Today in home education...

As Tane and I are still in a quandary about where we are going to live and what Tane is going to do for work/career, we are currently homeschooling the children.

We dropped Tane off this morning at the domain as he was leaving for his basic training with the army for the territorials. So that means its just me and the kids for 4 weeks. On the way home I remembered I had seen a sign which was a public notice and said something about explosives. As one of Joshua's interests at the moment is explosives/explosions/fireworks, I thought I'd go back and read the notice. As luck would have it, the quarry was going o do an explosive on the 16th Nov... "That's today!" Joshua exclaimed excitedly.

So we waited around for the explosion standing from a good vantage point above the quarry. Further good luck was that a worker from the quarry came around and set up some seismographs to measure the earths movement with the blast. I told the kids not to bother him before the blast, but afterwards they just went for it with many questions... "what's that? (the seismograph , "what's it for?", "Why was it just a small explosion?"  etc... they loved that. They found out the quarry was a scoria quarry, which is used as it is good for drainage. They also learnt that the quarry is being prepared to be filled, so the explosion was just required to flatten out some of the hills. And little did they know they just had a geology lesson. As I am just getting to grips with the new camera I did not get a pic of the blast, but here  is a pic of the quarry.

We did our formal school work, which consisted of science (vascular plants), maths worksheets and spelling.
After lunch I put on some 'Love to Sing' songs for Ella to dance to, but it did not stop the bigger kids joining in.

After music-time (Singstar with ABBA and Queen), the older kids went outside to hep Grandpa. He decided to get them to move all the bricks, being used for the construction of the house next door, from the pallets to the scaffolding. So that's what they did... in between climbing up ladders and sliding down the poles like fireman's poles. Then the  neighbour took them for a guided tour of the house... which they liked. Anna-Maria was surprised.. "There is a staircase in there", and Joseph decided be wants to be a builder.

Notice the neatly stacked brick piles with 3 bricks per layer and alternating orientation - maths.

At bedtime Joseph enjoyed cuddles with Lily and Joshua messaged his best buddy Brother James.

Then I tried to get a decent photo of all the kids so we could send a photo to Daddy.

Learning at home is FUN!!