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MOOC obsessed
A local homeschooling connection posted a link to Coursera, which hosts a number of massive open online  courses, on Facebook a while back. I had a look at it at the time and forgot about it for a long while. A few days ago she posted again about how she and her daughter were doing this course on the science of gastronomy and describing what it was like so far. I went back to look and was so hooked that I signed up for the course right away even though it was hours until the first assignments were due to be finished. Even the Scientist got hooked and joined me watching the video lectures and doing the assignments that night. There are four more weeks worth of classes ahead and I look forward to doing those weeks.
I perused over course offerings there and discovered a class called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. I thought perhaps this would be of interest to Lego Lover and he did find the concept of interest. I signed up for that one and I am doing the course myself but will use the course materials to work with Lego Lover. This is the kind of ideal stuff to use with him for our homeschooling program. If I am taking the course, I can use the information and adapt to his needs without any requirement that he be directly involved. So far Lego Lover hasn’t been involved in any way but I must admit the course is turning out to be quite interesting to me by itself. I’m looking forward to his involvement with what I am doing and if he opts out at any point, I can carry on without him.
There are a bunch of other courses that I found interesting, many which I could use with Lego Lover, and many for my own enjoyment. Further research shows a number of these MOOCs are out there with varying levels of involvement required. It makes me want to lots of courses so it’s a matter of restraint on overdoing things. I’ve added a course on modern and contemporary American poetry for later this year. I’ve not been that interested in poetry but though this might be a gateway if it works out well. If not, at least I tried it out.
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Thursday musings
Seems we are not having a heat wave after all. At least it’s not happening at the moment. We’ve had two very pleasant days and tonight is already quite chill. Our air conditioner hasn’t come on all evening, which is nice for this time of the year. I think I’ll be adding a blanket to my side of the bed since my feet will likely go cold with this chill. It looks like it might warm up a bit over the weekend and into next week.
The place I visited to see the trackball contacted me a couple times yesterday and this morning although I managed to miss all the calls. I assumed the Slimblade Trackball might have arrived earlier than expected. I just happened to be in the area this afternoon and stopped by to check it out. It had arrived and different guy to the one who I spoke to earlier opened it up for me to have a look. It’s a lot like my old Expert Trackball mouse but much sleeker and probably more ergonomic than the earlier model. It was a bit pricey but I went ahead and bought it since it the temporary replacement has been driving me bonkers. At least I know I can use it for short periods of time should I need to do so in the future. I’ve only used it for a little while but it’s been pretty much a breeze so far. The click sound is different than I expected but I’m sure I will get used to that. Also, this doesn’t have a scroll wheel but I quickly found it easy to turn the trackball like a scroll wheel and I think that’s going work out well once I get the hang of it. I think it’s just a matter of working out what’s comfortable for me. When I was researching potential replacements for my old trackball, I read this one was great until you got to the software support for the device. Apparently there was none for quite some time after its release. The good news is that seems to have been rectified and there is software that I might download and try out.
This morning the boys and I went to visit an old friend of Game Fanatic from his Dungeons and dragons/ board game group. That group sort of disappeared quite some time ago and aside from one of those guys, we haven’t seen anyone for at least two years. I’d kept a slight contact with this boys mom via email and more recently on Facebook but we hadn’t seen them at all. This guy had recently earned a perfect score on his year 12 exams and had appeared in our local paper (his distance ed high school is local to us) but not theirs. I had offered to collect some copies of the paper for his family and it was a good opportunity for Game Fanatic to get a bit of social interaction happening. It was also an opportunity to put Lego Lover in some sort of social situation.
I didn’t think Lego Lover would wake up in time since he sleeps late almost every day lately. But he did wake up almost immediately. I had offered a positive consequence if he went and was well-behaved so think this might have been a good motivation for him. It was a bit harder to get Game Fanatic up but he did manage and got ready reasonably quickly. Once there I left the boys in the kitchen to play a board game (Age of Mythology-which apparently bears little to no resemblance to the computer game) while I chatted mostly with the mum. We had a rather nice catch up in the limited time we had there. And Game Fanatic enjoyed playing the game with the two older brothers for this family. Lego Lover mostly stood and stared at the ground but eventually started showing some attention to the game that was being played and even talked to Game Fanatic a little bit from what he tells me. It’s nothing big but I think it all went better than I expected. Lego Lover’s involvement is just a starting point in a plan I have to get him more socially involved this year. As the school year will be starting soon, I may post about that in more detail before then.
I should also add to the above bit about the friend’s achievement that this is the second boy from the same D&D group to have a perfect score on the year 12 exam. Another boy did the same two years ago and is now studying to be a surgeon if I remember correctly.
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Meh!
I’ve been wanting to post but then I haven’t been able to be bothered. I seem to be endlessly having too many thoughts and not enough focus lately. It’s a feast or famine when it comes to writing here. Was going to try to do a whole month of writing every day but that’s obviously not going to happen. :)
We are having flashbacks to winter with wet and windy days lately. I think we’re getting a break and it’s going to warm up over the weekend. I was sitting on the sofa in a short sleeve t-shirt while playing a game on the Wii and I was literally shivering. I’ve taken to wearing slippers and and my warm robe again. It kind of reminds me of when Game Fanatic was a few weeks old and his crying seemed to go on and on no matter what we did. Came to find that he was cold. Usually November is pretty warm but there are some days that are chilly, of course. Felt so stupid at the time for not realising he was cold but probably shouldn’t have since I was so new to taking care of babies and all.
