Lots of Helpers

Antarctic Centre

May 9, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

In early March, we had the chance to go to the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch with the homeschool group we used to be part of. One of the moms from the group organized special rates for us. Gayle and I took the youngest five children and had a fun tour.

We started with a Hagglund ride. Miss Joy is too young to go on this ride, so Gayle took care of her while I went with the other children. About ten years ago when we went the other time, I stayed back from the Hagglund with the current baby, so this time I enjoyed getting to experience it.

Here are two of the other Hagglunds. They are used for exploration in Antarctica, and can go over incredibly rough terrain. They are watertight and very strong!

This was one of the obstacles we went over on the 15-minute ride. It was a very steep hill.

This is the other Hagglund that took part of our group.

We drove over these logs. They are intended to represent broken-up sea ice.

This was another very steep hill, with large boulders in the water at the bottom.

The other Hagglund going through the water.

Just before we went into the 4D theater, Gayle had the children pose here.

This was the highlight of the day for some of the children—the cold room! It is kept below freezing, and then they started a storm. The wind whipped up, and the temperature stopped dropping. It got down to about 0°F for a few minutes.

February 2021 Photos

May 2, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Here are the last of the pictures we took in February! It seems like we haven’t been taking a lot of pictures since our trip, so I may end up getting caught up soon.

The Sunday afternoon right after Simon sprained his ankle on their tramp, we were relaxing after getting home from church when we heard the ice cream truck coming. It plays the traditional tune of ice cream trucks, and comes through randomly, several times a year, on Sunday afternoons. Simon decided that his little brothers needed practice making purchases, so he pulled $20 out of his wallet and sent them across the road to flag down the truck and buy ice creams for all the boys and Little Miss! While the truck was stopped there, several other neighbors came out to buy ice cream as well.

I have no idea what this was about!

I found this blossom one day when I was picking zucchini. I have never seen one so huge!

The garden was so beautiful in February! Picking green beans in this tunnel was so easy; I’m definitely doing that again. I planted two varieties of runner beans—Blue Lake and Cobra. The Cobra beans came on first, and produced bushels and bushels, then stopped; the Blue Lakes came on about that time. They, too, produced bushels and bushels. Meanwhile, the Cobra looked like they were dying; the leaves were even turning yellow. Then, when the Blue Lakes quit, the Cobras came on again, with new foliage and lots of nice beans—not nearly as many as the first round, but enough for several meals for the ten of us in a week’s time. I’m planning to plant both varieties again, but maybe more of the Cobra and fewer of the Blue Lake. That way, I can do the bulk of the canning at once with the Cobras, and have the Blue Lakes to fill in for eating on while the Cobras take a break. (A bit of trivia: It’s easy to tell the difference between the seeds—the Cobras have black seeds, and the Blue Lakes have white ones. This is significant because the labels I used to mark which kind was which got lost, so I wasn’t sure which I liked better till I saved seeds from both and compared with what was left in the seed packets!)

Little Miss wanted me to take a photo of this dill plant, since I had asked her to bring the camera out to get a photo of the beans. The garden doesn’t look this pretty anymore. Almost everything is dead now.

Product Review—Teaching Textbooks

April 28, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I have heard about Teaching Textbooks for many years. A friend of mine showed it to me back when we lived in Michigan—it must have been at least 15 years ago now! I was mildly interested, but at that time I had never so much as used a computer, so didn’t think about it much. Then, about six months ago, I was offered the chance to use this course for a review. Mr. Diligence needed something for math for this year, so I thought it would be an excellent course to try. The level he needed, Geometry, was one of the courses offered, so it worked perfectly. He started using level 3.0 in October, and after a break over the summer, he went back to it, using Teaching Textbooks 4.0—they upgraded in the meantime.

I’m quite impressed with Teaching Textbooks. It’s working very well for Mr. Diligence. He does his lessons with very little help from me. Once or twice, he has gotten stuck on a problem and asked for help, but otherwise, I don’t do anything with his lessons. Each lesson starts with a lecture, illustrated with animated slides, and then there are, I believe, five practice problems. After that, there are 20-25 problems, some having to do with the new concept taught in the day’s lecture, and some being review of concepts taught earlier. He is doing very well with this course, and really likes it.

