Our week of learning - 28th March 2010 - Rockclimbing, Archery and inventions

It's been a busy week again this week with lots of new experiences!

English:

Current Readaloud: Jack Stalwart: The Search for Sunken Treasure (Australia) by Elizabeth Singer Hunt.

Audio books: "Does my head look big in this?" by Randa Abdel-Fattah; "Cry of the Cat" and "The Gingerbread House" by Emily Rodda.

Independent Reading: Boyz Rule: Skateboard Dudes and Boyz Rule: Battle of the Games.

Other: He created a poster advertising his AFL tipping competition (writing for a variety of purposes). He's been playing several games of Scrabble online.

Maths: He spent time using Timez Attack, we watched an episode of Cyberchase (about enlarging using grids) and using an idea I found at Risa's blog, I gave him a couple of problems on the whiteboard from the Problems of the Day sheet. He particularly liked the code and made up one for me to solve too. (Thanks Risa!)


Science & Technology: He used Microsoft Publisher to make his AFL tipping poster. We learnt a bit about Thomas Edison (sparked by an episode of The Simpsons), looked at some of his inventions in the "How Nearly Everything was Invented" book and he set out to make some of his own inventions. Most didn't make it past the conceptual stage :)

We watched 3 videos on The Happy Scientist website - how mirages work, floating bubbles on a layer of CO2 and how to make butter from milk.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): He got some quiz cards handed down from his cousin, and spent some time with her doing some Arts, Sports & Leisure questions.

Creative & Practical Arts: He made up a play with his cousin and they performed it for the family.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Rockclimbing at a local PCYC organised by one of the homeschool mums.


"Feral Archery" - indoor archery - with the Joey Scouts.


Practising his diabolo circus tricks.

Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): He's learning how to care for our new cat.

We made Hot Cross Buns. The recipe was very yummy (esp the one Billy added choc chips too), the texture was good - but it was more like a fruit bun than a hot cross bun. The search for the perfect recipe continues...


School shows: Behind The News Extra.

Other fun stuff: They learnt the reef knot at cubs - I must get him a bit of rope to practice with now!

Our new baby!

Meet Kit Kat - the newest member of our family. He's a 14 week old Russian Blue and we picked him up this morning. I'm starting to remember what it's like to have a toddler in the house :)

Our week of learning - 21st March - Goblins, canoeing and da Vinci

Quite a mixed bag this week - very busy and lots of fun.

English:

Current Readaloud: Finally finished The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton

Audio books: "Does my head look big in this?" by Randa Abdel-Fattah

Independent Reading: Jack Stalwart: Peril at the Grand Prix (Italy) by Elizabeth Singer Hunt.

Other: We watched "Prince Caspian", the 2nd in the Narnia movies.

Maths: He took part in a play about goblins (teaching multiplication by 2s, 5s and 10s) at the FBI homeschool group.


He spent some time playing Timez Attack.

Science & Technology: Participated in an experiment involving chromotography at the FBI group.


Made a lava lamp using oil, salt & food colouring.


We went along to a Da Vinci Machines exhibition - it was very good with quite a few hands-on exhibitis. They had a working Archimedes screw to move water from a bottom trough to a top one, a bridge challenge that you could pull apart and put back together - that one took us a while - I was glad hubby was there lol. There were templates to make a little Da Vinci parachute out of paper and string - all the stuff was there to do it on the spot. A mirrored room that you could go into, a pulley system to demonstrate that pulleys make lifting easier and heaps of cogs & gears of various types to turn.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): We caught the train home from the Da Vinci exhibit, had lots of discussions about the role of the conductor etc and he practiced reading the train timetable.

The audio book he's listening to at the moment is about a Muslim girl who decides to wear the hijab (head scarf). It's given him an awareness of Muslim culture.

Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class. Making a goblin mask & acting in the goblin play.


PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Martial Arts. Canoeing with the cubs group at a local dam - it was a good introduction to it as it was quite shallow. Very muddy though :)



Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): He's starting to get some good habits of keeping his room tidy.

School shows: Music Moves, Behind The News.

Other fun stuff: A picnic with the secular homeschoolers group (for a brief time anyway!)

I wish I could think of an inspiring title..

I've felt really out of step this week.

