Here be Dragons...

Today we varied our usual fare of dinosaur documentaries by watching a work of docufiction:

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This very entertaining presentation used the same CGI and animatronic techniques which are used to bring dinosaurs to life on the big screen to give the same credibility to dragons. This sparked a lot of interesting questions about how difficult it is to know if what we are watching onscreen is real, the way in which fictional stories can be presented as non-fiction, and the difficulty of knowing what is "truth" when we are thinking about things that happened millions of years ago. (We concluded that only God knows what actually happened, but that it is fun to speculate!)

African drumming workshop

Today we joined in with an African drumming workshop with other homeschoolers. We learnt about how the drums were made and the materials they are made from, and the boys learnt to play some increasingly complex rhythms. Boronia and the boys had fun playing with the other kids afterwards - Waratah even learnt how to play handball.

Praying mantises and particulate matter

Sprouted wheat seed which we used to make Essene bread. This is bread which uses only one ingredient, and is cooked at a very low temperature - it can even be cooked by the sun. Our first try was not a great success as we had difficulty grinding the "flour" fine enough.

Hard to see, but this was our experiment in particulate matter. There are 4 materials in the bags: wood, wheat, salt and sugar, each material having a large, medium and small particle size. The boys were challenged to identify the materials. We sorted them into materials and particle size, discussed how the various particle sizes were created, and why they might be needed (eg wheat seed for planting, cracked wheat couscous, grinding flour to make bread; wood for building, wood shavings for animal bedding, wood pulp for paper...). We then examined the materials under our field microscope and challenged ourselves to identify the difference between the finely ground salt and sugar crystals.

Waratah's latest pet. We have researched habitat and diet, and identified his gender (males have 6 segmented abdomens, females have 8).

Building a play space

The boys have been using logs left over from the big wind storm that brought down the top of one of our trees, and spare bricks and pavers to construct a play space to their own requirements. Both like to use it as a quiet space to sit and think, and rake designs into the dirt.

Garden design

Waratah has been using the GardenMap app to design his perfect garden, using measurements based on his actual garden patch.

Lorikeet drawing

Waratah's latest artwork. He asked Daddy to draw the outline if the bird, but the rest is all his own work, using pencils and oil pastels. He used a google image search for the placement of the colours. When finished, he cut out the bird very carefully and pasted it onto a separately drawn background.