NZ Filbruns

Busy Boys

June 2, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

My boys know how to keep themselves busy. Here are a few of the projects they’ve been doing lately. Mr. Inventor built this tandem bicycle. He cut apart a couple of bikes and welded them back together. The boys love it; they can hook a trailer to it and with two of them peddling they can carry quite a load.

Counting down…till we fly to America. This was a few weeks ago; the chains are pretty short now!

Mr. Diligence made a cross, and Mr. Intellectual engraved Seth’s name and dates on it, to temporarily mark the grave until we get a proper headstone.

Mr. Diligence researching something.

Some of the busyness is not serious—sometimes they pull shenanigans like this! It took Mr. Intellectual quite awhile and a bit of help to free himself.

Mr. Inventor spent one morning trimming trees so he could mow under them.

The loggers. Mr. Inventor cut these logs across the road, and they hauled them home this way!

Mowing lawn one last time before we leave. He didn’t want to rake up the grass clippings, so he used the bag and pulled a wheelbarrow tub around to put the grass in so he didn’t have to walk to the other side of the yard every time it was full.

April 2017 Pictures

May 30, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Time to get caught up with the random pictures!

Remember that post I did about salsa? After I added all the other ingredients, I ended up with two pots full!

Does Little Miss look like she has gained some weight? We were given a big boxful of shoes, gumboots, and a few dresses, her size or a little smaller. She wanted to wear all the dresses at once, so she has five dresses on in this picture!

One afternoon when everyone was away except her and me, she found this sunflower head and sat herself down to pick the seeds out. She got a handful before she got tired of it.

Yes, this is me laughing. I had sent a text to Gayle at work, and although he got an advertising text sent him just before that, he didn’t see mine. So, I sent him another, and we were all laughing about the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Gayle reading my text.

One of our favorite meals—straw hats.

Little Miss

What to do with an empty chips bag—tape it shut tightly, then pop it with a bang! Boys….

We didn’t have a hard frost till early May, but I picked all the peppers the end of April. These were all from the greenhouse. I was astounded; I hadn’t thought they did so well this year!

This silly cat is always looking for a new spot to sleep.

I’m fixing my bicycle!

Gayle took the boys to the beach to get some sand, so the sandbox is full again. It’s been quite popular—although I’m glad the main popularity only lasted a couple of days; a lot was tracked into the house during those days.

Mr. Diligence and Little Miss mowing lawn.

Mr. Inventor, Little Miss, and Mr. Diligence all mowing at once.

Evening Walk

May 26, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We don’t have enough grass here for our animals, so we graze the cow on the roadside during the day. We bring her home every evening before dark, to milk her and keep her in our paddock overnight. Seth always used to bring her home, and after he died Mr. Intellectual took over the job. One day around the first of February, though, I went to get her when everyone else was away and decided it would be a good way to get my daily walk in. I do it when I have time in the evening. Usually I take Little Miss in her stroller, but one evening in April I invited Mr. Imagination to go along instead. He was thrilled to get to go, and rode his bicycle ahead of me. One treat was seeing the moon rising over the hills to our east, the other side of Cheviot.

There’s our cow, waiting for us!

Product Review—The Typing Coach

May 25, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

I have been trying to teach my boys touch typing for a long time now. Esther learned when we still lived in America, using an old typing book I had picked up somewhere. It was very similar to the way I had learned, and really worked. The boys have been using a variety of computer programs, and none of them was working as well as I thought they should. I had been thinking about finding something else, so when The Typing Coach Online Typing Course, from The Typing Coach, was offered for review, I jumped at the chance. Mr. Intellectual has been using it for five or six weeks now, and he is really happy that he got to.

This program is quite different from the other online typing programs I’ve seen. It took awhile for Mr. Intellectual to get started with it, because there is a lot of introductory material to get through. To start out, you read a brief introduction, then watch a video introducing the method used in The Typing Coach. After that, you are asked to print several documents, which contain the passages you’ll be typing for practice, and then watch another, much longer video explaining how the course works. It took my boy several days to get through all that! The last step before actually learning to type is to do the Before and After Snapshot—type the Gettysburg Address for three minutes and take a screenshot of your results.

