As I mentioned over at our Facebook page a few days ago, our dining room was temporarily transformed in to a recording studio while Miss Oh Waily created her first Minecraft Let’s Play video. It was quite the experience for all of us.

Thankfully the awkward patch of trying to edit the first video to deal with some initial teething issues has not put her off at all. There should be more in this series, so if you want to support and encourage her to keep learning and improving, you could do nothing better than liking her video and perhaps even write her an encouraging comment. If you are feeling super-supportive then you can always subscribe to her channel too. I’m pretty sure any of those will bring a huge smile to her face.

So this first episode was edited by me, with the Miss doing some specific pieces and ensuring I wasn’t destroying her masterpiece. The next one will be much more of a collaboration where she will be left to do the necessary nips and tucks, with me hovering nearby to answer questions. Although I suspect there will be little to fix next time around… with the exception of any creaking doors in the background !

So without further ado, I give you Miss Oh Waily aka RainbowGems and her first “Let’s Play” video.

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RainbowGems’ debut

October 13, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Welcome to this week’s instalment of Tuneful Tuesday.

Today I’ve chosen to take the Oh Waily kids down Memory Lane into the ‘way out’ 1970s.
Disco, glam rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, soul, jazz, punk, R & B, new wave… oh so many genre choices!

I narrowed it down to a few of my favourites, and added in a couple of extras courtesy of some feedback one of our lovely ‘followers’ over at our Facebook page suggested. I can see that this time period is going to need to be revisited at some point to cover those great songs, singers and bands that we’ve missed this time around.

You can find the full play list here on YouTube. Enjoy!

And here’s what the Oh Waily Kids thought of it all:

On seeing “YMCA” from The Village People:

“Hey, the minions dressed up like them.”

This didn’t stop Master Oh bouncing around to the song and saying, ‘That was quite good wasn’t it Mum?’, and Miss Oh calling it “the Gru song”.

Miss Oh wanted to share a pun with me too… apparently we should call it “Gru-vy music!”

All-in-all the Oh Waily kids weren’t really taken with this decade. Master Oh did dance a little bit to other songs, but perhaps they just felt like doing other things today instead of dancing. After all, one of their all-time favourites was in this list… ‘Hot Legs’, and they didn’t even turn their heads from what they were doing when it came on.

Based on that I’m not giving up hope that they will come to like one or two other songs. There’s still the remainder of the week with this as our background music so something might click for them. If things develop further I’ll come back with an update.

In the meantime I need to head over to iTunes and see if I can find “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” since that doesn’t appear to be going out of fashion any time soon. (Seriously, you should go listen to it with your kids… it’s ridiculously catchy.)

Tuneful Tuesday: The 1970s

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

Following on from my discovery of the wonderful idea of a lego challenge from Let Kids Be Kids, Mr Oh Waily decided that there was no time like the present for setting challenge 1.
He chose a slight modification from the original idea and set them a time of 30 minutes to make something with four wheels that could fly.

Master Oh decided to be quick and to the point, then spend the time doing other things. It kinda shows he’s into brevity really, and has an imagination about what constitutes ‘wings’ for flying.

Miss Oh, being true to her nature, took nearly the entire time and created this. Also quite imaginative on what it takes to fly, but certainly more involved in scale and engineering needs.

They had a fun time doing it and have asked to add some ideas to the Challenge list, so this will be a keeper in our household.

If it’s something you do, or you think your kids would like, feel free to leave a comment with a link to your blog post. I’m sure my munchkins would love to see other people’s creations.

Lego Challenge #1 – Four wheels and flies

October 5, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

After a bit of a bump at about the halfway mark, the Oh Waily kids have managed to persevere and complete the King’s Chamber in their History World pyramid.
To be fair, I designed the stairways as they found it pretty tough translating the cross-section diagram of Khufu’s tomb in to a Minecraft world, but it’s something we can work on as they get more practiced at the planning side of things.

Once again, however, the great bulk of this creation is their own.
Master Oh Waily created the actual space while Miss Oh Waily did most of the outfitting. She even designed the contents of the boat chest to look like the profile of Egyptian boats she had seen in our readings.

We hope you enjoy.

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Minecraft History: The King’s Chamber

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

Today the Oh Waily kids had a real life physics lesson courtesy of one of the local play parks.
It’s hard work balancing the scales when you don’t weigh the same amount.
And it’s great work for them trying to figure out how to keep the momentum going… mostly, in the end, they chose to utilise “Mummy-Power”. This made it a phys ed class for ALL of us.

