Playing with the kids

November 10, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today’s post is really a recommended reading.

It’s about play and it’s importance to our children. I love this article by Genevieve Simperingham, it encapsulates so much of what I wish for my kids. It’s called, very simply, The Power of Play.

I’m also very slowly working my way through Lawrence Cohen’s book “Playful Parenting” which has a load of excellent insights into how to engage with your children on a playful level. I’m loving the ideas for connection and allowing them to get what they need in this way.

The hardest part is breaking pre-existing habits of interacting with our kids. And taking a playful approach if it’s not your natural style, takes a lot of focus, concentration and hard work.
But it’s definitely worth it.

I’d love to hear about any similar books or articles, so please leave a comment with your reading recommendations about playful parenting and the importance of children’s play.

The Cow Episode

November 9, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today’s blog post is brought to you by “Pigs in space….”

Oh wait. No…. that’s my youth I’m reliving*.

This is Miss Oh’s youth we’re talking about here. In that case it should be “Cows in trees”. In this episode you meet the gravity defying bovines that populate the Minecraft world. Well, mostly gravity defying and apparently expert climbers.

Fences are built, random movie moments are stolen** and re-interpreted by a child who has never seen the original, and the odd witty remark is passed. All by my lovely eight year old !!

Before we get to the link, I must again thank those who have subscribed to her channel. As of yesterday she has made it to her first goal – 10 subscribers. She is also well on her way to 100 views on one video – with her first episode up to 70 views now.

[kad_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRvr7LAvvAw” ]

Bonus points to you for recognising the reference.

** Triple points if you get that reference too.

Miss Oh snuck the iPad off to her bedroom yesterday and I thought she was either watching the ubiquitous Minecraft videos on YouTube or playing a random game. It turns out I was wrong on both points.

She was watching YouTube videos, but it was one of our other subscriptions, Art for Kids Hub.

Instead of doing any of the drawing prompts she chose to do the origami. She made and decorated the Snapper, a cup, a flower, a hat and heart. All done sneakily on her own. Here are some of them. She’s undecided if she will decorate them or not, so for now they are mostly plain white.

Origami Heart-2

And then she finished off with a Minecraft drawing, in homage to an effort to find a wolf to tame that she had made earlier in the morning.

I can heartily recommend the Art for Kids Hub, either at their website or at their YouTube channel. It’s great, straightforward art for kids to try out. And it’s on topic for what’s in with younger kids.

Sneaky Art

November 8, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today, while out exploring the sunny day with camera in hand, I discovered that I had filled up my SD card. So this evening I took the time to get the photographs off and to clean up the card. That means I can finally share some photos that have been awaiting my attention for a while now.

Back in October I set up another creative table for the Oh Waily kids. This time I put out some oil pastels and a few knickknacks as possible prompts.

Here are some of the results.

This is Miss Oh’s view and first piece of art. She pretty much chose to ignore the prompts, but for a later piece where she wrote out, in colours, the word ‘love’. For the keen sighted, you might notice her drawing of Sqaishy in her art journal.

Here we have Master Oh’s main piece, which turned in to something of a series. These days his art isn’t so much just a drawing as a visual piece of a very long, convoluted and involved verbal story. But I’m sure you can see that he was inspired by the frog, only these frogs have a lot of super-powers and stuff going on that is both exciting and gruesome at the same time.

And Miss Oh’s main piece from the oil pastel day was on a very consistent theme for her – hearts.

And that pretty much sums up our oil pastel creative table. What have you and yours been creating lately?

Our creative table – oil pastels

November 7, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today there was coffee ! And some applied maths… multiple-step multiplication and addition to work out the right number of blocks to make paths in Minecraft, for both kids. Also some discussion about different patterns and how to construct them. In between that there was a trip to the shops, a library visit for new reading books, a letter in the post from a home ed friend of Miss Oh’s who now lives in Christchurch, a play at the park, and a spotting of multiple baby ducks.
One of the ducklings elicited a great deal of excitement in that it looked to be the same “Sqaishy” duck we had seen a couple of weeks ago. Minecrafters will probably know which one is meant. Apologies for the hideous quality, it was a bright day & I only had my phone on me, so it’s pretty awful with no white balance.