Each problem is read aloud, and then needs to be answered in one of several ways. Sometimes there are multiple choices to click, other times it is a true/false question, and other times the answer needs to be calculated and typed in to the answer box. Immediately, the program lets you know if you got the answer right, and then you can choose to try again, or see how the solution is arrived at. A lot of the problems need to be worked out algebraically, of course. There is a “scratch pad” button, which allows you to write on the screen with the mouse. It’s a lot slower than using paper and pencil, but apparently works well with a tablet.

Do you remember doing proofs when you did Geometry in high school? I do, although I can’t remember details very well! This program has a way to do proofs. Some of the statements and some of the reasons are given; for the others, five choices are presented and you have to choose the correct one.

Version 3.0 was entirely online. He didn’t do a lot of lessons with it, because we were going into the summer holiday soon after we received it, but as far as I can tell, version 4.0 is easier to use and clearer. It is also not all online. You install an app on your device and several lessons at a time are downloaded into the computer. That makes it much more useful to us; my computer is getting very old and regularly loses connection with the internet for a minute or two. One of the features I really like about 4.0 is that I can pause our subscription, for a week or more at a time, when I know he won’t have time to use the course. This is very helpful, because we only have it for a year! 3.0 could be paused, as well, but I had to call and talk to someone to do that, and being international, that is difficult. Now, I can do it through the parent dashboard.

I am quite impressed with this program. I like the way the lessons are presented clearly, and that there is plenty of review. I like that I don’t have to do anything with them; I can just turn my boy loose and he can do the program all by himself. (This is something I’m learning about my children with dyslexia—computer programs that include lectures are very useful! I’ve been reading the lessons aloud to some of them all their lives to make sure they get it, but with a program like TT, I don’t have to!) I noticed on the website that you can get a free trial of the first 15 lessons of any level. That sounds really good to me! That would be enough to get a good feel for how the course works and if it will work for a particular child.

I like the Parent page, too. That is where I can manage the subscription (like pause it when needed!), and I can see exactly what scores he is getting on all lessons. The overall score so far for the course is shown, too. Now that we have tried Teaching Textbooks, I will likely have other children use it when we need math courses for high school.

Click on the image below to find reviews by a number of other families who also used Teaching Textbooks 4.0 recently!

Tramp to Elizabeth Hut

April 25, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

About the middle of February, Gayle and all five of the boys went on a tramp to Elizabeth Hut, in the mountains to the south of us, with several other men and children from our church. I stayed home with the girls, and with the help of a neighbor, did the milking. Mr. Diligence took his camera along and took these photos. Here they are getting ready to head out. Simon is in the center, and Mr. Sweetie and Mr. Imagination to the right in the photo.

They tramped up a river valley.

These little fish were found trapped in some puddles that were drying up.

This is a hot spring partway up to the hut. At some point in the past, someone made a concrete pool, but it’s in bad shape now.

Inside the hut! There are only six bunks, so the men got those and most of the young boys spread their sleeping bags on the floor.

They headed back the next morning. Soon after setting out on the 4-5 hour tramp, Simon twisted his ankle, and just kept going. He could hardly hobble by the time they got out, and didn’t walk on his foot again for a few days.

They all thoroughly enjoyed this tramp, and want to do it again!

January 2021 Photos

April 18, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had a lot of things going on in January after we got home! Gayle decided to paint the garage roof. He went over all the rusty places with a wire brush, and then painted them with something to stop the rust. He got two coats of paint put on all those places, and one coat on the rest.

Little Miss turned six in January! She was delighted to have a birthday! We had chocolate cake and lime ice cream for dessert.

Esther stripped our dining table and refinished it with teak oil. It’s pretty now!

We were given a deer! It was a huge red deer stag, and we got 39 kilos of meat off it. What a blessing!

Mr. Imagination put a bowlful of meat through the mincer.

Then, Simon took over and put a lot more through, faster!

The boys fried up some of the meat immediately, and pronounced it delicious!

