of our heroes of fiction. Today we can talk to animals, follow white rabbits and fly in a blue box to planets normally held captive by time and space, today is magic.

Goldilocks and her three bears (and apple)

Alice in Wonderland

The Eleventh Doctor Who

Pippi Longstocking

The best group shot of the day, Sabi was meant to be in the large gap in the middle but never mind.

One of the books we read was called My Uncle’s Donkey. It is a cute little book with very retro micky mouse style illustrations of a donkey running amuck in the uncles house. The story elicits delightful responses from the children along the lines of “That’s naughty he really shouldn’t be in the fridge, I would never do that!” And “Ahhh now he’s eating the flowers…..aren’t they Vincent Van Gough flowers?” and yes they were, the book is full of little pop culture references that you can explore in greater detail with older children.

I did love the fact that when the book inquired at the end not one of our kids thought it would be a good idea to have the Donkey come and live at their house.

For a craft we used one of the donkey drawings from the book and the starter line My uncle’s donkey……. to create our own donkey scenario using drawing and collage just like the book.

There was of course lots of free play opportunities and it was nice to see the kids inventing their own games.This one involved two sitting people and two standing ones that occasionally ran around the sitting ones like crazy then stood still. I’m not sure what the point was but I’m certain it existed after the amount of planning I witnessed before they started.

The second book we read was called The Tall Man and the Twelve Babies. This book is quirky and funny and delightfully nonsensical with a very tall man living in a very tiny apartment with six baby boys all named Alistair and six baby girls all named Charlene. And to top it off the babies aren’t very well behaved. To make the chaos come alive I hid laminated copies of the twelve babies around the Shed (School/playroom) each one had an action verb written on the back. When one was found the finder had to read the word then we all did the action such as jump, shake, cry……I think by the end of it we all felt the tall man’s pain.  At one point in the story the poor tall man is stuck in a cat flap and pulled in alternative directions by the Alistairs and Charlenes so we played a game of tall Man Tug of War with Charlenes (girls) verses Alistairs(boys). The girls knocked the boys socks off, twice, go girl power!

We finished with a colouring in of the Tall man complete with crazy hair that will be turned into a book mark.

Wet crafting hanging on the line drying oh so nicely when the weathers fine….

A glimpse of the madness involved in feeding so many, this was about half I’ll let you imagine the noise.

The theme for book week this year was One World Many Stories so we had to have a world cake to celebrate. My kids have also been looking at different stories from around the world and decorated the windows with a pulled apart sticker book on national costumes of the world so they felt that they had participated in the theme.

The last book we read, Maudie and Bear, won it’s category and looked just like it had been pulled of the shelves of history. For me this book works best as a one on one with a child where the little one you are reading with can snuggle up on your lap and pour over the delicate illustrations. I fell in love with the illustrations, their unfinished sketchiness and visible pencil lines gave the book an exquisite fragility, like it was merely a passing glimpse into a time gone by and if we weren’t careful we would loose the moment before we truly understood it. They added so much story to the book, filling in the blanks between one carefully succinct line to the next. The title character Maudie however is neither careful nor delicate and is instead the essence of every true child, self focused, hot tempered, excitable and sometimes rude but steadfast bear loves her through it all. by the end of the collection of short stories you just know Maudie with turn out well adjusted, who wouldn’t living with such strong non judging unconditional love.

For the craft for Maudie and the Bear the kids put eyes, nose and ears on and then stuffed a bear I had sewn. I’m hoping they can find the time to learn how to stich up his bottom because the poor bears left here very uncomfortable with their bottoms pined shut.     

They seemed to have fun, I hope they did I loved having them all around.

The Doctor will see you now.

“We are building a classroom at the bottom of our garden.”

