Welcome to our blog!

Welcome to the SHEAF Blog.

Despite our best intentions, we're not great at keeping this blog updated with our latest happenings. We are, however, definitely an active group, meeting at least once each week during term time.

If you'd like to make contact with Dunedin home educators, our contact details are in the column, below right.

We send out a weekly email newsletter with details of upcoming events, courses, gatherings etc.

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Have a look through this blog to see the types of events we have organised in the past. You'll also find links to other blogs and articles that we find useful or informative, on the off-chance that you'll appreciate them too :~) (Look for these more general blog-posts under the label "Weekend Reading")

If you're not currently on our email list and would like to contact us, please email us at the address you can see in the column on the right. We'd love to hear from you!

(Last updated May 2013)

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Science for Home Educators


Some of our families attended a chemistry workshop and a science seminar run by Nathalie Thomas of Science for Home Educators last week. As usual, she was a mine of cool information. There was much measuring and mixing of chemicals, and a little bit of writing, and we even got to play with a beautiful Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, which produced different coloured sheets of flame according to which element it was analysing.

Here are some of the links she shared with us that might be useful for science inspiration!

Nathalie’s site, where you can hire science kits and DVDS for about $10—$15 per term: http://www.science-for-home-educators.co.nz/

User Friendly Resources: http://www.userfr.co.nz/welcome.asp Nathalie recommended titles such as Super Science and Reinforcing Science from this site. They give access to the first 10 pages of many of their publications so that you can have a good look before you buy.

Scientriffic magazine for ages 7+ http://www.csiro.au/resources/ScientrifficMain.html
The Helix magazine for ages 10+ http://www.csiro.au/resources/The-Helix.html
If you subscribe to either of these through The Royal Society of New Zealand (http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/), then you don’t have to pay international postage charges.

The Royal Society also produces the Alpha magazine, for more serious science buff kids, free to download from http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/publications/teaching/alpha/

Nathalie recommended The Book Depository for many of her favourite titles—they have free shipping worldwide: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/

The Royal Society of Chemistry also has many free resources http://www.rsc.org/Education/Teachers/Resources/OnlineResourcesHome.asp

Nathalie made the fantastic suggestion of running a local homeschooling science fair. Her homeschooling group does this each year, and invites a local scientist to come and judge the children’s projects. Winners can then possibly go on to enter regional science fairs. If anyone would be interested in organising this, please let me know!
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