Simon was doing exercises for awhile to strengthen his knees. One evening, he tried pushups with a load on his back!

Baby turkeys!

An apple tree at Simon’s house. I still haven’t gotten over there with a camera, and now the house is full of furniture, being stored till it’s needed by other people.

Esther took some friends to see the old dredge at Ngahere one rainy day.

They also went down to our picnic spot by the river. Near the end of a week of torrential rains, this is what it looked like!

Later that week, also on a rainy day, we took some other friends to Shantytown, a historic village. We got to the school in between lessons on using old-style pens, but with the supplies laying out on the desks, we figured out how to use them.

More exercises!

Elijah spent a few months building himself a desk (he finished it just when he quit school to start his apprenticeship!).

This was our second picking of cucumbers. The next four weeks or so, I got twice this many each week.

Our salad one evening. Mr. Imagination and Little Miss decorated it for us!

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Product Review—ARTistic Pursuits

April 15, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I have a son who loves to draw and dreams of becoming an artist. I want to encourage his dreams, so when the opportunity came up to try out a course from ARTistic Pursuits, I requested Beginner Level, Art Core 1, Drawing with Graphite Pencils. We worked our way through the first unit, Outline Drawing.

The first lesson described what an outline is. We watched a video lesson in which the instructor showed us how to find the outline of an object, trace it with our eyes, and then draw what we saw. Then, we were supposed to choose a selection of small objects, such as teacups or small toy animals, and draw them. I did this activity along with the children (Mr. Sweetie, age 11, Mr. Imagination, age 9, and Little Miss, age 6). I think we all agreed that Mr. Imagination did the best! Here are his drawings from the first two lessons, and mine and Little Miss’s from the first lesson.

For the remaining three lessons in this unit, we read a page or two from a book. Because we live outside of the United States, we had to use a digital version of the book. It works, but I think the physical book would be much easier to use. Lesson 2 talked about line as an element of art. Mr. Imagination went outside and drew several objects he found. Lesson 3 showed a painting by George Catlin, who painted many American Indians, and focused on the way the blanket draped over a chief’s lap. The assignment was to drape a cloth over something and draw the folds of the cloth. The last lesson in this unit gave the assignment to draw a person sitting on something. Mr. Imagination chose a picture of a child swinging and drew that. Unfortunately, the picture he drew got lost before I photographed it!

Each unit in this course focuses on one particular aspect of drawing, and each lesson builds on the ones before. As I mentioned already, Unit 1 teaches how to draw an outline. Unit 2 talks about space—showing what objects are closer than others—and then the units go on to teach about shape, texture, value (light or dark), and form. The last three units help students draw human, animal, and man-made forms.

Each unit begins with a video lesson, and an assignment to practice the concept that was introduced, using objects found around the student. The second lesson expands slightly on the first one. The third lesson studies a painting by a famous painter, and gives an assignment based on that study. The fourth lesson gives another assignment to expand on the topic a little more.

This course, the way we received it, did not work very well for us. I believe that if we had the physical book, Mr. Imagination would have used this course a lot more. He tends to pick up art books that are laying around and work through them, but if it’s online it is a lot harder for us to use. I am quite impressed with this course myself, though. I like the idea of learning to draw objects around you, rather than being shown a picture and walked through the steps of drawing it. This seems quite useful to me. So, bottom line? If you have an aspiring artist, and can get the book to go with the video lessons, or have an easy way to access the digital book, ARTistic Pursuits would be a great choice. Check out what several other families experienced with it by clicking on the image below!

December 2020 Photos

April 12, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Now that I’ve finally uploaded all the pictures and stories about our big trip over New Year’s, I can go back to sharing photos of daily life. Here are the rest of December’s pictures.

Princess loves large black-and-white stuffed animals. Does she know she blends in with them?

I had a miscarriage in early December, and spent a day in hospital. That evening, Mr. Imagination and Little Miss put a lot of flowers on my night stand!

After many years of struggling to teach dyslexic children to read, I love seeing scenes like this. Mr. Sweetie is reading a Hank the Cowdog book here. I bought several of them when someone was selling them used, and they are quite popular!

