Precious Moments

Another excellent week! I am loving being back to my normal homeschool! I’d forgotten how freeing it was to simply follow interests. Not once in the past five weeks have I needed to persuade the girls to do homeschool. They are loving it as much as I am, and are so thankful that workbooks form only a tiny part of their days now ❤

I felt like super woman on speed Monday! I’d written a list of things I wanted to achieve, and by 3pm I’d managed every single one…yay me!

The first thing I wanted to get done was a letter documenting a day in the life of an Edwardian woman. The girls have been watching Edwardian Farm with great interest over the past few weeks. One episode happened to be of Ruth Goodman, the female historian taking part, writing a letter as an Edwardian woman may have done. She describes her day in some detail. I had Abigail watch that episode again and write her own letter to her best friend Evie-Mae. I helped her to pad it out with extra information and opinions about various jobs. We then formatted it in Word as columns and printed it out with a handwriting font. I chose various Edwardian photos online which could have been her and ‘Frank’, her husband. The girls arranged it in their newspaper and stuck it down:

We have been learning about the suffragettes and the girls learnt the difference between the suffragists (democratic, peaceful, law-abiding suffrage protesters) and the suffragettes (autocratic, law breaking activists). They then compared the logos and advertisements of both, analysing them and their effectiveness at portraying what each stood for:

Winsor McCay was the first ever man to have strips of his comics placed in the newspaper in 1903, with Little Sammy Sneeze. The girls are studying comics and animation during the first decade of the twentieth century. On Monday they learnt about how to create characters who look like they are moving or doing an activity, finishing some work on them:

Abigail did a hedgehog character doing karate whilst Becca drew a tiger who was painting:

The girls also did their normal maths, word-building and botany studies, and Abigail began Zoo-ology 3 from Apologia. She is doing this completely on her own as an extra science subject, whilst Becca does some extra arts and crafts. Today, she began a project drawing all the well-known suffragists for an article in our newspaper.

Monday night Gary came home from work, had a bath and then enjoyed an hour or so with his littler girls building a radio:

They’ve not got it working yet. Rather him than me! The girls had great fun though with their change in teacher, and Gary had great fun talking to them with a strong Northern Irish accent which sent them giggling constantly…it’s no wonder nothing worked! They were having far too much fun 🤣

Tuesday rolled around after a restless night for all of us, as Charlotte experienced pain on breathing and severe back pain. With her illness, it is all about getting the pain under control but sometimes that takes a few days. We still did a stellar job at homeschool though with the girls adding some alliteration, onomatopoeia and rule of three to their Literary Devices notebooks. These were all from last week’s read The Wind in the Willows. Yesterday I began Mary Poppins. I am beginning to realise that authors tend to favour particular literary devices over others. Kenneth Graham, for example, seems to litter his writing with alliteration and rule of three, where as PL Travers (author of Mary Poppins) uses personification at least once each chapter. So I did an impromptu lesson on personification and later on photocopied a self designed sheet to stick in their literary devices note books.

We spent a little time after lunch learning about Mr Lipton, of the famous Lipton Teas. I also did a lesson on character traits in preparation for a couple of character studies I wanted to do to link in with our Beatrix Potter author study.

The girls did their normal maths, word-building and Botany. Abigail finished off reading her Zoo-ology 3 textbook for chapter 1 and did an experiment about camouflage with Becca:

Lastly, we read about how sound effects are represented in comic strips and the girls excitedly linked them to their work on onomatopoeia:

Gary, bless his heart, came back home from work, had a quick shower and then returned to building the radio with the girls. You should have heard the squeals of delight when they actually got it to work! I was so proud of him 😁

And the radio with its aerial:

Wednesday came about super quickly. I had spent the night before with Lillie constructing maquettes (preparatory models) and watching Bridget Jones’ Diary together. She had seemed a little quiet all day, so I decided some mum and daughter time was in order. By the end of the night, Thomas and Charlotte had joined us. It was a lovely end to the day.

School began with me reading the next chapter of Mary Poppins. Wowser! I have never read the book before, and it is so different from the film as to be almost unrecognisable as the same story. No matter, the girls still seem to be enjoying it, and after Wind in the Willows, it is an easy book to read and understand.

Yesterday, the girls had learnt about the Mud March protest by the suffragists (with a few suffragettes thrown in). Today I taught them about primary evidence and read them a newspaper report on the protest by the Daily Mail (very supportive of their plight) and a diary entry by one of the women who took part in the rally. We spent a long time chatting about them both, after which the girls created a newspaper spread using the actual diary entrance:

Everyday I ask the girls to write a few sentences in their journals. Today they wrote about what made a suffragette a suffragette rather than a suffragist:

I read to the girls from their botany book and they filled out their notebooks on geotropism, tap roots and fibrous roots, drawing pictures as needed.

Before lunch, they finished their maths and word building work for the day.

The afternoon was a fun one. Firstly, we took our first proper photo with the Brownie camera, of a jug of Lipton Iced Tea:

I still think this is the coolest thing we have ever done during our homeschool!

In Mary Poppins raspberry cakes are mentioned, so we thought we would try our hand at them:

Not too shabby, eh? They have raspberry jam inside them as well as raspberry flavoured icing:

Thursday is a bit of a funny day for me as I need to fit in giving Lillie a lift to uni and taking Charlotte shopping, as well as putting away our Able and Cole boxes (fruit and veg box scheme which is delivered on a Thursday). Also the little one’s friend comes round and they go to drama. Homeschool happens kind of in between everything else. Needless to say, we don’t get as much done as I would perhaps want.

The girls managed to get their maths, Zoo-ology 3 (Abigail) and pictures of suffragists (Becca) done whilst I was giving Lil a lift and shopping:

These will go into our Edwardian newspaper alongside some similarly drawn suffragettes.

Once home, I read a chapter of Mary Poppins, which, incidentally, I am not enjoying at all! Mary Poppins is a stuck up know-it-all! I’m not sure how Julie Andrews made her so likable in the film, but I really don’t like her character in the book. I also read the rest of our Botany chapter on roots and the girls did their copy-work and the crossword in their Botany notebooks.

Over lunch, I wrote the post I had hoped to write yesterday but couldn’t on account of all the blackouts we had (three in one day!) whilst the children watched the Nativity snuggled up with Charlotte:

During the afternoon I taught the girls to make a spaghetti bolognaise from scratch, for dinner:

After which they completed their Benjamin Bunny and Peter Rabbit character study and learnt about how to plan a comic strip, briefly planning a short script for their very own comic.

All in all a great homeschool week. Have a great weekend everyone!