A Year in the Life of a Homeschooling Family: Day 8

It felt like a singularly unproductive day today!

The littles, having got out of bed early every day last week, lay in until 730 this morning. It must have been first week back enthusiasm, which has waned somewhat this week!

There was also lots of chores to do from the weekend, which the older girls did whilst singing and dancing…

After a delicious breakfast of porridge over the top of blueberries, nuts, seeds and banana with a tiny bit of Manuka honey added to it, we ventured out to the park. We were all a little tired from the weekend, and it did us good to blow away the cobwebs:

The little ones enjoyed some time playing at the park whilst Charlotte and Lillie walked its perimeter:

After a really busy weekend Charlotte was beginning to struggle. I think I made it worse by insisting she got up at 730 this morning. The poor girl did not look good. It didn’t help that she had to start up maths again today. My goodness, you’d have thought I’d asked her to walk barefooted across red hot coals, backwards! I have never seen such a fuss. She intends to write to the Education minister and complain about the need for a GCSE in Maths in order to study an English degree. I can see I’m going to have to rethink how I teach this, because she really does struggle with the most basic of concepts. As you can see by her face, she is less than impressed 🙂

The littles needed to do their workbook curriculum before we began any fun school:

Abigail whizzed through her books, which is very unusual. As a result she finished early and played with some of the toys we had brought out for our younger visitors yesterday 🙂

Meanwhile, Becca was trudging through hers. Usually the opposite is true – it was like they’d both had personality transplants, it was very confusing!

There was one very happy camper in my homeschool today though….and that was Lillie. Having finished (or so she had thought) her Art and Design qualification last week, she was ecstatic (no exaggeration!) to start Human Biology IGCSE and Psychology GCSE alongside her Maths and Photography. Every so often she would come bouncing out of her office to share with me all she was learning:

The postman also delivered some books I had bought for the younger girls for their quiet time:

I was so impressed by them, and they are at just the right level to push Becca a bit in her reading – she tends to read books which are easy for her. One of the books is ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ which fits in perfectly with our Minoan lesson last week 🙂

I made some cauliflower cheese for lunch. I had to make Charlotte’s separately because cow’s milk products make her pain much worse. We are trying out goat’s cheese at the moment, so I made her a small one made with goat’s milk and goat’s cheese:

I was quite happy with it, given I’d never cooked with goat products before. Charlotte loved it, and said it was better than the normal one made with cheddar!

After lunch, Lil had her quiet time in the bath, the littles went upstairs to read about Theseus and the Minotaur and Charlotte decided to go to bed and try to sleep. Which she did. For two hours.

After quiet time, Lil did some changes that her art teacher asked her to do to her scarf. She was not happy! She thought she’d finished with all of this, but alas no. When Charlotte arose, feeling a little better, she tackled her Latin, then both girls did a quick tidy up before following their own pursuits: Lillie went over to her Granny’s next door for a chat, and Charlotte spent some time on her computer relaxing.

Meanwhile, the little ones and I spent an afternoon doing fun school and catching up on everything we should have done last Friday. Like creating note pages about Egyptian fashion, Egyptian mummies and doing some map work:

The girls then made some mummies from foil, masking tape and strips of cotton soaked in plaster:

It was a very, very, very messy thing to do. It’s a good job I have a strong constitution for mess because that plaster got everywhere! It was worth it though. The mummies looked great:

They then coloured in the mask, jewellery and cartouche to place with the body:

We could have made the canopic jars and the sarcophagus, but honestly, I needed to move on. I know we are going through the Mystery of History slowly but any slower and we’ll be going backwards!

Whilst the girls were making their mummies, I had been plaster casting a couple of models for them to paint, as a fun thing to end the day with:

And that’s it! We are all currently winding down from the day, Thomas is home from work and giggling at some video he’s watching, Lil’s still over with her granny, Charlotte is reading (surprise surprise), the littles are playing with their Thomas the Tank Engine toys, Gary is on his way home and I am about to start dinner – a nutritious soup with some fresh bread and butter…yummy!