Last weekend Pete & I went down to Sydney for the night to see Bell Shakespeare's King Lear. It was very well done btw, John Bell as usual was outstanding but I felt some of the other actors were a bit weak for the roles. We quite enjoyed it. It was a late night though - well late for me anyway :) The play didn't finish until after 11pm so it was about 11:30 when we got back to our motel room.

By the time we picked up Billy on Sunday, did some shopping and got home, it was time to launch into a new week. Which has been fairly busy. I haven't slept very well this week for various reasons so I've been dragging through the days - lets just say there are a few things undone that should have been done by now :)

I didn't get to the gym this week at all. I didn't feel up to going to my BodyBalance class on Tuesday and I was watching the cubs canoeing rather than go to the gym on Thursday! I did go for a walk instead on Tuesday and I think I might go for one this afternoon once it cools down. I bought myself a new MP3 player ($30 at Dick Smith!) last weekend which is much easier to walk with than playing music on my phone. It clips on rather than having to go in a pocket.

I tried to fit too much into yesterday. An eye appointment for Pete, a homeschool get-together for us, the library and the Da Vinci Machines exhibition for us all. We picked up frozen pizza for tea on the way home and collapsed for the night :)

I'm trying to do a brain dump on stuff I need to do but the brain isn't co-operating. I know I have to get some paid work done by Monday so I can install it at the clients. I have emails to answer, forms to fill out, bills to pay, stuff to put away. It would help if my brain wasn't so fuzzy that thoughts appear and then disappear straight away. Or if I didn't keep getting interrupted - like I just did - Billy just lost another tooth!

Right, off to see if I can kick-start the brain!

More musings...

Further to my post last night, I've been contemplating what Billy actually needs to learn in the next few years - let's say by the end of Yr 6. (He's "officially" in Yr 2 atm but he works at all different levels.) It seems hard to believe that not that long ago, many kids had left school by the end of primary school and were out working and learning a trade. In fact neither of my parents have much more than a primary school education.

I have no idea at this stage what job Billy will want to do. In fact, based on his love of technology, the job he ends up doing probably hasn't even been invented yet. So how do I know what he should learn? The Australian states can't even agree on what should be in the curriculum, let alone the rest of the world.

So after some contemplation, this is what I consider the "Must haves" in his education:

• "Consumer level" maths - budgeting, measuring / weighing, basic maths skills
• Understanding of the maths processes, not just rote learning
• Ability to read
• Ability to comprehend what is read
• Legible handwriting
• Computer skills - typing, word processing, email, web surfing, web searches - how to find & interpret information
• Life skills - looking after himself, household skills like washing, cooking, etc
• Understanding of significant events & people in Australian history
• Tolerance & appreciation of other cultures, religions & people
  

The following things would also be desirable but he'd still get by without them.

• Ability to speak in public
• Love of reading
• Not afraid of maths
• Understanding of significant events & people in World history
  

To me, everything above & beyond that is just 'icing on the cake' - just expanding his mind and exposing him to new ideas.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What skills or knowledge do you consider as vital?

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm left wondering what the point of high school is (other than to keep kids out of the workforce and stop them competing with adults for jobs!). It's not really to specialise - when I went through school, you couldn't choose subjects until about Yr 11 - and that was if you were lucky enough that the subject you wanted was offered and fitted in with your timetable. That's why you go to uni - 6 years later! How much of what you learn at high school is actually used later on in life? I'm struggling to think of anything I learnt that is critical to my life now. Writing an essay on Shakespeare? Nope. Trigonometry? Nope. Pretty much everything I needed to do my job, I learnt on the job. High School seems a very broad brush approach - let's make everyone learn how to dissect a poem to cover the 1% that will actually use it! (And turn the other 99% off anything to do with poetry for the rest of their lives!)

Would we be better off going back to the days of early leaving and apprenticeships? Its not like today's youth appear to be any happier than previous generations!

Just some ramblings - what do you think?

Plenty of time..

Sometimes I get antsy that we don't seem to be covering enough stuff in our "homeschooling" - it usually happens after I've been talking to more curriculum based homeschoolers, or like tonight, as I look around at all the incredible resources we have in our house just waiting to be read / watched / played with. It just struck me though that with the new school leaving age of 17 - I have 9.5 more years of "teaching" (or should that be "learning alongside"!) Billy. Even at the very conservative school estimate of 5 days / week for 40 weeks - that's another 1900 days of learning. Maybe I should just take a deep breath and trust we will cover enough stuff in that time :)

Our week of learning - 14th Mar

Lots of Science & Maths this week.

