Meet Blackie and Henny, they’ve come to stay for a year while friends go around Australia.
Puggle and Bilby are so excited about their stay! (Although, I had to have a couple of attempts at putting a Very Sad boy to bed tonight, after saying goodbye to his very good friend:-( )
They brought their own tractor with them, so their environment is not too different, but they seem to have settled in ok.
General stuff:-)
This probably seems like a fairly full on year, for what is essentially Puggle’s pre-school year (most of this is for Puggle, although I do have some plans for Bilby included). My plan though, is that we’ll start with this, and it will take as long as it takes. We’ll stick with the three term year, each being made up of three blocks of 4 weeks on, one week break (plus the Christmas block/term).
Language (Including Memorisation and Copywork)
For Puggle, I’m planning a second run through The Writing Road to Reading
We’ll be reading Complete Nonsense Poems
We’ll continue with the Latin nursery rhymes, but this year we are going to begin Song School Latin
Over the year, we’ll be reading from The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus
Bilby isn’t at quite the same stage as Puggle was two years ago (she’s effectively 6 months younger), so I don’t think she’s ready for everything I did with him:-) We’ll still do the Nursery Rhymes
She’ll join us in the Latin and French nursery rhymes, but this year, we’re going to try reading a number of (generally familiar) picturebooks in French:-) La Chenille Qui Fait Des Trous
Maths
We’ve finally made the decision to go with RightStart. It’s a very hands on programme, which should appeal to Puggle (basically I think the manipulatives approach is a good idea for the early stages of maths).
English Studies (including Narration)
We’ll continue the Aesop’s Fables for Children
Obviously, we’ll be including other read-alouds as they occur to us, but they will include The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Health and Phys. Ed
We’re continuing with Waterbabies (swimming) this year:-) Or at least we’ll continue with Puggle for now. His class will probably collapse soon (they only take them until they are five), so then we’ll be looking at other swimming classes.
History and Geography
I’m looking forward to this a lot:-) We’re going to begin The Story of the World: Ancient Times
We’ll also be reading Geography from A to Z: A Picture Glossary 
Science
Unless Puggle has particular things that he wants to immerse himself in, I think we’ll be doing most of our science through the garden:-) I do hope to do Nature Walks more regularly (well, once the weather settles down a little), and I think this would be a good year to start recording the weather, but otherwise we’ll try and do a lot of planting and feeding and watering and seeing what happens. I’ve ordered The Tiny Seed
Art and Music
I’m going to try and be more regular about having family music nights:-) This year we’ll begin recorder (Bilby as well—because I don’t like my chances of doing it with Puggle and leaving her out:-) ). Our composers this year are Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Liszt and Gustav Mahler/Anton Bruckner. And of course, we’ll sing:-)
I think I’ll probably repeat my art plans from last year… we didn’t really do much of them, mostly because I ended up putting the stuff away:-( I’m working on keeping art materials in a more accessible way. Our artists this year are Sandro Botticelli, Caspar David Fredrich and Vincent Van Gogh.
Technology and Enterprise
Cooking. By the end of the year, I’d like Puggle to feel confident about preparing one dinner:-) When he’s (quite) a bit more independent in his reading, I thought I might start letting him choose recipes to try:-)
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Week Two
This morning we headed out to Herdsman’s Lake again (twice in two weeks! I’m impressed!):-) It wasn’t nearly as chilly as last week (could have been because we were an hour later, but I think it’s also just hotter this week:-( )
I’m not sure which of the factors was the cause (I’m assuming it was one of them!), but we saw a number of different birds this week, and the distribution was also quite different (lots of Swans, not many Ibis‘ or Purple Swamp Hens and no Dusky Moorhens that I noticed).
We did see a Yellow Billed Spoonbill (just one), as well as quite a number of Australian Shelducks (including one that appeared to have only one foot—we noticed it limping, and then a more attentive look revealed what appeared to be a stump!) We also saw what might be a Grebe or Cormorant… but I don’t know enough to identify it (and there was too much else for me to remember!) (We also saw a lot of Pacific Black Ducks, but we did last week as well—I just didn’t seem to mention it!)
When we first arrived we heard a lot of bees in several of the Eucalyptus trees. It was a good opportunity to remind Puggle to listen carefully. He (actually, both of them) certainly did a lot better at being quiet and moving slowly:-) We were actually able to listen a few times along the way, and he spent a lot more time watching rather than chasing the birds:-) Today’s big activity was finding a stick to sweep the track after himself.
After last week, I thought I’d try using the stroller. It definitely made for a more pleasant time. Bilby was able to walk and be put in the stroller and taken out again much more easily—and I had put our drinks and snacks and my nature journal and the camera in the stroller basket… more stuff than I had last week, because I wasn’t as worried about carrying it all and carrying Bilby later when she got tired (and I was also tired!) As a result, I took a number of photos (although, I’ll have to wait to upload them, until the film is developed) and even tried a drawing!
