Going Against the Flow: Term One: Week Five ~ Flooding Rain

This week was an interesting week with continued torrential rain and flooding EVERYWHERE. Thankfully our suburb doesn't get flooded but plenty of suburbs around us had significant flooding and there are signs of problems whenever you go out driving around. Significant rain is forecast for at least another week or two before things ease off, and to complicate matters, storms from Queensland have moved south and affected NSW as well. It is a soggy end to a very damp summer.

First off for this blog post I wanted to mention this book that I read independently and finished this week. I knew magnesium was important and I even had an inkling that most people in western societies are deficient, but I had no idea just how important supplementation is, nor did I know how many serious conditions and/or diseases are likely because of magnesium deficiency and can be improved or cured with supplementation of this vital mineral rather than treatment with pain killers or other medications. I urge family and friends alike to read about the importance of magnesium. This was the book our local library had, but this particular author does have an updated edition of this book.

Munchkin struggled with math this week as he started working on more difficult multiplication and division. So I decided to outsource the teaching a bit to save our sanity.

First we watched two videos on the Math Antics website... the man who creates the videos is quite funny so we find that he keeps the viewer engaged and interested. The step by step processes are easy to follow as well...

Then we moved on to a few videos on Khan Academy. Again, Sal Khan can be quite humorous when teaching, and he thoroughly shows his work as he talks about each step, so it is easy to understand. After watching all these videos, Munchkin was able to sit down and finish his work easily and without too much drama. I highly recommend these sites to any family and friends who are looking for some "homework help" when it comes to math.

Munchkin enjoyed a lot of craft time this week... creating various creatures with his modelling clay. This is the Ender Dragon from Minecraft

Totally engrossed in his crafting time...

We got lots and lots of rain...

The only flooding we got was some street flooding during the downpours as the storm drains struggled to keep up with the speed of the water...

Nothing better than a snack (sliced apple) and a good book on a rainy afternoon...

Monkey working hard on his writing assignment for the week...

We finished our last Asian country notebooking page this week... reading about Bangladesh and completing this page. This was an easy assignment for both boys!! We have now completed our unit study of Australia's Asian Neighbours which we started Term 4 last year.

Munchkin and I decided one afternoon to walk down to the entrance to the boardwalk to see if we could possibly have a look at the river level yet... All this water you can see in the above picture is draining down the street towards the entrance path to the boardwalk. The street is only slightly downhill but that is all it takes to create this kind of drainage after some rain...

The little (dirt) path we normally walk to get to the boardwalk is just at the end of the road...

It was very wet, but we carefully picked our way on the grassy areas to see how close we could get...

This is as far as we got, since neither of us had rain boots/gum boots on and didn't want to soak our feet. As you can see, the first part of the boardwalk is flooded, though that is from runoff, not from rising water (yet).

To get to the river you walk down the path that leads into the trees in the centre of the photo. Since we couldn't even get to that point, we couldn't have a look at the river on this particular day.

We are happy to discover that our resident Blue Tongue lizard has found a new home. Previously he was living under our veranda in the backyard, but this week we discovered that he is now living under the big agave plant in the front yard. No sun to warm him properly this week, but any time it wasn't raining, he could be found laying super flat soaking up whatever heat he could from the overcast light.

You can't see from these photos, but he has almost no tail. He is also EXTREMELY shy and skittish so we know that something really bad has happened to him and we are hoping that if we are careful and kind, he'll get used to us and not be so afraid. We really want him to continue living with us because Blue Tongues LOVE to eat cockroaches, so if you have them living around your house, you aren't likely to see many cockroaches IN your house.

Munchkin is LOVING this series of books that was recommended to us by a good friend.

After a big library haul, Munchkin enjoyed two series written by an Australian author and comedian that he hadn't read before.

More Wings of Fire books... the last few Munchkin was waiting for arrived at the library by Thursday and he now has the WHOLE series to enjoy reading and re-reading.

Two literature selections that we finished this week... Note: if anyone is considering letting their child read Curious Incident independently, there is language that some parents might not want their child exposed to.