English:

Current Readaloud: The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton

Audio books: Raven Hill Mysteries by Emily Rodda - "The Disappearing TV Star", "Green for Danger" and "Cry of the Cat".

Independent Reading: The Mystery of Banshee Towers by Enid Blyton

Other: Another game of Rainbow Scrabble - he's getting good at it! We'll have to invest in a grown up version soon!

Maths: We celebrated Pi Day as blogged earlier.

Science & Technology: Billy pulled out one of the kits we'd bought earlier in the year and he went through the book to find something interesting to do. He settled on making a tsunami - very simply, a jam jar lid with a string through it, in a container of water and pull on the string sharply to disrupt the water. I found a couple of suitable video footage of Tsunamis on YouTube and we watched them together and talked about what was happening, including the fact that so many people had died in the Indonesian ones.


He spent a full day making some movies on the digital camera and the webcam, and trying out a few free bits of software I'd downloaded to integrate them.

He created a very basic footy tipping website for himself and Pete to use :)

We both spent far too long on this game trying to create the circuit. It used lots of different methods to generate electricity like steam, air, solar & laser - quite educational, frustrating and fun! Thanks for the link, Karen :)

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): We've started watching James May's Toy Stories - the series involves Top Gear presenter James May taking toys he played with in his childhood, and making massive versions of them. We watched the first episode where he makes a giant Spitfire model airplane. As well as the history involved in what toys were like "back in the old days", this episode also tied in again with what he'd learnt about WWII last week via Narnia and the Adventurous Four. See, learning really does happen in the most unexpected places!

Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class. He also spent much of the weekend watching his cousin dance at an eisteddfod, so he got to watch tap, jazz, classical and modern dance!

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Martial Arts.

Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): We cooked Anzac biscuits together before his friend came over for a play.

School shows: Music Moves, Behind The News.

Other fun stuff: Lots more Webkinz this week! Plus a visit from a friend.

International Pi Day

We celebrated International Pi Day a little early today - it should be on Sunday but we'll be busy. (Given that it doesn't really work in Australian date format anyway - its 3/14 in American format but 14/3 in Australian, I wasn't too concerned lol).

We started off the day by me telling him it was Pi Day and that pi was a cool number that had something to do with circles. So we had pancakes for breakfast :)

When we settled down to explore more about it, I explained to Billy that pi was a special number and we used a symbol from the Greek alphabet for it. I recapped the term radius, and introduced the terms diameter and circumference (he was able to recognise that the diameter was twice the length of the radius - yay!). We used this worksheet from Enchanted Learning as the basis as measuring some circles with a piece of string and working out the circumference / diameter ratio. Due to some rather haphazard measuring, especially since the small circles were rather tricky for small fingers, our numbers weren't very consistent - but at least they all started with 3!



(We had a brief interruption with some silliness from Master B and a bit of a tantrum from me but after we got that out of our system, we continued - see, that's the bit of homeschooling blogs you usually don't read lol).

We looked at how to get pi up on the calculator (which went down well! - he loves my old scientific calculator) and used that to work out what the circumference of the circles should have been.

I pulled the "Think of a Number" book off the shelf and we looked at some significant times in history for pi. I explained that it was an irrational number and what that meant and we read the first 30-odd digits - he got a kick out of that too :)

We took a break with some round Tick-Tock biscuits, and watched an episode of Cyberchase dealing with Pi (Series 6, Episode 10).

He wanted his Mountain bread cut into a circle for lunch, so I did and then made him measure the diameter and tell me what the circumference was lol.

After lunch he told Pete what he'd learnt about pi and they did some "boy examples" - eg if the diameter of the SCG is x metres, what would be the circumference?

We watched the featured Brainpop video on Pi and then decided enough was enough. Hopefully he'll have an idea that at least pi has something to do with circles, even if he doesn't remember all the details!

Oh, and of course, we had pizza for tea :)

I hate change.

