Going Against the Flow: Term Two: Week One ~ Blending Life and Learning

Here we are at the beginning of Term 2, and I'm taking this blog in a slightly different direction. Previous to this year, I've maintained three separate blogs. One for homeschool, one for general family life, and one for my photography. But it is just too much at the moment. So while I simply and declutter my life a bit, I thought it was high time to change how I blog a bit as well. So this blog will still mainly focus on the homeschool portion of our life, but will now also include family stuff and a bit of my photography.

Our first week back to structure and routine went quite well. I am pleased with the amount of work we finished through the week, and we even managed it with minimal tears and frustration. It always takes us a week or two to find our groove, so I anticipate that in another week or two we'll be well on our way to a fun and productive term.

Enjoy the photos that highlight our week...

While the pandemic continues to keep us in lock down, we are unable to attend church on Sunday mornings. This allows us a slightly new routine. The boys and I have been starting our Sunday with a morning video chat with my brother, his wife, and their two girls. It has been a bit rough finding the rhythm of everyone getting a chance to talk and show special things, but we are slowly getting there. My nieces are young (nearly 3 years old and just 7 months old) so it is a challenge for the boys to work out the best way to interact with their cousins, but they are taking it in stride.

Munchkin has discovered the joy of reading aloud to his (near) 3 year old cousin. My SIL and I discuss ahead of time what book we each have a copy of, and then the reading can commence. For this first attempt, Munchkin read "Alexander's Outing" as we gifted it to my niece when my mum was here visiting us last year. In the photo above you can see my niece on the TV holding her copy of the book while Munchkin is just visible in the bottom left-hand photo holding his copy of the book. It worked well and was the highlight of the chat session for my niece.

Sunday evening games session playing Sushi-Go Party...

The lovely giraffe drawing Munchkin did for his cousin...

Monday morning book work... Munchkin and Monkey at the dining table working on their math exercises for the day.

Later Munchkin worked on his Reading Eggspress lessons on the computer...

We're working hard to incorporate more games into our days... this time it is Zeus on the Loose which we all really enjoy...

A Zoom chat session one afternoon with some homeschool friends of ours... through the term I hope to start holding more chat sessions with their friends as they are really missing visiting weekly with everyone.

A damp afternoon walk inspecting the footpath progress...

More work has been done at the construction site as well...

A few more snapshots of their structured learning time...

Left photo: Munchkin working hard typing up his IEW paragraph

Right photo: Monkey works on one of his favourite weekly activities - handwriting

Monster hard at work on his grammar assignment and Munchkin reading a beautiful Graeme Base book that all three boys love.

Munchkin has really taken to his writing this week. BOTH of these paragraphs were written by him and the right hand paragraph (Tree Kangaroos) was typed by him as well. Both of these photos are full-sized, so if you have trouble reading them just click on the photo for a full-sized version that should be easier to read.

I had a little artistic fun with my photography while out on a solo walk around the block one afternoon. I have had not a lot of time or interest for my photography of late so I'm trying to MAKE myself look for opportunities when and wherever I can.

The footpath is DONE - a full three days ahead of schedule! Munchkin is THRILLED!

This photo is also full-sized so you can click on it and then zoom in as well if necessary. Look carefully in the grass and you might see all the winged ants. They are queens heading off to start nests of their own and when the queens fly away like this it means rain!! Sure enough... the rain started about 20 minutes after we arrived home and continued for almost a full day. It was welcome rain too as we've had an extremely dry April.

Munchkin was so excited to get his scooter out and ride on the footpath for the first time.

While doing some cleaning up I discovered the drawing that Monkey did some time ago. He is starting to work on drawing realistic faces. There is a lot he is unhappy with in this drawing, but there are some things he did really well, and I'm sure he'll continue to work on his skills.

A fun games afternoon with Munchkin... Snakes and Ladders on the left and a fun Marvel game on the right where the goal is to make a row of the same character.

The new Guess Who card game Munchkin received for his birthday, and then Blink which is a family favourite.

Finally a beautiful, wooden, marble version of Connect 4 that gets very tricky as you can pull balls out from the bottom row and place back on top to stump your opponent.

In the evening we played some more Zeus on the Loose...

After all the rain we had a stunning sunset... I just couldn't decide which photo was my favourite so I just decided to post all three. The colours were just glorious and pretty close to what you see here.

Munchkin multi-tasking with a snack of spiral pasta while finishing up his math for the day.

Checking to see if the slope on the footpath in front of the Montessori school is good for the scooter board. He had to wait until Saturday to test this out so there were no students and no cars around...