Finally, you’re ready to start the first lesson. That covers good posture while typing (mine isn’t very good all the time, to be honest). The second lesson covers the home row. It begins with an audio in which the instructor tells you where to have each finger and what letters to type. Then, you practice, using the student packet you printed out earlier, until you can get through several lines without a mistake. When you feel ready, take a test. You will not pass the test until you have 100% accuracy! The big difference I’m seeing between The Typing Coach and the other programs we’ve tried is that you are not to look at the screen. You are to keep your eyes on the paper you’re copying from. While you listen to the audio, of course, you won’t see anything on the screen, either. You are to type in a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. That makes it work much like real life.

Does it work? Yes, at least for Mr. Intellectual! He already knew how to touch type, but was very slow and not accurate. He had been averaging 6-10 words per minute, with several errors. Today, when he did the Top Row Learning Check in The Typing Coach, he typed 11 words in 40 seconds, with no errors. He’s pretty happy to be able to type faster. In fact, when he writes stories, he is now typing them rather than using a speech-to-text program! I will probably be using this program for some of my other children in the future (you don’t want to use it with children much younger than about sixth grade, unless you have time to help them through it). One thing I really appreciated is that Mr. Intellectual was able to do this program pretty much on his own.

We did have some frustrations with this course. At first, the website seemed pretty clunky and hard to navigate. After playing around with it and looking closer at everything, we found what we needed, though. We did notice that things were changed as we used it, and it’s actually much better than it was before. Another frustration was that you have to wait two days, to the minute, before retaking a test that you have failed. That is especially aggravating when you’ve left Caps Lock on accidentally! We did find a way around that, though; if you enter a different name you can retake it immediately, so my boy used his middle name a couple of times. However—remember that the purpose of this course is to teach mastery and accuracy! That is why the rule about not doing the test again immediately. You are to practice and practice until you are absolutely accurate.

The suggested pace is a lesson a week for ten weeks. Mr. Intellectual hasn’t quite held to that pace, because life is pretty crazy around here; he’s finishing lesson 3 right now. We’ve had a lot of days we had to take off school to go to Christchurch for appointments, or other life happenings, including our upcoming trip to America. He has learned a lot, though, and plans to finish the course after we get home. I highly recommend this course for anyone who wants to improve their typing speed or accuracy, but you will have to have the patience to figure out the course.

To read what 100 reviewers think about The Typing Coach, click here:

Connections

May 18, 2017 by NZ Filbruns 2 Comments

I love the connections we sometimes get to make. We’ve been reading aloud a book titled The Broken Blade, a story about voyageurs who traveled from Montreal to Grand Portage in 1800. The main character is a young boy whose father got injured just before signing up with a crew for the summer’s trip, so Pierre went in his father’s place. In the chapters we read this morning, the five canoes reached Lake Superior, and as they crossed a large bay a fierce storm came up. They barely reached the shore of an island before the canoe sank.

At lunch, we often watch some educational videos online. One we watched today was from an article I came across this morning, about a shipwreck recently discovered in Lake Superior.

We watched the video, and then read a bit of the article. As we were reading, I wondered where the wreck was, so then we went to Google Maps to find Michipicoten Harbour. As we looked at the map, we started thinking it looked like the map in The Broken Blade that we had been studying this morning. We grabbed the book, and sure enough, it was the same bay! What fun.

By the way, The Broken Blade is quite a gripping story about the voyageurs and the hard life they lived. We are really enjoying it, although there are some very graphic places, such as when they killed a deer or when one man was killed. It’s so real, you feel like you were there. We are rather upset with how the author made the one man die, and wondering why it had to be him. We’re hoping there is a good reason later on. What I loved about all this was the connections some of the children made, between the book and real life, and what’s happening today! I also loved that it was totally unplanned!

This is the map we were looking at in our book; the yellow arrow shows where the canoes got caught in the storm. As far as we can tell, they landed on the island.

Here is the Google Maps page we looked at:

And I just realized, we actually did a bit of geography today! That doesn’t happen every day.

