A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 105

Easter holidays sure are weird this year. We took a couple of weeks break, although Charlotte did a little bit of Latin each day. But Thomas is only just now starting his Easter holidays! Very odd.

We are now entering the final leg of Charlotte’s exams and Lillie’s A Level photography. I have spent the last few days school planning for an intense three weeks ahead. This morning I posted the next three weeks rota on the board, and spent some time going through it with the girls:

This timetable depends on things starting and finishing at certain times, so I am going to time the day in thirty minute increments. Before the Easter break, Charlotte had managed to cover two years worth of Latin and Classics in three months. The text books were finished and every single exercise completed. From here on out it will be revision, revision, revision.

During the first half an hour, Lillie completed a maths lesson:

Charlotte went round to Mum’s to be tested on her Latin vocab and I read out loud to the littles. We have almost completed the first lesson in the Apologia Botanics text book. Today we learnt about seed bearing plants. I also read the chapter about Pythagoras from ‘Mathematicians are People, Too!’ and tested the girls on their Latin vocab and times tables. Lastly, we started Stage II of the Cambridge Latin Course.

The second half hour was spent checking LETL forms with Lillie for her photography; the littles completed some of their workbooks and Charlotte learnt the first ten lines of the prescribed Latin resource, Virgil’s Aeneid:

Lillie helped me out in the last half an hour before break time by taking the littles outside to finish up their Art Lab lesson with soft chalk pastels:

I tested Charlotte on her Aeneid work before sending them all for a walk around the block and preparing a protein snack for them to eat whilst they had their devotion time:

Later on in the morning, Lillie did some photography work, putting together the bibliography for her final document. She then did some cooking with the littles, teaching them to prepare jelly and also to make a tuna salad for lunch:

Charlotte spent the rest of the morning translating a Latin passage into English and then learning some Classical Civilisation focusing on the Gods, Hercules/Heracles and the journey to the underworld. She needs to learn the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Homeric Hymn to Heracles the Lion Hearted, as well as various passages from Virgil and Ovid.

I did some work with the littles which included some journal work, writing about seed bearing plants, as well as splitting, drawing and labelling some monkey nuts:

Searching for seed bearing plants in the garden, studying them up close and sticking them into their journals:

And checking on our vegetable garden:

Lunch was the tuna salad made by Lillie and her little sisters:

Abs and Becs playing in the garden whilst Charlotte and Lillie had a bath and I planned out how to make a Roman villa floor map and made some labels for our paper mache map of Italy whilst watching Grey’s Anatomy!

This afternoon, Charlotte answered some comprehension and grammar questions on the passage she had translated before lunch, which I then went over with her. And lastly, she answered some exam questions on the Classical Civilisation topics she had learnt this morning. Again, I went over them with her immediately after.

Lillie did some more photography, and then took the littles through the next Mystery of History chapter on Nefertiti and the next chapter in the Life of Fred: Farms maths book. She also tested the littles on their Latin vocab and times table using the flash cards I had made up.

I had two separate half hours with the younger girls during which we made a ground floor plan of a Roman villa, and they used the labels I made to label the important parts of Italy – we will add more as and when we learn about different places during our Rome Unit Study. The girls stuck the floor plan to our map and labelled the rooms accordingly:

At least, they did until we realised that the map was upside down and we had to pick them all off and start over again!

It’s not looking too shabby though! Here’s our floor plan of Caecillius’ villa in Pompeii, made out of cut up pieces of card stuck inside a shoe box lid!

Lastly, I read ‘Science in the Ancient Times’ learning more about Pythagoras, focusing on his musical achievements. I will do the experiment with the littles tomorrow. I finished off the day reading the Thieves of Ostia.

It is very good to be back in our normal routine again. Home-school rocks!