TESS Animal Wildlife Sanctuary Day

Around 60 people attended the homeschooler gathering at the sanctuary.  Kirk enjoyed being able to touch the animals and interract with them.

Space fact from Kirk: The centre of Jupiter is hotter than the sun.

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Kirk spent the afternoon practising archery at the Historical with us. Ron commented that he looked like Robin Hood and he was delighted with the comparison. I wonder if this is the point where imitation for fun becomes modelling the self? I wonder...

Fishing at Coonarr - Take 2

This time, sensibly, we went in Bob's car - albeit I had to leave Skye with Cissy because there were no seat bolts (Cissy is sooo tolerant). We caught a swimmer crab (Kirk thought this was hilarious), 4 undersized flathead and 4 dart - 3 of which we fried for lunch with salad & rice. Kirk had a great time and and keenly absorbed everything about baiting and casting the rods. After lunch Bob and Kirk checked the trap and found and enormous red claw yabbie.

Of late Kirk's knowledge of the world is rapidly expanding but his capacity for self awareness and control takes two steps forward and one step back. Sigh...

He ain't Newton

...but he observed that when things are scrunched up they fell faster. At the time he was throwing a windscreen shade around (AKA bat wings). So I asked him to do the same thing with a piece of paper and explained what is happening with regard to gravity and wind resistance. So tomorrow we're making parachutes.

Twinkle Twinkle Bloody Huge SUN

Currently he is hooked on the comparative sizes of our moon, earth and the sun and will tell anyone who will listen about it. Mercury is pretty dull - a bit like the moon - but Venus thrills him with its volcanoes and sulphuric acid rain. Looks like space science is a winner.

We've had a lot of friends here this week. The Edgar family came on Monday and the kids both helped rescue burrowing frogs from the sand and lug pavers for the front path. Today the 5 George kids were here for a few hours and they all played outside in the sand and on the swings.

Reading & writing is experiencing slow but steady progress. He is consistently differentiating initial sounds and rhymes. Inconsistently identifing & writing letters. Can listen to a string of sounds and make a word from it. We just do a little every day.

In maths we're building vocabulary such as more, less, fewer, most, least etc... He's adding & subtracting inconsistently. Counts well to 15. Of late he has been asking for a trampoline and today I finally said "Yes"  ...when he can count to 50. Hopefully that will buy me sufficient time to save up.

The stumbling block to counting is the "teens". English is an odd language - we have 1 to 10 and then the teens which to a child in no way resemble the first 10 numbers then we revert to using the initial base 10 nunbers.

Today

Phil, Ben and Bradley came today to finish off the shed. I played with Bradley, played Rainforest on the computer and we normally hang out the washing. We smoked chicken wings and pork ribs in the smoker. The chicken tasted great and the pork tasted great. It is a gas fired smoker with sawdust to give the smoke flavour.  We also put a big bowl of water in the smoker to keep the meat moist. I want to make smoked beef next time.

Duck Dodgers

Kirk has decided he wants to be an astronaut, not just as a payload specialist but THE PILOT. So we looked up the requirements. Mmm...I think I shall take advantage of this phase and put dinosaurs in the back burner. What a great excuse to watch science fiction.