A Year in the Life of a Homeschooling Family: Day 30

The house was very LOUD on rising this morning. So much so, I had thoughts about doing a 180 degree turn and heading straight back to bed. Alas, I had a tonne (really, the noise indicated this!) of hungry children to feed. As I moved into the kitchen I was assaulted (or, at least, my ears were) by two teenagers prancing about rapping some Christian son about God’s love. Now I am always nearly always happy to hear of God’s love. But I had just got out of bed. And it is February. And I hadn’t had a coffee yet.

I rolled the oats, attempting to avoid the gaggle of children in my very small kitchen, and put them on the stove with some water, and began warming the frozen blueberries. Lillie, who gets up early every morning to have Bible study, was sharing all she was learning. Abigail was trying to tell me that she had thirteen fingers, Becca was telling me she was tired, and Charlotte was bouncing about exclaiming how well she’d slept and how she was looking forward to another day of Latin. The voice of reason came from my son, offering me a coffee. Boy, I am so not enamoured by early, noisy mornings.

Lillie, noticing, perhaps for the first time, that I was struggling somewhat, questioned (with far too much volume and energy for my liking) whether I would prefer a grumpy, mostly silent teen who was moody and just grunted every so often… I refrained from answering. Mostly silent sounded positively Heavenly at that particular moment.

Once I was coffeed for the day it was a different story! It’s incredible the difference between pre-coffee Claire and post coffee Claire 🙂

Once nine arrived, Charlotte went over to my mum’s house. She has agreed to help Charlotte learn the vocab for her Latin for half an hour each day. How blessed is Charlotte to have her Granny next door to help?

The littles settled down to their workbook work:

They whizzed through it with Becca crossing out all the work she had missed from the week before:

Once Charlotte returned we did a quick activity which required the twins to be, well, twins. I shall share more in my history posts, but suffice it to say the littles had to figure out which twin was which, blindfolded:

Then, of course, there were lots of kisses and cuddles to be had before going back to work:

Love my girls!

Lil needed to get on with her school as she works outside the home in a nursery on a Tuesday afternoon. The pressure was on to get it all finished! Charlotte went back to her place at the table to complete a few hours of Latin work. She is working so hard right now:

The littles completed some copywork for their astronomy:

As well as a mini book on space rocks:

After which they played with our model solar system, pointing out where the asteroid belt would be:

It has an interactive quiz in-built which Abigail in particular enjoys attempting whenever she gets the chance:

I found a volcano set, which I had wanted to use when we were studying Mars. Alas, I could not find it (story of my life!). It was one I had bought from a charity shop ages ago. I determined that we would use it retrospectively and I would add it to my Mars post. No-body would know…

Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me just how much fun they all get out of a bit of bicarb and vinegar:

Even Charlotte got in on the fun! One is never to old for fizz, apparently:

I left them to it for a while!

Just before we took a break for lunch, we all played a ‘Space Rocks!’ board game, to see how much of our learning about space rocks had gone in:

The writing was a bit small so Abs used her handy dandy magnifying glass:

Lunch-time arrived, then quiet time. The little ones watched some of the following dvds:

And Charlotte and I focused on a Latin translation. She did it pretty much on her own. She is definitely getting the hang of the whole Latin thing. I’m glad one of us is 🙂

Tuesday afternoon, I always do some MEL science with Abigail and Charlotte bakes something with Becca. Today they are making peanut butter cookies:

Abigail had chosen the soap boat from her Rocket Science box:

She had great fun learning all about surface tension and how to use it to her advantage when sailing her little boat:

Here she is explaining all about why and how this works:

Abs had two boats included in her pack so she challenged Becca to a boat race in the bath!

Which she lost!

Now they are settling down to watch Joseph, the Egyptian King with a glass of milk and the cookies which were made this afternoon. Gary is just home from work and I will be picking up Lil from work in just a minute.

What a good and productive day!