Yesterday Billy & I headed down to Newcastle for our usual 6-weekly chiropractor visit. I've been going to this same chiropractor for 10 years - I started going to him when I was having troubles with my back from sitting all day at work and I chose him because a) he was close to my work and b) my mum used to go to that practice. It's meant an hour drive to see him now that I'm not working in the same town but I was willing to do it because he was fantastic. I'd have other chiros on the occasions that he was sick or on holidays but the adjustment never felt right. He was also fantastic with Billy - he's been seeing him since he was born - he even treated me while I was pregnant! We both adored him.

So you may be able to imagine the devastation I felt yesterday when we walked in and the receptionist came and sat down next to us. "I don't have Michael for you today" she started. I was a bit disappointed, but then she continued "He's decided to retire from seeing patients". Nooooooooooo!

So we went in and had our appointment with the replacement chiro - I'd had him before once when Michael was away. He's lovely and does a good job but he wasn't Michael :(

So I bit the bullet afterwards. I spoke to the receptionist and explained that we'd try to find one more local to us - if I had to "break in" a new chiropractor anyway, it would be better to find one I didn't have to travel an hour to see. She was completely understanding and even suggested one locally with a similar style that Michael had worked with sometimes. I signed out my X-rays and brought them home with me.

I felt so sad for the rest of the day - I hate change :(

Our week of learning - 7th Mar - new experiences!

Several new experiences this week. It was a pretty full on week with planned activities so we tried to keep the home side of things nice & cruisy.

English:

Current Readaloud: The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton

Audio books: Raven Hill Mysteries by Emily Rodda - "The Disappearing TV Star", "Green for Danger" and "Cry of the Cat".

Independent Reading: The Mystery of Banshee Towers by Enid Blyton

Other: We watched "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" and discussed it. We played a game of Rainbow Scrabble.

Maths: I picked up a board game the other day called "Number Rings". Each person has pegs numbered 1 - 18, you roll 3 dice and then use numerical operations to make whatever numbers you can out of the numbers you rolled. You place your ring over the numbers you make and try to fill all your numbers first - for eg, if you roll 3, 6 and 2, you can put your rings on those numbers or on 3+6 and 2, or 3+6+2, or 3*6-2 etc. We started by just playing using addition and subtraction, but it became very difficult to get the last few numbers over about 15. So we pulled the multiplication table out and used multiplication as well. You can also block another player by putting your rings on their number pegs! It's a great game, and I love how it can be used by any skill level.


He also played several rounds on the World Maths Day site. He learnt about Cartesian co-ordinates by playing this fun game to feed Billy Bug.

Science & Technology: He did several 50 question science quizzes on Quizzy's Corner (Webkinz World).

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): The children in the Narnia movie are sent away to the country during the London bombings in World War II - the opening scenes are of German planes bombing the city. That led to a discussion of WWII, Hilter (without too much detail) and the fact the Germans were fighting Britain. Co-incidentally it then popped up again while reading The Adventurous Four - it was also set in that era and the children discover a nest of enemy submarines & seaplanes.

He participated in Clean Up Australia day with his cub group.



We had a natural learner's picnic at Blackbutt Reserve and had to go back around and check on all the animals again. He has "adopted" a black-winged stilt that he calls "Chuck" lol, so we have to make sure he's ok :)


Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class. He watched the show Music Moves and was then making up his own rhythms and ostinato.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): He had his first martial arts grading this week, and was promoted to yellow belt.



Lots of running around at the natural learner's picnic.

Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): He's been making lots of the tea-cup biscuits in the header of my blog :)

School shows: For the Juniors, Music Moves.

Other fun stuff: He had his first night up at Cubs this week. He & several friends have started the process to graduate from Joeys to Cubs - they have to attend 4 cubs meetings, go back and tell the Joey's group about the things they've done and are then able to start Cubs for real.

Lots of Webkinz this week!

Where's the cave?

I need to hibernate...

It's been a full on week and I feel like sitting life out for the next week or so. That's not going to be possible so the day and a half I have will have to do :)

I've been out every day this week and have done lots of chatting - client meetings, a homeschool get-together, a birthday party, afternoon tea with my friend, a chat with a potential new homeschool mum. All rewarding, but exhausting to little old introverted me!

Our BodyBalance class launched a new routine this week - I survived but boy it hurt the legs!! I was also brave and went back the next day for my first gym proper session. Yay me!