Added to this Miss Oh has recorded her fourth episode of Rainbow World, and we’ve noticed that she now has 9 subscribers – one away from her goal of 10 !! Thanks to those of you who have been kind enough to sub up, as I know it’s a royal pain if you don’t have a Google account.

Interestingly, as I sat down to write this post I was thinking that there really wasn’t much going on today. Maybe there was after all.

And that’s pretty much what we did today. Hope your Friday has been a good one!

What Did We Do Today?

November 6, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Is it Christmas yet?
Are we done for the year? Can we be? Huh? Huh? Huh?

Yes, there are days when those words run through my head, and that’s only in February!
Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re being selfish or self-centred for choosing to home educate your kids! I could have a life that involves talking to a range of other adults on a daily basis if I weren’t at home with my kids. I could go to the gym and have the body of an athlete if I didn’t do this.

Yeah, right! (At least to that last one.)

Some days are bloody marvellous with your kids, and other days are like Chinese water torture. As the year goes on and as everyone starts to become tired of the constant company, there are slightly fewer of the first and slightly more of the latter.
I’m sure there are super-mums out there who have the juggling of personal time, fitness, kids’ activities, date nights with hubby, and the serious business of having the kids learning stuff, down to a fine art.

I have to confess to not being one of them. And I think it’s time for more blog posts about that side of our serious commitment to our kids’ education.

I wonder if most blogs about this only want to highlight the good stuff because of that dreaded social media disease of one-upping / living a false life in front of others, or whether there is still a good sized fear that to actually talk about the hard stuff might add ammunition to the anti-home ed brigade out there.
Personally I’m not sure which it is, but it’d be nice if we could gain a bit of balance in this.

I’m pretty sure that no one’s real life looks like their Facebook feed, or their Instagram account. As a seasoned home ed veteran said in a group I belong to, and I paraphrase, “It’s like a highlights reel.”
And that’s the truth of the matter. The fun bits are there to see, not the arguments, the frustrations, the let downs.

As for the folk who think home ed people are a bunch of hippy/fundamentalist/tinfoil-hat-wearing weirdos doing irreparable damage to their kids, I’m pretty sure there are school parents whose home life isn’t the stuff of fairytales either. (And they aren’t shoulder to shoulder with their kids on a daily basis!!)

So yep, by this time of year it’s beginning to wear thin.

And what does a conscientious mother do to get over that hump each day?

Yep. That helps.

Oh, and taking an unschooling or project based approach goes some way to chilling out too. Or take some good advice on clawing back some time for yourself, and remember that to create self-motivated, life-long learners it’s a marathon not a sprint.

Good luck. I know we all need a bit of it some times!

Yesterday’s post title came from John Lee Hooker’s “Wednesday Evening Blues”

Where’s the coffee?

November 5, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / 1 Comment

The Oh Waily household had a bit of a role reversal today. Mr Oh took the day off work and spent it with the kids, thus creating enough quiet time for me to do some real world work.
Otherwise known as getting on with creating our new work website.

So while I tipped and tapped; cursed and curated my way through a few solitary hours, the rest of the Oh Waily family headed up the coast to a PYO market garden. By way of Facebook, I had the heads up that the strawberry patch was going to be open for picking today and tomorrow, so suggested a fun day out with a bit of a purpose.

Miss Oh loves strawberries so it was a complete no-brainer as far as she was concerned. Master Oh, not so much. He went, he picked, he had a good time. Whether we can convince him to eat one of the juicy, smelly (in a super-yummy way), huge strawberries… well, let’s just say… we’ll see.

Yesterday’s blog title was from “Tuesday Afternoon” by The Moody Blues.
Today’s is from yet another song.

Everyday on Wednesday, Think about my baby

November 4, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Tuesday afternoon, I’m just beginning to see

November 3, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Today’s blog title is rather fitting as Tuesdays in the Oh Waily household tends to be afternoon heavy with events. So I’m only just beginning to see the end of my working day right now.

As for during today, thanks for a willing volunteer who has taken the job over from me, we are now back at swimming lessons for the remainder of the term. Unlike previous terms the kids aren’t in back-to-back classes and we only have one teacher for all three classes. This means that young Master Oh starts out at 1:30 and Miss Oh doesn’t start her class until 2:30. So altogether the kids are going to have a minimum (and you know it’s going to be a minimum) of one and a half hours in the pool every Tuesday afternoon.
They might just love that.