I’m not sure what was going on here, but this is all of my children except Esther—in one photo! From left to right are Mr. Sweetie, Miss Joy, Simon, Little Miss, Mr. Imagination, Elijah, and Mr. Diligence.

This little girl loves to sit on or in anything!

When he was cleaning, Mr. Imagination found this white-tail spider. They are somewhat venomous, so he made sure it died.

My sister sent a packet of Koolaid and a recipe for playdough made from it. Once I finally got around to making the recipe, Little Miss had great fun playing with it!

Goats are quite amusing.

One afternoon, this tractor stopped in front of our house, and Simon, the mechanic, went out to see if he could help. It turned out that the fuel line had been turned off, so the man got about two blocks from the local garage, and ran out of diesel in the lines. Simon helped him bleed the lines. Esther and I were amused at how many boys it took to help! (This isn’t all ours; two neighborhood boys also stopped to help.)

One really exciting thing that happened just before Christmas was that we got “new” carpeting in the living room! This is what we had on the floor before—a very wornout carpet on the bottom, with several pieces patched together to make a top layer.

After supper the evening before the big day, we pulled out the carpet. This was the old carpet underneath.

This is the subfloor.

The day before Christmas, a friend came right after breakfast and started laying the underlay. Since then, Elijah has started an apprenticeship with this man, laying carpet and other floor coverings.

The finished carpet! We shampooed it and left the furniture out till the next day.

There was still somewhat of a cat smell for a day or two. Princess was extremely suspicious, and wouldn’t enter the room for a couple of days.

From Haast Pass to Home

March 31, 2021 by NZ Filbruns 1 Comment

On Day 12 of our big trip in December and January, we made it home! The trip was wonderful, we really enjoyed it, we saw amazing scenery and we spent time with many wonderful people—but it was time to get home. We packed up that morning in the DOC campground not too far from Haast Pass, on the West Coast side of the mountains, and then headed for the coast. It was clear and sunny that morning, and we enjoyed the amazing views of the mountains and rivers as we drove. Here we were, packing up the vans for the last time. We had put the fruit we brought on top of Simon’s van in case possums would come around during the night. We put the laundry up there, too.

When we reached the coast, it got foggy for awhile. I think this is the mouth of the Haast River.

This is Bruce Bay, if I remember right.

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Another river—I don’t remember which one.

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We drove up to the carpark for Franz Joseph Glacier. We ate lunch there, in the vans, because it started pouring. We had talked about walking up to the glacier, but because it was raining so hard we viewed it from the carpark and left again.

It rained off and on till after we went through Hokitika—see the rain coming down in the distance? We made a stop for fuel, but otherwise just kept on driving, and in the end we were glad we hadn’t stopped anywhere, because it took long enough to get home as it was.

From Te Anau Over the Haast Pass

March 28, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

On Day 11 of our big trip, the second-to-last day, we left our friends’ house in Te Anau fairly early and started our two biggest days of travel on the entire trip. We first drove to Queenstown, which took a couple of hours. It poured for awhile, and was cloudy the rest of the day, but the scenery was still incredible.

We drove along this lake for a long time. Queenstown is on the far end of it.

Notice the name on the brown sign? We were were going up the Devil’s Staircase here!

We stopped for a few minutes at a lookout. We would have stayed longer to enjoy the scenery, but a small person in the family had an emergency need, so we got moving again quickly.

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Almost to Queenstown!

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I think this is the other side of Queenstown, on our way to Cromwell.

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Cromwell is a fruit-growing center, so we stopped at a few shops to buy peaches, apricots, and plums. At one, we bought ice creams for the children. Can you tell that Miss Joy loves ice cream?

This place had incredible gardens we could wander through.

This lavender farm was right outside Cromwell.

Mr. Imagination always kept Miss Joy happy when he rode beside her. They spent a lot of time playing with wet wipes. Miss Joy scrubbed her face, neck, hands and feet very thoroughly, over and over!

We stopped in Wanaka just long enough to fuel up the vans, and then headed across Haast Pass. We were no longer in the mood for any sightseeing!

Heading up into the mountains!

