New Homeschool Blog

Posted on 1 May 2012 by

I’m pleased to say that the offshoot Oh Waily blog about homeschooling the two little Oh Waily kidlets is now open for business.

This morning I posted our welcome mat out and I’m here to invite you to come over and visit us when you have a moment.  From today most things to do with the Oh Waily kids will be posted over at The Pukeko Patch.
They are not being exiled from Oh Waily, they are just expanding to fit their own space. So you will still hear about them here too.

I’ve only just added the very basics to the blog, so expect to see it change and grow over the next short while as I add more relevant information.  Rather like my children, really.

I look forward to seeing some of you over at The Patch.  I hope you all have a great day.

Posted in Blogs of Note, Family, Home Schooling | 2 Comments

Anzac Day

Posted on 25 April 2012 by


It is Anzac Day. I have written about this before and there is little left to say. So today I will go with a simple commemoration with my favourite poet, Wilfred Owen.

Futility

Move him into the sun-
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds-
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

- Wilfred Owen

And to close, the fourth verse of ‘For the Fallen’:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Lest We Forget.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Today’s Oddity

Posted on 23 April 2012 by

Those of you who follow me over at Goodreads know that I am currently making my way through a book called The Puzzle of Left-handedness by Rik Smits.
In due course I will probably drop a short review of it here, but when I was reading today’s chapter, I thought to myself, “I can’t not share this bit”.

So today’s oddity comes from the chapter entitled Other Asymmetries and Preferences.
Mr Smits is talking of our tongues.  Yes, we only have one, but apparently we may have a side preference.  Here is how you find out*.

Some people do indeed seem to have a preferred side.  In normal circumstances we’re not aware of having a tongue preference, but it’s easy to identify.  The trick is to place one side of the tongue, then the other, gently between the molars and hold it there while singing your national anthem.  The tongue side that is free when the words of the song take the least effort to sing and the result sounds best is the preferred side.  Sadly no information is available as to how many people have a clear preference, what proportion of people are right- or left-tongued, or whether there is any connection between that figure and the proportion of left- and right-handers.

Okay, so I tried this.  The national anthem is never safe with me, tongue clenched between molars or not.  But by the end of my attempts I could not discern a strong tongue preference.  Perhaps I require an independent audience to adjudicate, so long as I promise to ply them with earache treatments afterwards.

So, do you have a tongue side preference?  Shall we take a poll to see if we can help Mr Smits out on his lack of information.

I am a right-hander and I have no obvious tongue preference – what about you?

—
* I absolutely swear that I am not making this up.  It is on page 205 of the book.  Check it out at your library if you do not believe me.

Posted in Books, Humour | 1 Comment

The Pukeko Patch

Posted on 20 April 2012 by

As you will know, if you’ve been hanging around here for a while, the Oh Waily household is going on the adventure of official home schooling once Miss Oh Waily turns six.
Part of the process for doing this involves sending an application off to our Ministry of Education for an exemption from attending school for the child.  This application requires you to state your intentions regarding your child’s education.  I will go into this in more depth when the time comes.

What interests me from this process, and it was nicely raised by another homeschooler on one of my local email lists, is the inclusion of the method of monitoring your child’s progress.  For those homeschoolers who are choosing an informal style of teaching, and therefore are not likely to keep “test papers” or similar, observation generally seems to be the go to answer.  It did not occur to me until I saw her exemption example that what I have been doing as a hobby, blogging about my children’s activities, could also be considered a valid method of assessment and monitoring.   So I plan to use my blogging hobby to good effect.

As part of my exemption in a little over a year’s time I will be including blogging about our goings on as integral to my assessment and observation of Miss Oh’s progress.
I figure it will come in handy should the ERO* suddenly come out of the woodwork and start reassessing homeschoolers.

To this end, I am creating a homeschool blog.  I will put up a link here once it is ready and open for business.  It will have all of the previous posts about things educational that the Oh Waily children have been up to from this blog.  But I have yet to decide on the best way to integrate it with Oh Waily Waily going forward.  No doubt I will work that out in due course.

The Pukeko Patch Homeschool Blog will be open for business shortly.  I hope you will drop in and see what we do all day that helps educate and grow great kids.

—
* Education Review Office

Posted in Blogging, Home Schooling | Leave a comment