It's hard work balancing the scales when you don't weigh the same amount. #homeschool #physicslesson #reallife #thepukekopatch
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Real life physics

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

If you’ve been around the Patch’s online homes lately you will notice a bit of an update in looks.

I’ve finally managed to get some time to bring us kicking and screaming in to a brighter, more colourful place which is totally appropriate as the Oh Waily kids are most certainly bright and colourful.

In addition to the brighter look, I’ve also brought all of our online homes in to line so no matter where you follow us we will look the same (or very similar). So if you follow us here at the blog you will recognise us over at Facebook, on our new Twitter feed, at our new Instagram feed or over at the YouTube channel.

If you already follow along on the existing Twitter and Instagram feeds, please note that there won’t be any more home education related posts there from now on. So feel free to join us at the new Patch-specific accounts.

Updates all round

September 30, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Inspired by a post at Tinkerlab I thought I would start a once-a-week art provocation called ‘Our Creative Table’ and see if the kids enjoyed it.

I’d say it was a resounding success. They’ve asked me to do it again today!

Taking my initial inspiration from this Creative Table post at Tinkerlab, I cleared off our table and set it up with watercolours and some plain paper with swirly loops. It was quite interesting how each of the Oh Waily kids chose to use the swirls.

So here is what it looked like to start off.

A nice clear table with only the art supplies… nothing to distract from the opportunity to create.

Nice swirly patterns to interpret as they see fit. And so they did.

Miss Oh chose to colour in and add her own flourishes. While Master Oh chose to make faces.

As I put out basic paper the watercolours started to crinkle it, but using the masking tape and leaving them to dry in situ seems to have sorted that out quite well. Today I’ll be putting out some of our watercolour paper and they can compare it to yesterday’s experience.

So here are the final products.

Apologies for the dull photographs, it’s been rather miserable weather around here for a while. Time to find a good spot to take finished photos even when the weather is uncooperative!

As for the activity, I can highly recommend this and will be doing it again in a couple of weeks when we return from visiting family. If you want to join in with a creative table post every Friday, then feel free to drop a link to your post in the comments. The more, the merrier.

Also, if you read through the Tinkerlab post you will see that there is a hashtag to use on Instagram if you want to join in there, #creativetable. You will find an incredible 8,000 posts for a tiny bit of inspiration, and much better photographs! (Clearly I need to up my game on that front.)

Happy creating everyone.

Our Creative Table

September 25, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

Last night was the final evening of the local kids’ badminton club. Surprising her totally, Miss Oh was the recipient of the Most Improved Novice Girl prize for 2015. To say that she was happy and bashful all at once would be a bit of an understatement.

Well done Miss !! You really have come a long way this year, skill-wise, and are a deserving winner. Love your enthusiasm!!

– Mr, Ms & Master Oh Waily xoxoxox

Most Improved

September 24, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

I’ve been a long-time reader of Jo Ebisujima’s blog, in it’s various incarnations. I was first attracted by her Montessori posts and then just continued to hang around as she evolved and became a full-on entrepreneur through her My Organised Chaos work. I’ve also posted about that before too, since I was lucky enough to be an early participant in her online courses.

Well, just recently we’ve seen that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree in the Ebisujima household with the young master taking to doing his own inspirational work. This time producing short videos to inspire other kids to give adventurous eating a go.

In a snappily named channel “Ebi-kun Eats” you can follow along as he downs a variety of foods.
I’ve subscribed us up and I’m going to be ~~ensuring~~ encouraging the Oh Waily kids to watch his new videos as he does them. Who knows? My two may be inspired to get past the look or smell of a new food in order to actually try it as a result.

Adventurous eating

September 18, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / 2 Comments

A discussion and an idea

September 13, 2015 / Ms Oh Waily / Leave a comment

I’m currently KonMari-ing our books. I mentioned this earlier.

Today while doing the kids’ books section of the process I compared the releasing of the unwanted books to our other semi-regular donation of goods and clothes to our local Women’s Refuge. I also tied in the purpose of the “Donate” portion of their pocket money to the short discussion.

Miss Oh saw a connection immediately to helping others, and what they might need.
She asked if it would be a good idea to donate food to those who may be in need and could we do that.
I said it would be, then I suggested the idea of going to our local food bank and asking what items they most need. Then perhaps we could get together a box once a month for them.

Apparently that would be a good idea. And apparently we have stumbled in to another life lesson in appreciating what you have and doing what you can for others.

It’s the joy of impromptu discussions and a joy sparking result for me.