Sick and tired already?

November 1, 2016 / Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

Welcome to the first day of The Pukeko Patch’s NaBloPoMo posts.

It is a highly inauspicious start, following the contraction of some random cold and cough by Master Oh Waily on Sunday, and the subsequent contraction of it by Miss Oh Waily yesterday. As the senior Oh Waily at home right now, I am dutifully awaiting my turn for the miserable sniffles and scratchy throat to arrive. My best guess is either tomorrow evening or Thursday morning.

In the meantime I am very grateful that we can be flexible around our home educating when such things happen; and happen this past six months they most certainly have. I cannot remember a year where we have continuously cycled from well, to ill, to well again, only to have a few weeks respite before repeating the process all over again.

We are all heartily sick and tired of it – both literally and figuratively.

In the meantime, what are we to do when we have the weak, feeble, tired bodies, scratchy throats and sniffy noses?
We read.

Well. I read. They listen.

Today we managed to breeze through our week’s worth of history readings and have arrived in Rome. I did our week’s art readings too and the kids drew their version of Romulus, Remus and the Wolf. I’ll post photographs later in the week, if I’m not laid low as I suspect may be the case.

We watched the first part of a German documentary about Alexander the Great, which we picked up from Curiosity Stream, and will probably watch the second part tomorrow. It fitted in quite well with the end of our time in Greece.

Our literature reading for this week is more of The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards, which we have been doing as a bit of bedtime reading over the past week to create some spare time during the day to spend on other things. The kids seem to be enjoying it, but it hasn’t been as gripping as some of the earlier books. To be fair, though, we have only just finished the first part and the real adventure is yet to begin.

I will see if I can get a review out of the kids once we have finished it in a couple of weeks.

In addition to this, we also read a number of poems involving wind which led to discussions about the different sorts of imagery the poets chose. It was really good to see them thinking about and recognising the connections.

And that ends a pretty run-of-the-mill day around The Patch. The only thing missing today was our regular swimming lessons, which fell victim to the colds as well.

Tomorrow will probably follow a similar pattern, depending on what sort of grip the cold gets on the Oh Waily kids (and if it starts in on me).
See you then.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

May 11, 2016 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Miss Oh Waily’s Review

It was a great book. I liked the book because it was funny and silly, and because Violet turned in to a massive blueberry. I also liked it when Verucca fell down the hole and I liked it when Willie Wonka had a candy boat.

Charlie was my favourite character because he was the only nice kid. I also liked Willie Wonka because he made a ton of chocolate and it was amazing. And I liked Grandpa Joe because he danced around the room when he got out of bed for the first time in twenty years.

Master Oh Waily’s Review

I thought it was really funny and nice.
The main part of the story I liked was the Oompa Loompas and how Verucca was thrown down the acorn chute by the squirrels. The squirrels were very hilarious when Verucca went to grab one. And I liked the fact that Violet Beauregard ate the chewing gum and she turned in to a blueberry, and how Augustus got sucked up a pipe.

I liked how funny Augustus was because he was so greedy. Charlie was the best because he was so nice.

Ancients and Art

March 30, 2016 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

This is what we are going through this year in History. I’ve chosen to hit the middle ground between the kids so that I can do one set of readings with them. It’s about a year ahead of the young lad and a year lower for the young miss. But, like all things home ed, it can be tailored to suit as you go along.

As I mentioned before, we are trialling Build Your Library this year and so far it seems to be working a treat. We cover literature, history, art, language arts, mythology and we will be adding in the science component shortly. Maths we already do through our My Pals Are Here! curriculum from Singapore.

What I’m enjoying about BYL is that many of those different curriculum areas are nicely tied together. The art activities tie in with the period or culture being read about in the history section and this also applies to the mythology. With the language arts and literature, they tie together with the book being read.

I obviously need to supplement this with ‘specific to the kid’ extras. For instance, Miss Oh gets a bit of spelling practice while Master Oh gets some more reading practice. But I can say categorically that we have more flow to our days now and I think some of that can be put down to using BYL.

So today, I thought I’d show you a bit of their art which tied in with their history lessons around archaeology. Specifically, cave painting. Here are how Miss Oh Waily and Master Oh Waily represented cave art à la Lascaux. It helped that we already had crumpled paper from our moving that could replicate the texture of a cave wall.

G's Cave Art

Miss Oh’s art depicts a bull being hunted with a spear, and you can note her normal motif of small baby and mother included to the right of the action. And yes, the ‘boy bits’ were intentional.

M's Cave Art

In Master Oh’s work we see a bit of a mixed theme. And true to his style, this piece of visual art was accompanied by a lengthy explanation of what is going on. For brevity I will shorten it here.
You are witnessing a bull being hunted. The two figures at top and on the right are holding torches, while the figure on the left has a spear ready. The golden spear-like object in the bull’s bottom (or “butt-arks” as Master Oh likes to call it) is supposedly a copper spear. So a discussion regarding when technological advances was had regarding that particular aspect of the drawing. There was more to the story, but I think that gives you the gist of it.

If you or your kids are interested in the amazing cave art of Lascaux, I can’t recommend this link more. The interactive experience of gliding through the caves looking at the drawings is most excellent.

Happy Home Edding!