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Homeschooling Diary - A Week in November

by Beverley Paine

A week can be a busy time, especially if your grandparents are staying with your family. Thomas's week began slowly, with lots of relaxing and conversation. His grandparents brought with them some leather working tools and scraps of leather. These quickly got converted into embossed pictures, some later painted, all worked with amazing dexterity and detail. Roger became busy making watch straps, knife scabbards, and then a belt. Interested in this practical application of leather work, Thomas made himself a belt, and a holster for his sword and tai chi stick, and then a strap for his quiver to hold his home made arrows. The boys then spent some time embossing and carving pictures onto their belts. Thomas spent well over an hour leafing through the instruction books, reading the information and finding pictures to trace and transfer onto leather. Not bad for a beginner reader!

A walk down the beach revealed thousands of dead pilchards washed up onto the fore dune, resulting in a conversation about the information heard on the news earlier in the week. The walk then turned into a Frisbee throwing game, with Beverley having to take an unplanned dip to rescue the Frisbee!

Table tennis occupied a fair bit of the week, with Thomas playing both his grandparents as well as other family members. In such a short time he has progressed really well, getting in some ace shots that are unbeatable. What looked like luck at first is now proving to be quite a skill. Even Beverley is beginning to lose some games! As usual Thomas mixes his competitive nature, strict adherence to rules and dedication to the game with a fair amount of fooling around and fun, making him a pleasure to play with.

The goslings have required a bit of attention, being let out of the cage under the house which they share with seven pigeons, about twenty guinea pigs and one orphaned chick. While free ranging they need to be watched over because of the crows, magpies, dogs, cats and foxes which may attack them during the day. Playing with the goslings was enhanced by watching a movie where a girl raises some orphan goslings, eventually training them to fly so they can migrate south for winter. Luckily our goslings will stay with us, although this will mean clipping their wings, something that was touched on in the movie. That raised some thoughtful discussion.

Granite Island is a great place to take interstate visitors, with its wooden causeway and horse drawn tram and resident fairy penguins. Whilst walking around the island Thomas found several nests and showed his grandparents the penguins. After the walk the family visited a retirement village and looked around some display homes. During their visit Thomas's grandparents discussed their plans to sell their house and move into a retirement village, as well as their will and other details relating to death. It was interesting watching Thomas quietly absorbing this information in his matter of fact way.

In the gift shop on Granite Island Pop and Grandma bought Thomas a model of The Endeavour. It rekindled his memory of having walked around the replica ship the Endeavour Bark on his Kangaroo Island holiday a couple of years ago. Thomas was keen to do some research on the Internet, and downloaded a lot of pictures and several pages of information, including the Captain's log of the recent transatlantic crossing. He then became very busy with the balsa wood and within half an hour had produced a small model of his own. The next day his ship had sails flying, and Thomas was talking about weighting down the hull so that his ship would float upright once he has sealed it.

Pop was obsessed with putting his feet into the ocean, living more than 200km from the coast, so one hot day we all went swimming. The water was cold, with a lot of seaweed floating around in it. Roger had to get out after about ten minutes as he had dived under a few times and the cold had given him a headache. Whilst floating Thomas got cold water into his ears and they began to hurt. Those that kept their heads above the water managed to stay in the water for more than half an hour. But it was good to start the summer swimming season off early!

A visit from Pop and Grandma is never complete without several games of cards. Pennies from Heaven is a game where partners team up and try to be the first to reach a score of twenty thousand. Grandma plays very competitively, and it was good to teach her a couple of new games, Rage and Chicken. Pop challenged Thomas to a couple of games of chess, giving him a fair few pointers about the game along the way. Later in the week Thomas played three games with Beverley, and won his first game ever!

Never far from the piano, Thomas managed to impress his grandparents with how far he has come with learning to play it in eleven months. Pop commented on his ability, noting how natural it seems to come to Thomas. Showing off Roger's keyboard rekindled the boys' interest in that and kept them busy for a couple of afternoons experimenting with the functions and inventing melodies.

When Thomas's grandparents left it was with some relief - Beverley is looking for a quieter week, with more computer playing and exploration for the boys so she can get some time to catch up with her growing backlog of work!

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.

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Welcome to the World of Home Education
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We began educating our children in 1985, when our eldest was five. In truth, we had helped them learn what they need to learn since they were born. I am a passionate advocate of allowing children to learn unhindered by unnecessary stress and competition, meeting developmental needs in ways that suit their individual learning styles and preferences. Ours was a homeschooling, unschooling and natural learning family! There are hundreds of articles on this site to help you build confidence as a home educating family. We hope that your home educating adventure is as satisfying as ours was! Beverley Paine

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