I also have a confession to make - I started playing Scrabble on Facebook :( I'm playing the games where each player can have 24hrs to make their move so it shouldn't take up too much of my time - if I'm careful!! (Of course, the fact that I have 6 different games on the go atm is a worry!)

Bits & Bobs..

Last Friday I finally got brave enough to have my personal gym program designed - I'd been putting it off citing lack of time since I joined the gym in January! The trainer was very kind to me and took it fairly slowly. My goals are a bit more weight loss and some toning, so she has me doing treadmill, bike (which almost killed me!), some reps on 4 different bits of weight equipment (the technical term lol), and some crunchies. Now to be brave enough to go back and try it on my own!!

I'm still going to the BodyBalance class (ta-chi, yoga & pilates) and still loving it. I'm a bit concerned about this week though - I'm finally starting to get the hang of the routines, and this week they all change!!!

On Friday night Pete & I went to see Tim Minchin - he's a comedic musician who is very, very talented, clever and funny! (Also very, very rude and pushes the boundaries at times so don't check him out if you're easily offended!) It's been years since we saw live comedy - probably Billy Connelly was the last one we saw. It was a great night - I laughed so much my face hurt. The only thing that spoilt it for me were the idiots in the crowd who liked to prove how 'clever' they were by heckling or spoiling the punchline :(

We also went out for dinner beforehand - it was very pleasant sitting in the sunshine on the waterfront eating a lovely dinner prepared by someone else! Unfortunately the service was so slow we ran out of time for dessert! It was a travesty :)

Our week of learning - 28th Feb - M&Ms

A deliberately slower week this week!

Current Readaloud: The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton

Audio books: Robot Riot by Andy Griffiths; Two weeks with the Queen by Morris Gleitzmann

Independent Reading: The Mystery of Banshee Towers by Enid Blyton

English: This hangman (hang mouse!) game that I found on someone's blog - but now I can't remember who, sorry!

Maths: I threw a packet of M&Ms into the trolley while we were shopping the other day - Eagle Eyes noticed and wanted to know what they were for. "To do some maths with" was my reply... I wouldn't tell him what we were doing though, and the suspense was killing him! "Can we do it straight after lunch today???!" lol, love it!

So we did! We made an Eratosthenes' Sieve to find prime numbers up to 120. First we put an M&M on all the multiples of 2, then 3, 5, and 7. He was able to see the patterns in some of the numbers and we both learnt a trick of finding whether or not a number can be divided by 3 (if its digits add up to a multiple of 3). And yes, then we got to eat the M&Ms! (not all of them at once though!)


He also watched a couple of episodes of Cyberchase online - one of the episodes was showing how to draw a circle with a pencil & a piece of string, so I pulled out the compass and let him experiment to his heart's content.

Science & Technology: The slime kit got another workout this week.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): We went and did the month's Waterwatch testing again, and picked up rubbish along the river bank.

Hundreds of flying foxes (fruit bats) have taken up residence in a street in our town - we saw them at dusk a week or so ago, all out flying looking for a feed. It was quite spectacular! Our local paper had an article about them which identified where they were, so we took a drive to have a look. They were very noisy but kind of cute :)



Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Little Dragons martial arts class, exercising each morning with Pete, and the area's homeschool swimming carnival (attended by over 100 kids).



Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): General tidying plus he made 'rocky road' biscuits with marshmallows and M&Ms.

School shows: BTN, Our Earth (about fossils), Count Us In.

Other fun stuff: He attended the Regional Show with his grandparents & had a sleep over at their house for the night.

New look..

I've been playing. What do you think of my new look? (Well, my blog's new look - I still look the same!)

Our week of learning - 21st Feb - Non-stop!

This was Pete's first week working from home, so its been a very odd week as we all tried to get into a new routine. I think it will still take a while. Looking back on the week, it's been a very busy one!

Current Readaloud: Five on a Treasure Island

Audio books: The Waterhorse by Dick King-Smith; Just Macbeth by Andy Griffiths

Independent Reading: The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl; Bernice Knows Best by Max Dann

English: Discussions (ad nauseum lol) about the differences between the book of The Water Horse and the movie.

Maths: He spent about 45 mins on Mathletics and was introduced to the concept of mixed fractions. Discussions about 2d and 3d shapes at the FBI (Fun Brain Institute) run by another homeschool mum, and attempts at making some with pipe-cleaners and straws.

