Paper Patterns

This week in art we have been using grids to make regular repeating patterns with paper shapes. You can customize all sort of grids and print them out at Incompetech

End Of Term Concert

Today the children played for an audience at their end of term music school concert at Dynamic Rhythms. Here they are practising their pieces.

We got to listen to other children sing and play too. The school really has some talented musicians!

Home Ed Camping Weekend

I've finally got around to updating the blog. Here are a few pictures from our recent camp with our home education group at Shoalhaven Heads. Despite the rain we did manage to get to the beach, swim in the pool, play golf and have fun in the playground.

Mapping Our Community

Today we worked on creating a simple map of our community with important (to us) places marked on it.

First we got a base map free from our local council offices, you could also use a tourist map or one printed from Google Maps. We traced out the main features such as the river, main roads, town centre and the location of our house. To make it easy we stuck the original map and the tracing paper down to the table to stop it moving. We actually used baking paper rather than tracing paper as its bigger and cheaper!

Tracing the main map features

Once the tracing was complete we TURNED IT OVER and then scribbled over all the lines on the back with a soft (2B) graphite pencil.

Using the side of a soft pencil to colour over the back of our map features

We then turned the paper right side up again and taped it over some cartridge paper. Pressing firmly with an ordinary pencil we drew over all our lines again. We then removed the tracing and the graphite had transferred to the paper giving us a copy of our map. We then went over the lines where needed to give clarity.

Then the children added colours, symbols, a key, scale, compass directions and a title to their maps.

By R

By L

Exploring Space

This week we have been finishing off our space unit study. We talked about the constellations and researched some stories behind them. We had a go at making our own constellations by splattering paint and then looking for images in our "sky" just like ancient peoples did in the heavens above.

We also made a scale model of the solar system that was around 800m long! For that we had to use a large stretch of our road and lots of different sized balls spread out along it to represent the Sun and the planets. Find out how to do it here. Our Sun was a football whilst the planets ranged from a bouncy ball for Jupiter to a pin head for the dwarf planet Pluto. Earth was represented by a peppercorn. The children loved pacing out the distances between the planets and this activity really shows the relative sizes of the planets (and Sun) and the empty space between them. The neighbours probably wondered what the crazy family was up to this time!

The planets

Powerhouse

Today we went along to the Powerhouse Museum. We caught the "Sydney Mini Maker Faire" - which showcases lots of strange inventions by students and enthusiasts from around Sydney. We saw robots, 3D printing, textiles, and lots of electrical things we couldn't identify!

We also saw the new "Playing With Light" exhibition which has lots of hands-on experiments.

We caught a show all about liquid nitrogen and visited some of our favourite galleries and the playground.

A Walk In The Gardens

On Saturday we decided to walk off a rather large lunch by visiting Mount Annan Botanic Gardens. We found some amazing coloured beetles feeding on the plants.