Busy Little Tree

Littletree has been keeping me pretty busy lately too. She's recently started going to a weekly art class with some other homeschooled kids, which she really enjoys (though the kids tend to do more playing than art ;) )

Littletree announced that she wants to get a telescope so she can look at stars. It seems astronomy has taken over dinosaurs as her newest fascination, so we've been getting books on stargazing from the library, and we downloaded Stellarium, a cool software that simulates the night sky as seen through a telescope. it's very cool; check it out.

I've also been looking into buying Littletree a telescope, so that means a lot of learning for me, since I know absolutely nothing about it!

Littletree also decided to take up violin, she's been asking me to buy her one pretty frequently lately. I think she was inspired by a friend of hers who has a violin and busks with it. Of course, the friend can't play violin at all; she just screeches the bow over the strings, but being a cute little girl, manages to pull in a fair amount of money in a short time.

Now, I'm all for encouraging children's interests, but I'm not quite ready to take the plunge into the whole 'tortured cat' kinda instruments. Seems she just wants to make money, so we're going to take her guitar out and try busking a bit :)

Since we've been doing so much house hunting, Littletree said she wants to help pay for it (all the places we really love are out of our budget). She insisted if we buy her a violin, she'll busk and make a million dollars to buy a castle made of diamonds!

I love that unschooling gives us the freedom to live gently and follow our interests as they flow :)

Big City Adventure

Lush came home this weekend! :D It's so wonderful to have all the family here. We drove up to Brisbane to pick her up, which is about 2 hours' away. The plan was to go to the museum as well so Littletree can see dinosaur bones; she's been really interested in dinosaurs recently.

After a long drive, and getting lost in the confusing maze of freeways and overpasses in central Brisbane, we finally found the park where we were to meet Lush, only to discover the park crawling with police, all taped off as there had been a murder! We arrived just in time to see the police taping off the area, and covering the body with a sheet.

Pretty freaky! So we didn't hang around there, but hot-footed it straight to the museum.

Littletree did get to see some cool dinosaur bones, which was great.

We had a great time walking around, looking at all the exhibits. They have some really interesting stuff there. Even a Littletreeasaurus and a Lushosaur!

I think one of the coolest things was this huge exhibit they have with loads of animals all lined up so you can see the sizes of them.

I was also interested to see scientific proof that children do not belong in schools:

See! Fish survive by schooling, and Humans survive by intelligence and dexterity. Schools are for fish, not children!