A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 156

Oh. My. Goodness. If I hear one more moan from my youngest twin about how much she hates maths I might very well leave home! Maths actually made her cry today. My usually very upbeat, happy and over the top cheery child is contemplating how long she is capable of going on…Numbers are her nemesis and might very well be her down-fall. Her exams went so well and she is fairly sure she has passed. This means it is only maths which stands in her way of going to school in September. I’m thinking boarding school might be a good option…

In contrast, Lillie has been storming through her school work, so much so that I might have to look at setting her more to fill up her afternoons in the coming year.

This afternoon she spent painting Da Vinci’s famous ‘Touch of gods’ hands onto her jeans:

She has finished one and is getting started on the other. The goal (apparently) is so that when she stands with her legs together, the fingers touch:

The littles and I did some itty bitty stuff this morning. They completed their workbooks as usual. Abs just finished in time for an impromptu session with her drama teacher to learn the monologue she needs to learn for her LAMDA exams. Whilst Abs was away, Becs and I did some partnership reading together. She needs to read specific books for her creative writing, but she still struggles with reading pages with small writing and which are filled top to bottom with words. She can do it, but she can feel overwhelmed by it. Partnership reading (where I read a paragraph then she reads one, and so on) takes the pressure off a little and enables her to read without feeling too overwhelmed.

Once Abs returned, I had them test each other with their tables flash cards:

I then tested them on their Latin vocab, before reading the Mystery of History lesson on King Saul and a few chapters of The Secrets of Vesuvius. Charlotte, who was taking any excuse not to do maths, made lunch:

The afternoon was far more productive. Charlotte finished the module she was on in maths. The goal is for her to do one module per day (even if it kills us, which is not an absolute impossibility!). She was very much more herself once the module was finished and she achieved 94% in the end of module test. Oh, and her littlest sister went to the shops with her own money and bought her a Pot Noodle to cheer her up.

The littles completed the chapter on seeds from their Botany book, with some dictation, some cross wording:

They also stuck in pictures of their vegetable garden, taken a couple of weeks after planting. The last activity (bar re-growing their bean, which had died over the exam period. Ahem.), was to test lots of food products for starch using iodine drops. This was fun. The seeds cotyledons are made up of starch, so this was an investigative experiment to discover which other foods contained starch. It didn’t start terribly successfully because I used paper to begin with to place the food objects on. However, paper contains lots of starch (duh!) and turns iodine black very quickly. Thinking it might skew the results, I made a nifty cover using a plastic sheet:

I am too clever 😉

Taking it in turns we discussed each food and made a prediction about whether or not it contained starch. We made some fascinating discoveries. Like not to use pieces of salad veg which had actually been in our lunch time salad and therefore close to starchy pasta. Yes, we had to change the salad pieces for clean not pasta touched salad pieces. The results were far more predictable after that.

Apart from the mousse. We conjected that the mousse would be mainly fats, proteins and glucose…y’know, on its account of cream, fruit sugars and milk. Who knew it was thickened with starch?! Well, we do now, as it happens 🙂

Likewise the ham went black in places. We figured that was because it was crumbed ham and crumbs came from bread and bread was very starchy. We were proper little scientists! Anyway, much much fun was had doing this experiment:

The girls even extended it somewhat by testing paper and fabric, hypothesising that both wood have starch based on their plant material origins…

I had hoped to complete the lesson on atoms and Democritus in the Science of the Ancient World textbook, but we ran out of time.

Ah well, there’s always tomorrow!