MacKintosh Beach

May 17, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

One Tuesday in April, our homeschool group went out to MacKintosh Beach, near Amberley, for a picnic and to explore after reading the stories the children wrote, which gives us our excuse for getting together. We had never been out there before, so we enjoyed the spectacular scenery. Even though it drizzled a bit, it was a fun afternoon!

Strange People

May 14, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

We had some very strange-looking people in our house this evening. First, this apparition appeared:

He wouldn’t tell us his name, but we think maybe it was Mr. Imagination. Sure sounded like his giggle, anyway! Then, a little while later, this one showed up in the kitchen:

Later, after we ate, we were treated to a sword-swallowing show. I’ll let you catch a brief glimpse of Mr. Inventor’s skills.

Happy Days

May 7, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

This is just a collection of random pictures of happy times over the past couple of months—pictures I never found a spot for before. Mr. Imagination was so happy to have puddles to splash in! This was one of our first rains in March, and was some of the first puddles he had the opportunity to play in for a couple of years.

All these lovely people, plus a few more, slept and ate at our house for a day and a half! We really enjoyed that weekend. One family had lived with us for two and a half months; they had to fly back to America a couple of days after the picture was taken, and the other family had come to say goodbye to them.

Mr. Intellectual was doing a science experiment, with help from Mr. Inventor and Esther. It had something to do with how pulleys work.

A friend came one day to say goodbye before she goes to America for a year. She loves children, and spent a lot of the day with the little ones. You can see how Little Miss loved her!

I believe this is a cup of hot chocolate from the friend in the picture above. Think Little Miss likes it?

We were given a big box of clothes, and Mr. Inventor had great fun dressing up and trying to look as ridiculous as possible! (And now I notice a cat enjoying the box!)

I came out of the bedroom after praying with Gayle at bedtime one night, and found that, not only had the boys not gone to bed, Mr. Inventor was busy tying Mr. Diligence up!

When we happen to have a Sunday afternoon at home, Daddy sometimes plays a game with the children. They love it!

NASA Super Balloon

April 26, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Yesterday evening when I was on my way home with the cow from where she grazes on the roadside during the day, I noticed a bright object in the sky off to the southwest of us. I thought that was an odd shape for a plane, and it didn’t seem to be moving, but I didn’t think much of it and soon forgot it. After I got home, I put the cow in the area where I milk, picked a few things from the garden, and headed for the house. The turkeys started fussing about then and ran for cover under the macrocarpa hedge. They were acting like there was a hawk, so I looked around, and saw a large flock of Canada geese coming toward us. Several of the boys ran out into the paddock to see them, and soon yelled that they saw a planet—maybe Venus or Mercury? I knew it wasn’t Venus, because I’ve been seeing it to the east in the morning shortly before sunrise, so I told them it must be Mercury, but went to see what they were seeing, because it didn’t seem likely that we’d actually see that small planet! They pointed out the same bright object I had seen a little bit earlier, and it was definitely not a planet. It was much brighter and larger than any heavenly body I’ve ever seen, except of course the Sun and the Moon. It was round, or oval, but we couldn’t make out what it was. Mr. Intellectual and Mr. Diligence ran for their binoculars, but that didn’t help much, so Mr. Inventor got the telescope. I went inside to look online and try to figure it out. First I looked for the International Space Station, but that was obviously not what we were seeing. I tried one or two other fruitless searches, and then thought of the NASA weather balloon we had heard was to be launched several weeks ago. I searched for that, and after one or two more dead ends, found an article that said the balloon had finally been launched today, after seven failed attempts. The accompanying video showed an object exactly like what we were able to see with the telescope!

This picture shows what we were able to see with the naked eye (this is very zoomed in):

This is a screenshot from the video in the article; this is what we could see through the telescope:

We were pretty excited to get to see this!

Little Miss and Her Bicycle

April 25, 2017 by NZ Filbruns Leave a Comment

Mr. Inventor and Mr. Diligence found a tiny bicycle with training wheels at the dump a few months ago. They brought it home and presented it to their favorite little sister; it was just the right size for her. She was thrilled to be able to ride it. I grabbed the chance to get this video one morning when she slipped out of the house still wearing her nightgown! She moves so fast it’s hard to capture a video like this.