After we crossed the pass and were again on the West Coast (notice the difference in vegetation?), we stopped at a waterfall. We saw this log covered with piles of rocks!

The boys enjoyed climbing on the rocks and skipping small ones.

The rocks were all like these.

We debated for awhile about driving the rest of the way home, or camping in a DOC campground a little way down the road. We had about five hours yet to reach home, and it was 3:00 in the afternoon. What a hard decision! We finally decided to stay at the campground and go home the next day, according to our original plan. At the campground, we discovered a creek along a track in the bush. I let the children play in it, and they had great fun! The older boys skipped stones, and coached the little boys in building a dam, and the girls played in the water. It wasn’t very warm, but not cold, either. We had enough clothes for the rest of the way home, so I decided not to worry about wet clothing—we had watertight tubs to put them in for the last leg of the trip!

This was our last night camping with the vans!

I cooked a stew on the campstove in the small picnic area, and we thoroughly enjoyed being by ourselves again!

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See how the beds were set up? It was surprisingly comfortable—and quite cozy!

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Esther took several short video clips of the fun at the creek—enjoy this glimpse into our evening!

Milford Sound—Part 3—The Trip Back

March 21, 2021 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

After we walked everywhere we could around Milford Sound, we gathered at the back of the vans to eat our sandwiches. It was raining, so some of us stood under the open back door; others got inside and sat in the seats. Wherever we were, the sandflies were BAD! They came in clouds, attacking every inch of exposed skin. We didn’t waste any time eating, and got on the road again quickly to escape the hungry hordes.

This is what we saw as we got on the road again. The mountains were absolutely spectacular, even through the rain.

Here we were heading up to the Homer Tunnel again, from the seaward side. Again, there were sheer rock cliffs going straight up. It’s nearly impossible to get a feel for it from a photo. I was absolutely awestruck by these mountains.

There’s the tunnel! I was quite disappointed that the light had just turned green. I was hoping we would have several minutes to sit there waiting, and soak in the grandeur of the scene.

Have you noticed the water streaming down the rocks all around?

Going down the landward side.

We stopped at a pulloff beside a waterfall. Miss Joy was asleep, so I stayed in the van with her while the others went to the viewing platform. This kea was on top of a motorhome; it rode for a little ways, and then flew back to our vans.

Miss Joy didn’t sleep long, so I got out of the van and went to see the waterfall, too.

When we moved on, the red van went ahead. Maybe I needed to feed Miss Joy? I can’t remember for sure. That left Esther and the two little girls and I together when we stopped at another overlook where we could see this spectacular valley. I can’t remember what it was called, but it was an amazing sight.

Our next stop was the Cascade Creek Nature Walk at Lake Gunn. Miss Joy needed some time to play, so I stayed in the gray van with the two little girls while everyone else went on the walk. These are Esther’s pictures.We also stopped at Mirror Lakes. A nice boardwalk led along the edge of a beautiful pond.

We were trying to get a picture of all the children, and another tourist offered to take our family picture, so we quickly organized for this.

Then, we went back to work on the children’s picture.

Miss Joy didn’t want to be separated from Mommy.

Finally, Daddy had to help keep her in place while I took the picture.

When we got back to Te Anau, we still had a few hours of daylight, so we stopped at the bird sanctuary. This is a takahe, a very rare bird. They have a couple of pairs there.

These are blue ducks, also very rare.

Paradise ducks aren’t exactly rare, but we enjoyed watching them. The mother (the one closest to the camera) was very worried that we would hurt her babies, and kept trying to get us through the fence.

This is a relative of the kea, some sort of a parrot, but I don’t remember what it’s called.

This is another parrot.

A table and chairs just her size!

A little house for her, too!

This is the view from our friends’ house. I would love to see it on a sunny day!Here is a video put together from several clips that various family members. The first clip was taken in the Eglinton Valley, on the way to Milford, by Mr. Imagination. Next is Esther’s clip of going through the Homer Tunnel, and then of going down the mountain from the tunnel. After that is a clip from sea level at Milford Sound, followed by one of the waterfall where we saw the kea. Then, there is one of Lake Gunn and a few from the nature walk.

Thank you!