SOTW Volume 1 Round 2

The past few days has seen us reintroducing Story of the World Volume One for Kangaroo's Prep/ Grade One history program. Kookaburra is loving doing it again too, fortunately!

Here we are right at chapter one, wondering what makes history. It's pretty simple stuff really. We read the section designated in the Story of the World Activity Guide and then Kangaroo narrates to me while I record his thoughts into the free two day a week lapbook we're using. Combined this with some great ideas from the self proclaimed OCD Story of the World using Mumma at The Chronicle of the Earth Blog and I might stand a chance of finishing this program with my boys and they getting so much more out of it this time.

This has been a hectic year. We've had so many opportunities to be involved in the community in various ways that I'm so glad and immensely appreciative of, but I find myself feeling very relieved to be saying goodbye this week to our latest 'job', a nearly three term stint as volunteers and visitors to one of the local private schools Art class on Fridays. I'm glad because this will aid my attempt to stem the flow of lost time in our home. I've also clamped down pretty tight on visitors and outings in the mornings and do not answer the phone, the calls go straight to messages so if it really is important I'll catch it. Every week we have several great reasons to be out and about and although I really miss catching up with friends and having my boys play with their children I've found that as Kookaburra is getting older I need to be very committed to my priorities. For us, for various reasons, homeschooling does take up a lot of our time and if I let a few hours slip through my fingers in the morning (read that as, this week my washing machine is in pieces so we'll have to make time to get the washing done at our local laundromat. But hey! We can at least enjoy some reading together!) inevitably our afternoons are sacrificed.

Today I managed fine. We had swimming lessons first thing this morning and got our language arts and math done before lunch so in the arvo we enjoyed A Dirty Dig. I buried some household items like tools, pencils, pot, toy car etc things that symbolise our present society into our sandpit and armed with trowels and paintbrushes my little archaeologists carefully excavated the site.


We also got some inspiration on how to exactly carry this out from here.




Kookaburra sifted the sand to find any stray artifacts.


Meet Elvis. We're babysitting him for two weeks whilst my cousin is on holidays with her family in France. Lucky girl :) he's a Dutch barge dog whom apparently has no idea how to play... Well, Minna and Thor have sorted that out and after two days, Elvis is running around chasing the kong right along with them. I think he'll be fine!



Kangaroo gently brushes away the sand from his treasure. A silver serving dish therefor, he concludes, that these people were rich!


Kookaburra and Kangaroo happily pose for a picture after their successful dig before taking their final bagged items upstairs where they reflected on the culture that left behind these buried remains, another narration for Kangaroo and some writing for Kookaburra. We also used this table to record our findings.

Thank goodness for the internet and clever blogging homeschool Mummas! A quick check on my some of my favourite bloggers for inspiration on how to approach each chapter of SOTW and I know that this program will keep on being interesting again for my boys a second time round and it leaves me with less head scratching for ideas and more time for being with them.

A Pratically Perfect Festival :)

My sweet little clown. Dressed up to visit a friend.
On the way over we stopped at the bakery and even
though we were parked right in front, Kangaroo insisted
on hopping out to show people and surprise them.

The real problem with not blogging regularly is that part of our story goes a little bit missing. It doesn't take long until some major happenings haven't been journalled and I find myself uploading a ridiculous amount of photo's to share and trying to figure on how best to tell our tale.

The longer I live in our little town the more I fall in love with it and the friends and connections we're making. It has an interesting history and it proudly lays claim to it's heritage and indulgently celebrates it, beauty and warts and all. The interesting thing about our town is that the author of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, was apparently born here which has led to our town laying claim to 'our Mary' and has turned this connection into a celebration and a festival, culminating in The Mary Poppin's Festival on the first weekend of July.

At the park our talented friends volunteered their time for a week before the festival to create stunningly, magical pavement art creations which awed and amazed crowds on the Sunday of the festival. There are more beautiful pictures below showing the end of all the artist's work.

Mary madness has permeated the air. In the lead up to the festival I'd been fortunate to participate in theater workshops, meaning that most weekends for the past two months were dedicated learning as much as we could in a short amount of time about theater craft and preparing for a play which was written by the director using ideas generated by the workshop participants. The plays' end result was pretty funny and featured a few slapstick elements and completely escaped reality - so well suited to the Mary Poppins festival.

