A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 114

Gary left for Slovenia early this morning for three days on a grass conference. He left me with a heap of hormonal females. I am thinking I might move out! The day began with tears and lots of cuddles. Baths always help so I prescribed one for each of my girls and we kind of juggled school in between.

Charlotte was fine so her day went as normal: Latin vocab with mum; Aeneas literary study and testing on the Aeneid with me. Abs had a bath first, as she was chilly as well as emotional. The bath was the perfect antidote. She came out feeling warmer and more settled and ready for the day ahead.

Whilst she began her workbooks, Becs had a bath:

Lillie was half way through a màths lesson and she came out crying, sobbing that she had just got three really easy màths question wrong… so we ran in another bath!

Whilst Abs was finishing up her workbooks (Becs had finished hers before 9 this morning), Becca and I went outside to check for snails in our lettuce patch. We had noticed that one or two of the leaves had been nibbled through yesterday. But no matter how hard we looked we could not find even one slug or snail:

We did, however, notice some bird foot prints.. So we have surmised that it was a bird which had done the nibbling rather than the slimy alternatives. Look at that growth though! We take a good few leaves each day for six of us to have lunch and yet they just grow back by the morning. It’s incredible!

Once the workbooks were done for the day, the girls went for a walk with Charlotte to blow away the cobwebs, they had a very unhealthy snack of profiteroles (dessert left over from yesterday!) and did their morning devotions.

After break, Lillie did some photography, Charlotte sat a Latin Language paper (and scored 81%) and I finished reading the girls the lesson about Democritus, and they discovered that the printing press uses way more dots to make typing compared with the number used to make pictures. They tried to see the dots using their various magnifying equipment – the dots in the picture were really easy to see yesterday, but we couldn’t see any signs of the dots in the letters. The reason for this was to show the children that, like atoms, you may not be able to see the dots in the letters, but that doesn’t mean that they are not there:

Next, I continued lesson two from the Botany book about seeds. The girls checked out two very different seeds, a bean seed and a coconut (which is a seed and not fruit, who knew?!):

They then wrote notes covering all they had learnt about seeds so far, and drew a picture of both:

We squeezed in one more activity before lunch, a simple space sky through a porthole – an activity from last month’s Curiosity Box:

We had a cheese salad lunch, made by Lillie who picked the salad from our salad garden (yay for growing our own!):

After lunch, Charlotte learnt all about the Parthenon and the Vestal Virgins, which I then tested her on. Lillie tried her hand at the màths questions again – algebra and the littles and I began some needlework. Last week the girls made a little needle case. This week they are making an apple shaped pin cushion:

I taught the girls the whip stitch:

Didn’t they do well?

I had two more activities I wanted to get done before we ended school for the day. The first was to take a look at our seeds which we planted on wet polymer yesterday:

We’ll be documenting any changes as the days go by. The girls noticed that the skin of the seeds was wrinkled, and there was a small crack on one of the beans:

Also, I had soaked some bean seeds in warm water to make them easier to slice into. I gave the girls a knife and a bean each and demonstrated how to cut into them without cutting into themselves 🙂

They studied their split bean and tried to identify all the parts of a seed, which was harder than it sounds. They then labelled the diagram provided for them in their botany journals:

Gary has sent me lots of photos from Slovenia, which looks totally beautiful. We have decided to have a fish and chips take away tonight, which Charlotte is about to go and get – Yay, no cooking for me tonight!

Have a great night everyone!