DIY

Have you discovered diy.org yet?

I'm a huge fan of this website, it encourages kids to try new things and develop their skills. There is an incredibly wide range of skills available, from Forager, Papercrafter, Writer, Chef, to Minecrafter, Animator, Backend Dev, or Game Designer!

Here are a few of the things we've been up to -

Homemade rocket pictures with pastel & watercolours (from Artventure which we've just signed up for!)

and pastel planet pictures, Earth & Venus respectively - 

both for the Painter skill. 

They harvested some potatoes - 

which qualifies for the Backyard Farmer and Gardener skills.

Lexi made a pizza -

 and a character cake -

for the Baker skill, which earned her the patch for that one! 

She made a bracelet for the Fashion Designer skill -

thus completing another patch

She made a homemade sprinkler from a bottle - 

 for a Summerologist challenge

 and some tiny treasure chests, out of matchsticks, cardboard, and quinoa -

for Toymaker, and the photo of them for a Photographer challenge!

And Eli learnt to use a mitre box for the Woodworker skill -

It's great fun, and very flexible, I just wish there was one for adults!

Crater caching

Have you ever heard of Geocaching? I had come across the term years ago, but never really thought about it. Then a friend mentioned a couple of time that she had taken her boys out geocaching... and then eventually (a bit slow off the mark) I decided to find out what it's all about!

I won't go into all the details, there is a much better explanation than I could ever give on the link above, but basically geocachers have hidden little containers ALL over the world, and you have to hunt them out, using GPS co-ordinates, some stealth, some puzzling, and sometimes a bit of scrambling too.

 This is a screenshot of the Geocaching map of One Tree Hill Domain / Cornwall Park - 

 Each little symbol is the rough location of a cache. As you can see, there are 16 of them, just in that one little patch of Auckland! The smiley faces are ones we've already found :-)

We were visiting Greenlane Hospital again, so took the opportunity to pop next door to the park, and hunt out some caches!

We found a tree that you could climb right through the roots of - 

We climbed up the side of the western crater

(that's our 7 seater car down there!)

Paused to rest our (ok, my) legs at the top of the ridge,

then descended into the central crater, where evidently it's a 'thing' to create pictures and words out of the volcanic rocks that litter the grassy crater floor -

You can see the long U-shaped western crater and kidney-bean shaped central crater really nicely in Google Maps - 

Then we trekked back to the car...

Before a quick run up to the top-

Then into Stardome!

So it was a pretty fun morning out, and one of the reasons I think geocaching is great for kids is that it really gets you exploring in-depth in places that you might never otherwise get round to visiting, or possibly not even be aware of! Despite using a GPS (or in our case a GPS capable phone + the c:geo app, and apparently there are some brave souls who are GPS-free cachers!) it's a good introduction to distance, cardinal points, and co-ordinates, and you often have to solve a puzzle to get the real co-ordinates, or follow a clue to find the actual cache. In fact, I've just solved one of the One Tree Hill puzzle caches by using the Arecibo numbers! Now we just have to go see if I got it right....

.............................................Space!

We're pretty big on space in this house. Four of us, quite coincidentally, have astronomically themed names (Nova, Alexis, Maia, and Leo). So as a topic theme, space seemed like a pretty good choice.

For a start, we dragged out our collection of space-related books - 

 (I'm possibly a little optimistic putting Measuring the Universe; The Historic Quest to Quantify Space up there, but you never know)

We made a big brainstorm poster of what we already knew, what we wanted to find out, and how

(gold star if you can spot the error with the "word wall" of planet names..) 

And I got a little carried away printing out resources from Teachers Pay Teachers and Homeschool Share - 

Then we got to work!

We tackle this sort of stuff usually after lunch, and in a gentle, self-initiated way. I scatter resources around the place, make suggestions of things they might like to do, then wait to see what piques their interest.

Eli  decided to draw the major planets, some space tools, and an astronaut. He later added a rocket too.

Lexi has been quite taken with NASA's Eyes on the Solar System simulation, which you can use to explore the solar system, including hunting down various missions like Voyager I & II, and the I.S.S.

Of course there was the ubiquitous polystyrene ball solar system model, most decidedly not to scale -

but we're quite proud of it -

 (I couldn't cope with the fat polystyrene ring that came with the kit, so improvised one from clear plastic & paperclips)

Of course we raided the library - 

 the 13 Planets one is quite good; it includes the most prominent dwarf planets, which is quite rare unfortunately!

And I recently added A Collection of Wonders with Professor Brian Cox * to our DVD stash, so we've started watching Wonders of the Solar System to begin with -

we're doing a little bit more each day, so I'll be back with more links and activities that we've been enjoying!

(* Affiliate link! If you click on that link and then go on to purchase something, we get a small percentage of that sale, which would be really nice!)