A Year in the Life of a Home-Schooling Family: Day 87

I think I must be fighting an infection at the moment, along with mum, Thomas and Becca. I feel so tired. In a moment of weakness I moaned to my younger twin, who grinned at me and said, ‘Mother, you just need to choose to make the best of it, and put a smile on your face and get on with life.’ I grimaced as I heard the words I have said to them in the past reflected back at me. I began thinking of who I could moan to who wouldn’t tell me to pull myself together. Coming up empty, I made myself a coffee, and started to plan the day in my head. I wanted to do nothing. I wanted to go back to bed. I wanted to sleep. But I did what I knew was the best thing to do, and that was to do the next thing.

I decided to work my way back. We have the youth group here on a Thursday. I usually cook chilli for them all, but I had such a lot of slow cooked chicken left from last night’s dinner, I decided to do a chicken noodle soup. So whilst the girls were doing their work books, I chopped, fried and boiled all the makings of the soup bar the pasta which I would add later on.

Feeling rather too proud of my (let’s face it, pathetically small) accomplishment, I moved to the next thing on my mental list. By the time break came at ten I was riding high on the crest of success. I had read my emails, checked my blog, read out forty spellings to Abigail for her word building test, and forty more to Becca for hers, and I had sent Thomas down the road for a latte and some paracetamol. I had not gone back to bed. I was rocking at this adulting thing!

During break time, which is all of half an hour, there seemed to be a veritable hive of activity from Becca checking cress seeds and strawberry plants:

Gratifyingly, the cress has begun to grow:

Abigail surrounded herself in a mess which seems to follow her where she goes:

She is making encouraging bracelets, with words such as Patience, Jesus, Love, Courage and Strength:

Not to be out-done, Becca made a glitter jar for relaxation:

And together they sung me a song to cheer me up wake me up! It was a song to the tune of ‘A sailor went to sea, sea, sea; To see what he could see, see, see…’ But the words were: ‘I really love my mu-um-my, I really love my mu-um-my…’

Aww, love my girls!

Anyway, I managed to drag the girls away from all their fun to do their devotions before moving on to all the reading aloud:

I thought I’d take a photograph of all the books I read from each day:

The list seems to be growing everyday, but it still remains our favourite time. Abigail plays with my hair and Becca and I snuggle up, whilst I read. Today we went over the Latin and began learning the rules for sentence construction. We read a bit more about Thales, and learnt about vascular plants in botany. We covered Joshua and Rahab in Mystery of History and read the next lesson in Life of Fred: Farms. Finally, I read a couple of chapters in The Thieves of Ostia. We then broke for lunch.

After lunch we made water using a candle and a glass:

We did some work on sets:

Learning about the intersection of sets:

And the union of sets:

After sets we moved onto botany. The girls wrote some notes:

Did some investigations on vascular plants, looking at the veins on a leaf, and pointing out its midrib:

They drew and labelled what they saw:

The girls then picked two leaves from the garden and looked up their binomial name. They stuck them in their journals and labelled them with their Latin names:

Our penultimate lesson was Art Lab four: Drawing with Soft Pastels. I popped a Mother’s Day plant I had been given at the Children’s Mother’s Day concert. This was just in their sketch pad with the goal of testing out the medium:

Didn’t they do well?

The final activity was to prepare a box to create a floor plan of a Pompeian villa:

The girls painted the pizza box (left over from Wednesday’s party) black:

This floor plan will be attached onto the girls’ map of Italy.

We were just finishing up and Mr Amazon man knocked at the door with a second-hand book – the newest addition to our home-school:

This is an area I need help planning, but I’ve never found anything I liked. I came across this book by accident. It looks promising and I think will not require much out of me behind the scenes time-wise.

I have just had a lovely chat with a friend, the youth group are here munching away on the chicken noodle soup, having a very interesting conversation based on Pilgrim’s Progress. Thomas is sitting behind me eating his dinner and Gary is snuggling up with the little ones watching Gilmore Girls. And once I press publish on this, I am going to join him 🙂