I said that statement recently to a person I didn’t know and who I knew had no idea we are a home-schooling family. It was in response to her query about my use of the last school holidays. I braced myself for the requisite “why are you doing that, why are you home-schooling, are you mad?” inquisition followed rapidly by the usual excuses as to why they would find it too difficult (By the way, if you ever feel the need to do this, you soooo don’t need to apologise to me I really don’t care two hoots about your educational choices for your own children I imagine you put some thought into it and went with what suited your little ones best. I imagine if the thought to home-school even crossed your mind you dismissed it because you knew it would cause your whole family more stress than it was worth or you knew in your heart you children would be miserable. I know this because that’s the thoughts we have about school and that’s the reason we don’t go, not, big not, because we believe it is the best and only way to educate a child)

Anyway this women just paused for a nanosecond, said “Oh ok” with a small shrug of the shoulders and carried on with her conversation about the sales, I think. Apparently backyard classroom building is common place and I should really stress less about talking to people.

Classroom building is sparky.

We also have no working lights in the school room yet so big sparky tools are being used in the dark, emergency waiting room here we come!

Notice my Dad is helping us again, isn’t he cool, he is the King of Construction. If it wasn’t for Dad we would be living in a plastic wall panelled homage to the bad parts of the 70′s. Now we dwell in a perpetual construction zone….um….yay….

We have been looking at contractions today, it did not run soothly.

Me: “I am going to read a word to you and I want you to tell me what words it is a contraction of. The word is Aren’t”

Lillian: “Aunty!”

 

Me: Can you please say your contractions to me before you go to free play time.”

Eli: “No!!!

Me: (insert random gentle persuasive words)

Eli: “AAAHhhhhggg!!!!” bangs fists down on the table “I cannot I can’t, I will not  I won’t and you aren’t going to make me” Then runs off

Alanah: “Well….at least you got him to say his contractions.”

The book is a humorous introduction into the mad world of Inventors. That specific breed of scientist who has no qualms about putting their lives or the lives of their friends, relatives and chickens on the line for the sake of progress.

The information is sound and broken up into snippets easily digested by the young mind. Each page is peppered with cheeky illustrations that bring the text to life.

There is also a link in the book to the Usborne Quicklinks Website were you can have ago at being an inventor yourself in the safety of the unexplodable internet.

Anyhoo, I had set Sabrina up on the rug with her wooden blocks while we read our two pages above her on the lounge. We were reading about the invention of the wheel. We hit a bit of a brick wall when the idea of rolling logs to transport stone was mentioned, Lilly just didn’t get it, I don’t know why, the poor child must be deprived in the rolling things arena. So I commandeered a bunch of Sabi’s blocks for an object lesson.

Then of course they had to make it cooler.

Because they were having such a ball with the blocks I let them stay on the floor while I read our lesson from The Story of the World. I think this was probably the book I was trying to buy when I bought the other one as well.

I like this book, the kids are hooked on it which in my mind is the best rating a school book can get. If it doesn’t hold their interest they aren’t going to learn anything other than how to look like you are listening while you are actually daydreaming about fairies. 

The Story of the World is history for the classical child apparently, I didn’t know mine were classical, I have always thought of them more sort of bohemian or even abstract at times but there you go.

The book combines factual accounts, ancient myths, legends and fictional stories based on life in the time you are looking at. It also explains, through the use of story telling, the definition of Archaeologists and Historians. My children now think of themselves as Archaeologists because they used the discovery of buried artefacts and other forms of physical evidence to prove beyond a doubt that the people who owned this house before us had a dog. Their scientific proofs are: A dog bone with teeth marks found under the house, A half chewed tennis ball found buried in the garden and the handle on the washing line was chewed to bits. Total geniuses.     

The chapter that we read was about the first nomads becoming farmers. As I looked up from my reading about a girl and her family who had recently come to live on the banks of the Euphrates river and were being taught how to place seeds in the rich soil of the river bank to find….

..our own fertile crescent appearing on my lounge room floor. The more I read the more they added to their model, like the horse because the girl in the story ate horse meat so we know there were horses. It was very cute, I couldn’t stop smiling as I read watching their big round eyes hanging off every word to see what else they could add. But then the inevitable happened and as I read through the last paragraph I was constantly interrupted with plaintive cries of "AHHHH, Sabrina has her foot in my Tigris River!!"  "Sabrina just threw a farm house at the Fertile Crescent!" and "Ahhh now she’s put the trees in the Tigris and run off with the Euphrates!!!"

"But They Are My Blocks!".