We found some time for things other then Mary related last week. There was some exploration with collage materials trying a Matisse style artwork.

I found that Kookaburra needed encouragement to let go of preformed ideas of how his art should be structured. By having fun with tearing his papers randomly and letting his art work unfold was a little bit of challenge but he did well and we had some great discussions about Pompeii during our work together.

There were lines to learn for me for the play on the Sunday but I was also fortunate enough to learn lines for a commercial which was shot on Thursday. A strange and funny experience which I was lucky enough to share with a friend.

Do I look like a receptionist? That was my part so hopefully....

So many opportunities roll our way when I have my eyes open. Whilst waiting to have a dress rehearsal in our art galleries forecourt, my boys and I stumbled upon a basket weaving workshop run by Aboriginal ladies in preparation for NAIDOC week this week. They were open and patient and I really wish we had of had more time before our performance to do more weaving.

Nervously I waited with friends before our first performance in front of a live audience... well, we thought they were alive but apart from a few sniggers the reaction was definitely lifeless. We were a little concerned how this play we'd worked on was going to go over during the festival.

When Sunday arrived our boys were up before dawn I'm sure, dressed and ready to go. Our first sound check was at nine am. When we arrived and saw the set in a carpark I was really impressed by what our stage manager had procured for our backdrop and that there was even seating! Lots of seating!

By the time the workshops had come to a close, as always, I'd managed to involve my family to some degree. This was Kangaroo's first time on stage and all he had to do was cry on cue and follow direction. He did beautifully!

Hubby lent some know how and muscle where he could.

And as for Kookaburra...

there's a black box sitting on top of his satchel in this photo which contained a remote control for the animatronic parrot which during the plays he directed the parrots eyes and beak when it took it's turn to narrate our story.

The play went off well and people laughed in all the right places and I even remembered my lines well enough to enjoy the show. Such a relief! When I try to remember something like this I worry, panic and then my mind goes blank. Just terrible :O!

The rest of the festival was full of colour in the finished art works.

There is a great joy for us, hanging with our family doing something unusual and fun. I admittedly did get a bit stressed out, but the benefits of having everyone involved as opposed to not was worth the fraction or so of tetchiness that came from me.

A very happy Kangaroo after his performance.

One of the highlights of the Mary Poppins festival is the Great Nanny Challenge. Our director borrowed a skirt and dressed as a naughty nanny so he could give it a go. The Nanny Challenge is a race for Nanny's and their baby carriages. They compete against each other over a short course and the first to cross the finish line wins But! there are rules like no running, no elbowing or jostling each other and then they must change the baby too in order to win. Our Naughty Nanny lost and he was hilarious about it too. Jumping up and down on his hat, whilst gnashing his teeth and tossing his baby bundle from the pram (thankfully it was only a teddy bear) not mention the run/walk!

My niece in red had a go too.


This is me and a great lady, we're dressed as Mary Poppins and the Bird Lady.

After the plays were done we still had more to do , so much to see and do. Our favourite is always the Chimney Sweep Challenges but absolutely best of all this year was going to high tea attended by none other Australia's own Mary, the star of the Mary Poppins musical, Verity Hunt-Ballard.

Kookaburra described the occasion afterwards as being incredibly exciting because he had met his first real celebrity!

It's was a very busy and full week but the highlight was meeting Verity and listening to her speak of her life in the theater and her role as Mary in the Mary Poppins musical. She was well spoken and lovely and she claimed to love our town and it's baking too! It was pretty embarrassing when our compere asked our lovely guest if she'd like a doggy bag to take back with her. Sheesh! But honestly it was difficult to resist a spread like this one at the High Tea. As always, we were amongst the last to leave and we were fortunate to run into friends talking with Verity so we got to have a little up close and personal dose of this practically perfect gal.

So this entry was massive and I wonder if perhaps it may have been better as a dot point. Never mind. I'm so glad I got it up and haven't missed this opportunity to share. Can you see why I love our town? The longer we live here I see just how very a special place it is for our family to grow together in. It etches itself deeply in our hearts. and I think of it truly as our home town. We can't wait until next years festival and I know we're all wondering in what capacity we'll be attending, as visitors or volunteers?

As long as I'm with my family, it'll be just ace.