Science & Technology: To celebrate Galileo's b'day we made a telescope from a kit we'd bought recently. Unfortunately one of the lenses was smeared by the sticky tape holding it in the packet and when I tried to clean it, it made it even worse, so you couldn't actually see much out of the telescope. It was enough to give him the idea though.


And that inspired some experimentation with lenses and pulling the real telescope out of the cupboard to spy on the neighbourhood trees :)



At the FBI day, they had to work in teams to make the strongest bridge possible out of 2 straws, 2 styrofoam cups and a piece of paper. Billy's team's bridge got up to 80-odd coins and would've taken more except some were knocked off.


He did some more work on his website adding a member's sign-up section. I helped him with creating the database and the code behind the scenes.

He's also discovered Windows Messenger - I signed him up to chat with Pete & I and he's investigated every single option it has! Including webcam messages. I didn't even know his machine had a built-in webcam :)

Oh and he spent some time on a Building Blaster physics game suggested by Alicia.

HSIE (Human Society and it's environment): He watched 2 Horrible Histories episodes - Terrible Tudors and Amazing Aussies.

We made pancakes for Pancake Tuesday and discussed the day's history.

Creative & Practical Arts: Drama class plus he made a 'secret agent' movie with the video camera.

PDHPE (Personal Development, Health & Physical Education): Little Dragons martial arts class, exercising each morning with Pete, and a full on day at the Scout Fun Day - rock climbing, flying fox, rope bridge, laser tag.





Life skills (cooking, gardening, housekeeping): After watching a show on a designing ice-cream flavours, he went out to the kitchen and whipped up a batch of choc-mint ice-cream. (Vanilla ice-cream with choc-mint chocolates crushed up in it!) He helped make Pancakes for Pancake Tuesday and anzac biscuits just because we felt like it.

School shows: Music Moves, For the Juniors (Birthdays), Designers, BTN, Our Earth (about the age of the earth), Three Kinds of Writing, Take on Technology, BTN Specials.

Other fun stuff: Its been a week obsessed with 'Escape from Scorpion Island' (a kid's reality TV challenge show) - it was the final week of the series. He's watched it (over and over again) and played the challenges on the website. Also a bit of Xbox and PS2.

Book #8, #9 & #10 - Life of Pi, Kings in Grass Castles, We of the Never Never

It's been a while since I've updated my list of 'non-twaddle' books I've been reading. I have to admit that I've slowed down significantly and have mainly gone back to books that don't require any brain cells. I read these ones over the Christmas break - but I do have a few that I've started on my bedside tables atm.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

This is the story of a teenage boy, cast adrift after a shipwreck in a lifeboat with a zebra, a tiger, a hyena and an orungatan. It's the story of survival against the odds - or is it?

Most reviews I've read of this book sang its praises, but I have to say I didn't actually like it. I enjoyed reading some of it - it had some wonderfully descriptive passages, but on the whole I found it disturbing. Maybe because I like books that wrap things up neatly, and without giving anything away, the ending of this was just too open-ended.

I guess I'm glad I read it so that I know what all of the fuss was about.

Kings in Grass Castles by Mary Durack

For a complete change of pace, this is the true story of the Durack family, one of the original cattle barons of Australia. It's written by the grand-daughter of the main character, Patsy Durack and tells how her grand-father came from Ireland in 1853 to escape the potato famine. He & his brothers set out to open up the country that was at that time largely unexplored - how they drove huge herds of cattle to set up properties in some of the most remote parts of Australia in NSW, Queensland and finally Western Australia.

Although its a bit dry & factual in places, I found it absolutely fascinating. I loved reading how they lived, how they set up their homes in the middle of nowhere, how they survived. Recommended for anyone who wants a glimpse into Australian life in the 1800s.

We of the Never Never / The Little Black Princess by Mrs Aeneas Gunn

Another Australian classic, this is an autobiographical account by Jeannie Gunn, published under her married name. Written in 1902, its her experiences of setting up homestead in Northern Territory, being the only white woman in the area, coping with the droughts & floods, the lack of provisions, the remoteness from everything.

I enjoyed the book but it did take me many starts and stops to get through it due to the style of writing. I found it really hard to get into it. Apparently it was made into a movie too - I'd be interested in watching that.