The homeschool moderator is coming out in two weeks and I still don’t know what I will show her. Nothing ever seems to go to plan, even the more viable ideas. I will come up with something and it will just have to do. Will have to go out and buy the workbooks for Lego Lover for next year. Won’t buy too much because we didn’t end up using very many of them this year. As he gets older, I am sure we will move away from the book work completely.
The Scientist and I went to see Augie March on Monday night. I enjoyed it very much but I found the crowd way too silent. It was so quiet you could hear the rain on the roof of the theater in-between songs. The crowd became a bit more livelier around the time of the encore but it was still pretty quiet. Musically I thought it was great aside from one song that really sounded too much like the recording. While I really enjoyed myself, I must admit it wasn’t that awe and wonder I’ve felt at other shows. It’s been suggested it was the Monday night show problem. Just not a good day for concerts in Perth. As it was we were feeling rushed to leave by the end to pick up the boys from my friend’s house.
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Constraints
This month marks the second anniversary of our home education experiment. I really shouldn’t call it an experiment since it appears to be the norm for the foreseeable future.
This was our third attempt at home education. The first attempt goes back to Game Fanatic’s second formal year of schooling when we made a temporary move to Canada. My plan was to home school while there so we could keep him up to speed with our local curriculum. That didn’t work out and when September arrived, he started at the primary school. The second attempt followed our return from Canada in the middle of the following year. By late October, he was back in the classroom at a new school.
The reasons the first two attempts failed were many but ultimately, it was due to trying to emulate school in a home environment. For some children this might work but for Game Fanatic it definitely didn’t. By the time we pulled the boys out of school, Game Fanatic was in year seven. It was clear that a classroom learning environment was never going to work for him. We spent four years trying to work out problems that couldn’t be fixed. Actually the first year back went pretty well for him with a brilliant teacher who really “got” him from the start. Teachers like that are rare, and even this teacher was limited by needs of many of the thirty other children in the class.
Lego Lover started formal schooling a couple years into the schooling experiment and all went seemingly well the first year. The second year was a different story and it’s still not completely clear what changed. In retrospect, I think the problems were already there and we were blinded to their effects.
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Changes
The current school term is winding down and there are two weeks of school holidays, not that it will mean much of a change to our daily life. That’s another topic altogether so I will save that for another post, especially as it is so late and I am tired and liable to make no sense at all.
I’ve decided that the Game Fanatic will no longer attend the homeschool science class. He hasn’t really made much progress and so I don’t think it is valuable enough to warrant dragging ourselves out on cold, wet Friday mornings next term. So our Fridays will be a lot freer. Actually that may not necessarily be so.
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No mental pictures
Time for another post and I have no idea what I will write. I guess I will see where the keyboard takes me on this one. It was another dark, dreary, and damp winter’s day here. It wasn’t particularly cold for much of the day. There was a certain warmth in the afternoon that was reminiscent of spring storms. We did have a storm and a “lovely” downpour in the late afternoon, just as the Scientist and I went off to the grocery store. Visibility was so poor he pulled into the parking spaces next to the nearby school until it eased a bit.
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Meandering through Whiteman Park
Oh, my body is so sore right now. It was newspaper delivery day (for our weekly paper route) so I went out on my bicycle for most of it. It was a nice thin paper today…good for quick deliveries but not so much money involved. Anyway, that took me a little over an hour.
After I showered, Lego Lover and I went off to Whiteman Park to look for native birds and trees. We didn’t have much luck with the birds. We mostly saw crows and magpies which we can see pretty much any time we want. I did see some galahs just before we left but that was exotic as we found on this particular occasion.
We walked from the village of the park to the Mussel Pool, which is about a kilometre away. There’s what’s called a Children’s Forest along the way and we passed through its many areas in the course of our journey. Lego Lover normally would complain of tiredness but he was having a nice time being “in nature” as he puts it and did quite well. We’ve been worried about his lack of exercise lately. He’s perfectly normal height and weight but his fitness is very poor. So I am making an effort to get him moving more often before he suffers problems from inactivity. He quite enjoyed running around today so it was well worth the short trip (we live five minutes from the park and it’s another five to reach the parking areas).
We both took our cameras but discovered the batteries for his camera were dead. He hasn’t tried to use it in a long time so it should be no surprise. We will have to recharge them before we make another attempt. I took quite a few photos in the course of our meanderings and will try to post some soon. I need to reinstall my photo editing program before I do that…I’ve got so many photos on my camera that it will have to be soon.
Down by the Mussel Pool (that as far as I know has no mussels), Lego Lover played at a tiny playground for quite a while. It was interesting to watch as the sky went from clear blue to mostly dark grey over the course of about forty-five minutes. We had another stop at the big playground at the village when we went back. LL was happy that there weren’t many kids there and had a great time playing. I pretty much had to drag him away before it started raining.
We have plans to go there more regularly, maybe once a week or fortnight to help us with our current project on Australian birds and trees.
I got plenty of exercise today but the body isn’t so happy about the over-exertion. Also, I realised the inserts of my shoes are now well over a year old and need to be replaced which is a likely explantion as to why my knees feel so unstable these days. I’m thinking of seeing a podiatrist before I get new ones so they can tell me all I am doing wrong to my feet.
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End of term
Although we are homeschooling, we still follow the local public school calendar. Today is the last day of the first term so we are now at loose ends for a couple weeks. The irony is that during the holidays, all the places we might visit are very crowded so we tend to avoid them. I suspect we will get together with our closest friends for a picnic on one of the days but nothing much else is planned aside from one speech appointment for Lego Lover next Thursday.