Showbiz ain't for this girl

Just a little update. Last week we did the advertisement with our local council for the Mary Poppins Festival coming up soon and as much fun as it sounded in theory to get all dressed up again and smear ourselves in charcoal... again, it really wasn't all that much fun this time.


If you know me personally, you'll know the drama's we've been experiencing with getting our house to construction stage at Iri'ni, so with the market being so low we've been investigating buying a house in town again and selling Iri'ni off or conversely with the market moving so slowly, Iri'ni may actually be ours for quite some time yet and the other option may be to move a renovator, like an old Queenslander onto it or contract a plan from Builders like Annadale. So because of this housing dilemma, we found ourselves looking at four houses on this day that we shot the add, as well clumsily, comforting a dear friend over some sad news, and I needed to get packed for my trip to Byron Bay with my Mother to celebrate my Sister Sunshines' 40th!

A lot to fit into one day! Too much and extremely stressful .

So ultimately, doing this advertisement felt a lot like forced fun. Under different circumstances it would have been great but we were tired, had eaten not enough and on the run, and all three of us had had enough by the time the fifteenth take of repeating the same thing was over. The whole process didn't have a lot of relevance to my boys and I could see exactly why they didn't want to prance around on the sidewalk for the camera anymore. I could never be a showbiz Mum! And it was a terrible way to spend the day before I left my family for three days! I should have been reading and cuddling and chilling out, but instead we were running all over town like headless chickens doing all this 'stuff' which is pretty meaningless now.



Oh well, we learn right?! I have. This craziness has infected our happy homeschooling life and whilst this particular Tuesday was pretty extreme it seems to becoming more of the pattern. We experience a ridiculous amount of interruptions during what should be our happy homeschooling hours. I've had to be firm and finally say no more. I've canceled or rearranged everything we have had on in the mornings - markets, music lessons, drama with the school -, and have gone back to not answering the phone before 1pm and the real happy tick for a better me is going to bed early. Today is day three and while we have a long way to go before our homeschool looks the way I'd like it, it's better than the shabby mess it has been. Back to that getting to bed at a decent time thingy, I bid you nighty nite.


But before I go I have to share this lovely pic of an old renovated church near Byron Bay. It was our accommodation for our glorious visit to Byron Bay. When I post next, I'll share pic's of this beautiful place we had the pleasure of staying in. The whole area of Ballina, Mullumbimby and Byron were just extremely special places to visit and I hope so much to take my family there sometime soon. I'm glad to be home though and am very thankful for my husband making it possible for me to go away and have such a blissful time with my Mumma and sister. I have come back way relaxed and pretty darn happy too and it was an awesome way to celebrate my Sister Sunshine's 40th!

All In a Days Work

Say yes, smile and ask to be involved. A great policy which has been getting us into all sorts of opportunities this year. The latest is a ride on a float in the grand parade at our local show. Sounds cool doesn't it! I like to roll the Grrrrrr in grand just to make it sound even more fun, much like a drum roll. So get set, I'm going to flood this space with pics from our first ever parade dressed as chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins.

Our little town claims the birth of P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, and annually we're lucky enough to enjoy a festival dedicated to the celebration of all things Mary Poppins. Massive fun! Especially the Nanny Race and the Chimney Sweep challenge but that all lies ahead in the coming months but today we have had ourselves a fab new experience and some very filthy little boys to scrub.

Strolling around the show later it was easy to forget the soot on my face until someone would ask why the charcoal and costumes. Well, me 'ittle urchins ain't seen no soap for a good many weeks and dis is the result. :)

Can you see the lady with red scarf holding the bag and umbrella? That's our Mary Poppins and joining her on the far left is Admiral Boom. We have a very colourful town!



A bonus was whilst having to wait for the parade to start, well not particularly good in that hot afternoon sun, but it was so much fun seeing all the other floats getting ready for the parade and catching up with a few familiar faces we've missed since The Music Man wrapped.

I have some fun big news to share too. On Tuesday, the councils events team will be shooting an add for local television promoting the upcoming Mary Poppins Festival and our little urchin sweeps will get to be involved :D! Fantastic, but I do wonder if the crew with the camera are going to be prepared for the onslaught of questions when faced with our two inquisitive critters. Well, good luck to them I say ;)