A Year in the Life of a Homeschooling Family: Day 40

I walked out of my bedroom this morning at 715 to three girls hard at their school work. My bedroom opens out to the dining area and there they were: Charlotte translating Latin, Abigail sitting a maths test and Becca finishing off her spelling workbook. I glanced up at the clock thinking I may have read it wrong and that I had massively overslept. No, it was 715. I enquired eagerly as to whether anyone had eaten. I mean, perhaps one of these super children had cooked the oats as well, thus saving me a job. I could maybe make a coffee and hole myself up for another ten minutes. But no. No-one had eaten, so I got on with the job of making banana, nuts, seeds and blueberry oat meal. Scrummy yummy, and so very healthy.

I knew why Charlotte was up early working. She was still buoyed up on her success at the school interview yesterday. She was so excited, she now just wants to get the exams under her belt and move on to the next phase in her life. But the littles, I wasn’t entirely sure what the reason was for their sudden enthusiasm. It was only when Abigail chimed up telling me she’d finished school for the day and could she please pack to go to Evie-Mai’s house. Now I hadn’t had a coffee yet and I wasn’t even dressed, and they had completed their school work and wanted to pack to go to a friends house where they were not expected for another six hours?! I informed them that once dressed, I had some school for them which would keep them busy until lunch. They groaned. Did I not know they were expected (in six hours time)?

If I could just digress for a moment back to my twins. Yesterday, Charlotte was so nervous, and Lillie, who obviously knows her sister better than anyone, dragged her into the living room for her to dance out her nerves. I took a couple of pictures, but as I only wrote a quick post yesterday, I didn’t include them. I’d like them here for posterity:

Lol! Love my girlies!

Okay, back to today’s homeschool.

Charlotte went over to mum’s to be tested on chapter 2 Latin vocab and grammar:

Thomas doesn’t have to go in until 1pm on a Friday, so he spent the morning doing some work:

Interspersing it with some crunches and planks:

And drinking coffee:

Somebody needs to tell him that he should be drinking water when he exercises. Not me. But someone. Chip off the ol’ block…coffee-wise not exercise-wise 😉

Lillie was hard at work, catching up on her biology, before heading off on a training course with her work:

You may ask why she has calligraphy writing up on her computer. You may ask what does that have to do with biology. I did. Lil just grinned and said her work had to ‘look booooootiful!’ Okay then.

Charlotte popped to the shops with the little ones to give her a break and to pick up some potatoes for dinner:

They arrived home just in time to say goodbye to their other sister who was walking to work for the training course:

Lil is a favourite with her little sisters, especially the littlest:

I had lots of itty bitty stuff I wanted to get done with regards to their astronomy. So, after reading some information to them, and showing them some ‘Bill Nye Asks Why? videos about man’s exploration of Jupiter, the girls created a newspaper page, using actual news articles online:

We then did the final activity related to Jupiter, making a hurricane in a bottle. My goodness! I do not remember it being that hard when I did it with my older three. In the end I had to enlist the help of Charlotte to get it to even vaguely work!

We did eventually get it to work, but honestly, I’m not sure the end product was worth the effort it took to get there!

Finally, around came the afternoon, and the little ones could finally leave to go and see their friend. She lives just up the road from us, so I walked them up there, snapping some pictures as we passed by the pond:

The lighting was just fabulous!

Once dropped off, I came home to go through Charlotte’s Latin. Now Charlotte is trying to complete a Latin GCSE in three months instead of two years. It is very hard, and requires hours upon hours of study each day. The night before last, I had been marking her work (at midnight!) and she had got almost all of it wrong. I was so upset for her, as she is putting in so many hours. Yesterday, we painfully went through every single exercise together trying to figure out exactly what she had missed. I have to be honest, I was not looking forward to marking her work today. I was in for a wonderful surprise though. Almost all of the Latin to English sentences were translated perfectly. She’s still struggling a bit with English to Latin, but she is moving in the right direction! Yay Charlotte!

Next week is half term, so we will be relaxing a little bit. Charlotte will still have to do some Latin because we simply can’t afford a whole week off, but I shall be making sure she relaxes some too.

It’s Rebecca’s birthday at the weekend, so this will be a wonderful start to a relaxing week ahead!