About an hour ago I was feeling totally successful. I felt we had accomplished a lot during the week.

Our meeting on Monday was actually kinda fun – I went through the areas of the NZ curriculum (that I said I’d use in my homeschool application) and we thought about whether we had done something relevant. I felt we’d been weak on science and this week we excelled in science. We were citizen scientists for Nelson city council. We went and dug tea bags out of estuarine mud. It is a world wide initiative seeing if estuaries are a carbon sink. We found some weird esturine life forms.. This event even led to some maths – mean, median and mode.

We even had some maths fun on Monday looking at what factorial meant – always good having a big number.

We did lots more art and H printed her own T-shirt with her pattern print. We even did some art with our cousin. It is more fun doing it with more people who do things just that little bit differently… Helena went to pottery again. She made me look up a sea shanty she had heard in a car over 10 weeks ago and sung it while our cousin played the banjolale and I shook a jug of water. I think I can say we covered the arts..

Helena went on the bus by herself to her reading group and was totally calm when I was late to pick her up.. We have started a new chart of tasks and she gets pocket money if I don’t have to nag her and it seems to be working… All leading to a confident and harmonial, rangimārie life. We have had exercise, it takes us about 45 minutes to walk home from a friend’s in the dark – which is good for you. And then there was: a few hours in the mud flats, jumping off (flying) bleachers with a 4 year old friend, lots of random seeming bouncing, raking leaves and the associated throwing and reading in the pile of leaves! Hauora – tick.

Helena has of course read heaps, all books of her own choosing. She has been writing for 10 mins a day and typing for 5 – these were times and tasks of her own setting. She has invented her own word and I think it will be of use and made us both laugh and led to a discussion on parts of speech.

I never think about the technology part of the curriculum as I fundamentally disagree on how it is taught… I just let Helena tinker and learn as she does it, no plans, briefs, or outcomes except what’s in her head. Has she made something this week- of course. Does inventing a new game count?

However everything has gone to custard again in the last hour as Helena has gone from happily making dinner to needing to be micro managed just when I am getting hangry. I have spent the last what seems like eternity trying to findthe t-shirt she printed that still has not quite dry oil paint on it… instead of a quality sit writing how good at homeschooling we’d been this week.

argh

… soon we shall be watching the princess bride again with our dessert. Life is a roller coaster and it is so easy to get caught up in the big loud worst moments rather than remembering success… or that it was sign language week and we did nothing. This week was good enough…

ps: we were on the news