The only issue is the half hour it takes to prise them out of the pool, into the changing room, under the shower and then dressed to head home. This is compounded by the fact that the pool is a 20+ minute drive from home. So you can see that pretty much ALL of Tuesday afternoon is taken up with swimming. Definitely ticks the PE boxes, eh?

My only weapon in winkling them out of the pool is the fact that we have to get home in enough time to eat something before Miss Oh heads off to her evening at Brownies and Master Oh gets to have his Daddy Date. It also looks like, being out of practice, that the swimming might just be tiring Miss Oh out a bit. I’m not sure how she stayed awake on the drive home from the pool, but she managed albeit with the odd moaning… ‘I’m soooooo tired’ coming from the back seat.

Then at Brownies she gets to go a bit crazy too. Thankfully tonight seems to have been a relatively calm evening involving crafting a picture out of random items. Phew!
A bit of a change from the weekend when she attended the Brownie Revels in Carterton, which I will write about some time this week. Mr Oh Waily went as a parent helper (bless his cotton socks!) and he took some nice shots of Miss Oh in action during the assault course and the water relay events. The only hiccup being the discovery of a second Brownie hoodie in her bag when we went to clear it out… now to find the owner.

And so that is the key bits of our Tuesdays here at the Patch. Just in case you wondered if home educators ever socialised with anyone but their families. (Tongue firmly in cheek, tinged with a dose of sarcasm.)

Monday’s Blog Post Title.
– no guesses? Surely it wasn’t that hard!
Answer: The Mamas and The Papas’ “Monday, Monday” of course !!

Today’s title hint: another song lyric.

So today the euphoria of winning the World Cup has gone, and it’s back to the daily routine. Maths, gymnastics and a bit of science were the order of the day.

Master Oh is working on his subtracting skills using counting back techniques, and rather cunningly with splitting techniques. He’s a bit of a sly one, in that he seems to have picked up his skills with very little direct teaching on my part and it suddenly shows up when we sit down to practice new concepts. Thanks to our lego, some freebie tens frames and our workbook we did some pretty good subtraction within 20 with regrouping.

Miss Oh is also currently working on her subtracting skills with regrouping. This time she’s working on the mental gymnastics required to do subtraction within 10,000, but in fairness the workbook keeps most of the mental arithmetic to under 100. This is a good thing because the Miss can do the maths but still stumbles a bit with a desire to subtract the smallest number from the biggest irrespective of whether it’s part of the starting number or part of the amount to be removed. The technical skills are there but the automatic understanding of what she’s doing and why still needs some more time.

Gymnastics was the same fun as usual. A great time to learn new skills & stretch themselves physically. Not to mention great fun to catch up with friends too. It’s a winner all around.

Science today was The Cell. It was, as Miss Oh insisted on punning, an egg-speriment !!
Yes, using the egg as a very big & easily seen cell.
I had to go out in the afternoon to have my dodgy back attended to, so it was left to Mr Oh Waily to lead the way here. Which, of course, is no problem for an ex-scientist.
When I returned home Master Oh was able to regale me with a couple of key parts to the egg and to tell me that plant cells were a different shape and had different stuff in them. I’ll take that from a just-six year old.

All-in-all a fairly typical Monday, despite everyone beginning to show signs of end-of-year slowdown.

November’s NaBloPoMo game – Guess the source of the blog post’s title .
Today’s Hint: it’s from a song.
Leave your guess in the comments.
Answer confirmed tomorrow.

Monday, Monday, it’s here to stay.

November 2, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Shameless plug

November 1, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

I thought I would put out a quick post to encourage anyone who hasn’t already, to take a look at Miss Oh Waily’s YouTube channel. Along with her Rainbow World Minecraft Let’s Play videos, she has started another series that will contain short tips.

She recorded and edited the third episode and did most of the tip video too. I should be entirely redundant in no time.

Her current goal is to get to 10 subscribers and hit 100 views on a single video. Lofty goals, but hopefully attainable at some point.

In addition to the videos, I also wanted to give NaBloPoMo a go here at the Patch. I’m not sure how it’ll turn out as I haven’t worked out if there’s enough to actually write about each day, but I figure it’s worth a crack. I’m already doing it over at my own blog, so it should just be a natural tag along to do one then the other, but we will have to see.

Happy viewing all ! And reading too.