A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 84

Today started yesterday. For some bizarre reason, Becca wanted to get a head start on her workbooks Sunday night. This week the girls are finishing up their current set of six workbooks and doing the tests for each before moving on to the next set next week. As Becca hates having all her tests on one day, she is staggering them, one per day…starting Sunday. Strange girl!

This morning she finished one of her workbooks and sat the test for it:

She was taking me out for breakfast as a Mother’s Day gift, so I guess wanted her school work over and done with as quickly as possible 🙂

Abigail was doing a similar thing, focusing on one book a day and getting the test for that book done the same day.

She is still a little behind on her maths, so still needs to do that every day. She is trying to complete one book per week until she is caught up.

Mum has recovered from her cold, so Charlotte headed round to do her Latin vocab:

Lillie began her maths in her office:

Whilst Abs was finishing off her maths, Becs and I went down to our local café to have breakfast together:

It was so cute watching her order and pay the man and then at the end tip him!

When we returned home after a lovely breakfast, the girls finished up their scribble drawings from last week, sticking their scribble fish onto their back ground:

Before signing them and sticking them up in our art gallery:

By this time it was ten-ish, and we were all ready for a break. We have been reading a lot about the Exodus and the Jewish celebration of the Passover over the past few weeks, and so haven’t really needed anything extra Bible-wise. However, I knew we had almost finished so in preparation for that I had bought four devotional books for the girls to read during their short break at ten:

They were all pretty excited to start something new, and disappeared to various parts of our house and garden to read:

After devotions I made myself a coffee in the new mug Abs had bought me for Mother’s Day (!):

and called the littles in for morning meeting. I was quite excited about this because today we were making a start on two new science curricula.

But first, I used flash cards to test them on some maths tables, and their Latin vocab. They did really well, and we moved on quickly to finishing off the very excellent Passover book. I then read out the next lesson in Life of Fred: Farm, and read a go along book about sets (one of the topics we are focusing on with LOF this fortnight).

At last it was time to move onto science. Abigail was ecstatic!

We learnt about the study of botany and the usefulness of learning Latin (yay for Apologia! Another good reason to continue with the Latin!). Gary will be home from work early today and we will be doing a bit of planting up this afternoon. Next was the historical science book, again from Apologia. I’ve not used these before, but I thought they might go well, alongside the Mystery of History text book. I read out the first lesson and we then went outside to learn how to measure tall things by working out the common factor based on smaller item’s shadow measurements:

The girls measured a ruler and its shadow; Becca and her shadow and Lillie and her shadow:

Using the factor obtained by dividing the actual height by the shadow length, we were able to find the height of Thomas’ van by only measuring its shadow:

It was cooking day today with all four girls. I usually do this later on in the afternoon, but I wanted to teach them to make poached eggs for themselves for lunch. As usual there was much unintended hilarity. The first thing I did was get the girls to prick some eggs for hard-boiling…

Meet Gillet the French egg:

Oh, it gets worse. Charlotte turned round saying, ‘Meet Lord Rutland!’:

Abigail then had to join in the fun:

Anyway, the girls did eventually manage to crack some other, un-named eggs into some simmering water to create some poached eggs:

These are meant to be serious cookery lesson, but only one child (Becca) takes then even remotely serious. Charlotte is, as always, the class clown, and Lillie and Abigail follow along very willingly 🙂

We do, at least, produce some edible food, and I only hope some of the instruction will stick in their future roles as wife and mother!

After lunch, Lil had a bath, Charlotte went back to Granny’s to work and the Littles played outside, until I called them in for some more read aloud:

I read from the Botany book, this time learning all about taxonomy and classification. I was gratified when Becca turned to me and said that classifying living things was much like placing them in sets and sub-sets (which she had learnt in the Freddy maths this morning!)

I read a chapter from The Thieves of Ostia (our Roman fiction) and we completed the calculations from this morning’s shadow work. I retested them on tables and Latin vocab before Gary arrived home and they squealed with delight at the thought of planting stuff!

The older girls had finished for the day, and they headed off for Lillie to take more photos for her diploma:

Gary sat down with the girls to survey all their purchases from our trip to the garden centre on Sunday (a treat for Mother’s Day):

Over the weekend, Gary and Thomas had worked really hard to clear and prepare the area at the side of the house (where the chickens used to live) to be used as a vegetable patch:

I was over the moon at this and think they did such a great job!

So, this afternoon Gary taught the girls to plant garlic:

And onions:

and some potatoes:

lettuce leaves:

Tomatoes (Gary and the girls were too quick, I went to put on the chicken for dinner and they’d completed it!):

And lastly, carrots:

I think Gary will also be planting some spinach and helping the girls plant seeds in a heated tray.

The older girls are washing up, Gary and the girls are finishing up outside, Thomas is on his way home from work and I am finishing up this post. It’s been a great day, with lots of fun learning 🙂

Have a great evening everyone!