Mama's Musings

Following on from the post about our Oceans Unit Study earlier this year, I've collated some info about our Dinosaur Unit Study to share with you.  Zeah is five, and she loves learning-by-doing, so we've done a lot of hands-on learning, as well as enjoying an epic Dinosaur Trail roadtrip!

Some of our Term 2 & 3 activities have included:

Castle & Kite, KiwiCo* and My Creative Box* activity boxes have come to the rescue again, with Zeah undertaking lots of creative Dinosaur activities with her Nanny on Tuesdays.  I like that I can leave these boxes for them and go into the office, and everything they need is on hand.  The activities give quick results, provide something to show off when I arrive home, and there's little waste involved because of how these activity boxes are designed.
(*use these affiliate links for a discount for your family, and mine).

We've found lots of Dinosaur books in the library, op shops, our own shelves, and...

This year, Zeah is Prep age.  Kids at Prep in our state are 4-6 years old.  Or I could just tell you that last month, Zeah turned five!  We plan our 'schoolwork' around themes.  So as well as doing some basic literacy and numeracy activities, and learning to swim, and lots of play and mess-making, Zeah learns about a different theme each term. 

Term 1 was Oceans, and some of the activities included:

Castle & Kite, KiwiCo and My Creative Box activity boxes have all been huge blessings since I started a new job while still studying fulltime.  I'm working casually this year (and mostly home-based) in Community Engagement, which is a dream job for me!  I'm studying Sustainability online via the University of Tasmania - Sociology, Indigenous Lifeworlds and Engaging with Sustainabilty units this semester - all three are quite content-heavy with plenty of written assessments!  I only have another month or so to go until I get a break...

Recently, I shared a review of a printable resource to learn about Money from Teachers Pay Teachers (which also has heaps of cool freebies too, if you want to sample what's available).  Then I reviewed the Barefoot Investor for Families.  To continue with the money theme check out this collection of over 60 resources.  From this Australian government site families can learn about budgeting, charity, advertising, enterprise, sustainability, consumerism, investing, savings goals and more.   

If you do unit studies, or project-based homeschooling, Consider including practical topics like money in your home learning journey...  it's relatively easy to gather resources and children love to learn about real life.  Some other subjects we've covered in other 'real life' units include:

growing food
animals
kitchen skills
enterprise
sewing
building
cars

Rather than a rigid curriculum, the projects have been a conscious choice to include the...

It’s funny, they’ll often joke, if they don’t know how to do something, or don’t know something, “Well, duh, homeschooled.”  And while it’s a joke, I think they might sometimes feel self conscious that they don’t know all the same things as their peers.  But really, their peers don’t know the same things as each other, either!    People have made presumptions about them, their family and their education based on homeschool myths too, which can be awkward.   I find that it’s less common now that there is a lot of positive media coverage of home education.  Once the kids are a couple of years older, they realise they are just as well-educated as those who went to high school, and a couple of them have described it to me as “the ultimate private education”. 

 We each have different skills and strengths.  One thing they all know is that they can learn ANYTHING...

The term ‘bush tucker’ refers to Australian native foods – the huge variety of fruit, nuts, seeds, leaves, birds, mammals, roots, bark, fungi, herbs, spices, flowers, reptiles, insects, aquatic plants and fish. ‘Wild foods’ is another way to describe these, and includes non-native but often abundant food sources.

Wild foods are the ultimate in spray-free, packaging-free local food. So long as they are harvested in moderation from clean environments, they are a very low impact food source. These were once the only means of food and medicine for indigenous Australians – they are a valuable and viable resource worth learning about.

Our family have been discovering over many years and though each change of season, native and wild foods on our small farm and in the surrounding areas in Far North Queensland, Australia. Some we have found include red and yellow guava, lilly pilly, Atherton nut, lemon aspen, native ginger, pipturus and...

Marie from Nature Study Australia has collated a fantastic list of free resources for homeschoolers looking to include Nature Study in their learning journeys...  We've used some of Marie's resources before, and I attended her workshop at the Australian Homeschooling Summit.

Once I started looking for nature study resources, I found there were hundreds, including freebies, available online.  If you have any recommendations, please let us know what you're using, especially Aussie products!

Apart from the sheer hard work of juggling six kids and their varied needs, I actually did feel guilty at times that we were on this almost-constant “holiday”. Our kids didn’t have to wake to an alarm, they had lots of freedom through the day with what they ate, where, when, if they were reading a book they really loved, they could just lay on the couch and finish it in a couple of days. We always tried to travel outside of school holidays to avoid the crowds, went to the beach whenever the weather was best, watched a movie after lunch when we needed a rest, took trips to the city on school days so that the shops, museum etc were quieter. And yes, even our “school work” did not seem to resemble “school” at all.

I’m pretty sure some neighbours and relatives wondered what on Earth I was doing to the “poor kids”! It was easier once the older ones were, well, older, and everyone could see that they were turning out better than...

This never seemed to me like a possibility, and I don’t think the kids worried about it too much either. Even when I first went to uni in the 90s, many of my fellow students were not school-leavers and had entered uni via an alternate route.  I've just enrolled  myself in another university course, 25 years on, and the process was quite simple and 100% online.

When my older kids were teens, a Certificate course was a good entry path into further education, so they started studying those as part of what would be their “senior studies” at around 15. For the younger kids, they also chose certificate courses, and they are also accessing bridging courses into their preferred field. These courses are offered by many universities, and I wish that’s how I entered uni – instead of leaping from high school into the foreign land of tertiary study!

Five of the bigger kids have completed Certificate Courses (such as a Cert 3 in Business, or a Cert 4 in...

When The Barefoot Investor by Scott Pape was published in 2017, I heard about it everywhere and so grabbed myself a copy in paper and audio editions.  I read the book, listened to the audiobook (read by Scott himself), joined a facebook groups where the concepts were discussed, subscribed to the Barefoot emails....  And yes, I opened the ING accounts!  The books are less than $20 each (new), and are also available as ebooks and audiobooks.

We didn't implement all of the ideas in the book - a lot of the Barefoot steps we were already doing, or didn't apply to us.  The way Scott simply and humorously laid out the strategies he suggests made it easy to implement a few easy changes which meant instantly increased savings, decreased expenses, and reaching goals more quickly.  Reassuringly, he reminds readers often to "tread your own path."

I bought this book for some of my younger siblings and adult children, I loved it so much!  I've...

We used various resources for learning. Collectively, our children attained academic knowledge from text books and workbooks, apps and online learning programs like Duolingo, Rosetta Stone and Khan Academy, online courses from free 4 hour short courses through to Certificate IV level qualifications, reading, documentaries, You Tube, tutors and mentors, classes – and probably a dozen other means of which I’m not aware! Their learning programs were extremely flexible and by the time they were teens they were almost entirely self-designed and self-driven. Some of their favourite ways to learn, especially in earlier years, included Unit Studies or Projects, co-operative learning (where we’d do the same Unit Studies as other families, and come together to share regularly), and classes like art, pottery, Italian, and co-op group lessons on science and math topics.

It’s good to remember that you’re always free to change things. If a book or course isn’t...