We ended up being out for nearly two hours! It was rather longer than I had anticipated, but we were enjoying ourselves, so there was no particular reason to stop:-) It did mean that we came straight home to lunch and naps… so there was no time for Puggle to draw/colour (I had forgotten to take paper for him… I think I need to assemble a nature walk bag, that has journals and pencils and his mini-binoculars… so that they’re all ready to go). We did talk over lunch about our walk.
I asked him for the 1/2/3 words in response to the prompt—but he struggled a bit (even with my modelling) because he’s not used to counting the number of words:-) But after a while he came up with some phrases:-) One word for something he heard was quite easy (although, not for me to write!) “eee-ee-eee”—a pretty good mimicing of one of the birds we heard. I chose “chirruping”, also a bird I’m sure, but I don’t remember it from last week. Two words for something he saw was either “Purple Swamphen” (it’s sometimes written as two words!) or “Crab nippers” (we saw just the nippers, on the trail… being eaten by ants), mine was (somewhat fudged!) “Synchronised-swimming Swans”. There were a group of about five swans who were obviously eating. They kept turning themselves upside down, tails in the air and feet kind of dangling and waving. There were a number of times where two or three of them were either upside down together, or were alternating almost rhythmically… It made me think of the Olympics:-) Three words for something he felt were “Sun and breeze”, I chose “Stamens raining down” for the bits of gum flower that dropped all over us when we stopped to listen to the bees. Interestingly, the sense he seemed to be most ready to note was smell… he frequently paused and asked me to smell something (we’re working on not picking stuff!). Mostly, I couldn’t identify anything (or even smell anything distinctive), but he was very interested in something.
I spent last night wrestling with the .pdf of The Handbook of Nature Study (it’s really long! Nearly 1000 pages—and I think probably more than that if you count all the blank pages at the start.) I’m printing out the bits I’m reading, but it takes a bit to work out which pages they actually are! Now that I have the index out though, that should be easier. I think we’ll just focus on birds for now. They’re definitely what Puggle’s noticing (aside from excavators and ditch diggers… sadly they’re very visible from the lake:-( ) I need to read up on them (I got as far as printing those pages last night, but was too tired to read them then. It should be easier if I build checking the next Green Hour assignment as part of my Sunday prep for the week… that’ll give me more time to read and digest so I can use the new information for the next walk:-) )
I should check what state the “Parts of a Bird” cards are in—I may actually have finished laminating them, and that might be a good thing to introduce to him about now.
And in spite of my good intentions, he’s napping now (he’s essentially given up his naps… and while he does still occasionally sleep, that usually means he doesn’t settle to sleep in the evening—and we’re out tonight…)
This week was our first attempt at joining the Green Hour Challenge:-) I read the suggested excerpt from ‘The Handbook of Nature Study‘ (and found it surprisingly approachable… I’m still not sure that we’ll buy
This morning we headed out to Herdsman’s Lake again 
(I can’t believe it’s so long since we went!) This time I wasn’t necessarily planning so much of a walk (I knew Bilby would want to walk, and that would slow us down:-) ). We strolled (pausing to watch a Black Swan floating on the water, with it’s head tucked into it’s body) down to the bench on the small headland. We sat there, had a drink and nibbled on some fruit. This had the advantage of keeping the children a little still, so that the birds actually wandered not too far away—they soon retreated once elevenses was over! From here, we saw a number of other birds (although, I don’t think there were as many varieties as we saw in August).
Puggle was very interested in the birds (which moved:-) ) while Bilby preferred listening to the sounds they made… I think between the two of them they may have confused some of the birds by calling back to them:-) Puggle was very taken with the White Ibis‘ (we saw a lot of them flying), and I was entranced by the Purple Swamp Hens that were eating in the grasses. We also saw Dusky Moorhens, Eurasian Coots, Pacific Black Ducks and one Magpie Lark (that let us get surprisingly close!)
We stayed out for about an hour. Unfortunately there was quite a chilly breeze, and although I thought about taking the kid’s jackets, it’s February! Who would think they’d need jackets now?! I’ll be a bit more together next week:-)
It seems that Puggle was most taken with the Swans and the Ibis’, so they are what we’ll investigate this coming week. Given Bilby’s interest, I should try to find some recordings of bird song, so that we can learn to identify them:-) I have printed out some of the photos from those links, and labelled them (Puggle insisted!) Puggle has been keen to copy pictures from Drawing with Children, so I thought he might like to try copying from the photos:-) We’ll see:-)
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