A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 170

Seriously, Gary needs to stop having days off!! It is SO hard to leave him in the morning…so sometimes I don’t 🙂 I think it may have been coming up to nine before we were all up, and gone half nine before we started school. Gary started a new job back in December and he works six days on and two days off. This means his days off are always different, and worse, are often in the middle of the week. I find him very distracting!

I spent the ‘early’ (not) part of the day reading two Mystery of History lessons on Homer and the ancient Indus civilisation, a few Life of Fred lessons, more Botany all about the attraction of colour to pollinating insects and the patterns on petals which ultimately direct the insects towards the nectar and finally we did some Latin translating together. They translated this passage:

I also did some tables flash cards and Latin vocab flashcards.

After the girls had a quick break, we returned to the table. I dictated some notes on colour and nectar guides and then sent the girls outside to find some brightly coloured petals, as well as some highly patterned petals to stick in their notebooks:

The last activity of the morning was to begin the next lesson in Art Labs on drawing with an eraser. I had bought the girls new putty rubbers to use, which are so much fun. You kind of tear a bit off to use and mold it to the shape you want, fat or thin. Fun, fun, fun! The girls rubbed some charcoal all over the sheet of paper, whilst I set up a simple still life. We talked about the lights and the darks and how they needed to first bring out the highlights with the eraser and then add the darker tones with the charcoal stick afterwards:

The girls love this lesson and really enjoy learning fun new techniques where there is no sense of failure. I love all they did, and more importantly, so did they:

We had a quick lunch of soup and rolls and then dragged ourselves outside to go through some boxes filled with all sorts of toys, dress up and other home school resources. We were not in the mood. Charlotte is still very concerned about one of her friends, so we girls all sat down and chatted for a couple of hours. Sigh. Being a teen these days is so much harder than it was in my day.

Once the older girls had gone inside to play a board game with their younger sisters, I got my bottom into gear and actually managed to clear three boxes of PlayMobil toys, and took them with about five other bags to the local charity shop. We are gradually getting there, but it is quite an emotional journey getting rid of all the physical evidence of our homeschool memories of when the older ones were the little ones’ ages. I kept it all but the littles learn so differently from the older ones, we are not really making any good use of it. So it is time to declutter and move onwards and upwards. And it is bitter sweet.