A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 70

I’m going to start today’s post with a photo from the weekend. One of the things I enjoy most is listening to Gary and Thomas playing and singing together. Saturday night was open mic at church and they were performing together. Unfortunately, I needed to stay home with the little ones thus missing the actual performance. But fortunately, they had an impromptu practice in the kitchen. Gary was on the banjo (except it wasn’t a banjo, but the actual name of it has gone awry. Banjo is close enough), and Thomas the guitar:

Ooooh, the mandolin!! Gary was on the mandolin! Yay me!

I am currently on day 13 of my Lenten feast and fast. The fasting from all solid food is not as bad as I thought it would be, although Sunday is always the hardest day. Today I decided I needed something savoury. Completely savoury. So I boiled up a heap of vegetables and strained the liquid. This vegetable broth was a type of vegetable only ‘juice’. It was Heavenly. I had it for lunch and tea. My feast of God’s word is going well. I am currently listening to 2 Chronicles and have 13 books of the Bible completed.

This morning, Charlotte and Becca went round to Granny’s to work and read respectively. This is them all just before Charlotte finished and Becca started:

I grabbed a picture of just Becca and Granny snuggling. We like snuggling in our family:

Her reading is really coming along. Whilst Becs reads to Granny, Abs also does half an hour of reading. Today that reading was done up a tree:

Once Becs returned, the littles did their work books, Lil did her maths, biology and psychology and Charlotte continued with her Latin next door. I asked Lil if she had any biology drawings I could photo. She emerged from her office with this:

Hmm. Not quite what I had in mind. 🙂

After their workbooks, everyone had a break. As it was lovely weather, Abs and Becs went and played in the garden:

They are currently creating a Mud Café, selling all sorts of muddy delights, which you can see on the floor behind Abigail:

When they got cold, the girls came in and did some partnership reading of their astronomy text book. I had someone email me and ask what this actually is. It is when one stronger reader and one weaker reader take it in turns to read a book. Abs is then able to help Becs with words she is not familiar with:

They then went and made some notes in their journals:

Whilst they were writing, I got a still life together for them to complete their final giant ink drawing for their second art lab. Before lunch they got the main outline done:

Meanwhile, Lillie made some soup for lunch:

Whilst the girls ate their lunch, I had some vegetable broth and went and listened to the Bible for half and hour. When I came out, the older girls were at my computer belting out songs from the Greatest Showman:

And their younger siblings were outside making a herb garden for their Mud Café:

This afternoon, the girls completed their paintings, layer at a time:

In between the layers I read out the story of the ten plagues, the Passover and the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt:

I have decided to do an in depth study of this over the next week or so, using the Wonders and Miracles book above.

Once they’d finished with their drawings we stuck them up in our gallery:

I think they did a great job!

My goal today was to teach the girls how to boil hard boiled eggs and to use them to make kedgeree. The older ones were delighted! Not. Huge claims were made over their respective cooking skills. In the end I had them sitting on the sofa with their fingers on their lips. Actually, no. In my head they were. In reality they were still eye rolling their way through my very clear (and concise) instructions on how to make a kedgeree. It remains to be seen whether or not they were listening…

Enjoy your evening!