A Day in the Life ... August Edition

Welcome to my monthly A Day in the Life post.  If you are a regular follower, you can skip this paragraph.  If you are here from The Not Back to School Hop, here is a little review.  We homeschool three of our four children.  Our oldest has already graduated from our homeschool and still lives at home.  He has many special needs but is busy growing, learning and testing his wings.  The rest of our children have special challenges that include vision, occupational therapy, speech and developmental issues.  One of our children also has severe food allergies, which has proven to be a difficult learning curve for us.  We love Charlotte Mason concepts.  We are also trying to do our history, science, music, and art as one week unit studies this year.  So far, the kids are loving it, and it seems like more concrete learning is going on.

This week the theme of our learning is art and we are studying Mary Cassatt.  Also, just to keep it real, I did have to adapt the day a bit for our son who was having a weepy, argumentative day (he had chicken stock with rice and soy in it which caused an allergic reaction the night before).  We ended up watching more TV than normal, and there were several struggles with obedience throughout the day.

6:30 to 8:15 am ~  Everyone woke up and had breakfast.  The kids did their morning hygiene chores, played with Lincoln Logs and watched Curious George.  Timothy trained his dog, Boomer, and took him on a long walk.

Grain-free applesauce muffins with applesauce

8:15 to 10:15 am ~ This was the core of our seat work.  We started off with an intro to the Impressionist Movement (my favorite period in art :) ).  We then played Go Fish with our Impressionist Art Cards (Art).

 

After that, we did Draw to Learn the Life of Jesus while listening to Luke 1:26-38 from our audio Bible (Bible and Art).

Check out my new Lazy Susan for our pens and pencils.

The kids did Math ~ addition for Little Red Ridinghood, place value for Goldilocks, and the 9's times table for Tom Sawyer.  Then they each did three pages in the Language Arts book of their choice.

I read them two chapters in our Literature book, The Mystery of the Alamo Ghost.  This is a light read that is more like brain candy than literature.  However, I found last year that practicing narration with some light chapter books every now and then helped the kids narrate better with the deeper books.  Also, this book touches on a period of history I decided not to spend a whole week on.  Lastly, I introduced Mary Cassatt, and we did a coloring page of her art work (Art).  This was when things fell apart.  Tom Sawyer, who doesn't like to color anyway, became very stressed by the choices in coloring sheets.  He wanted a coloring sheet with boys in it and there were none.  He said she discriminated against boys and generally fell apart.  Since we were going to have to leave for speech soon, I closed lessons for now.

10:30 am to 12:15 pm ~ We traveled to Speech therapy for Goldilocks.  We try to get there early so that everyone can do the craft at the Arts for Life table.  Today the kids made butterflies and flowers with paper and pipe cleaners (Art).  While Goldilocks was in Speech, the remaining two did reading lessons with me or silent reading on their own (Language Arts).  We then bought bananas from the hospital cafe, and they watched part of a Scooby Doo video on the laptop.

12:15 to 2:00 pm ~  We returned home and had free time.  I made and ate lunch, went through email, cleaned a bathroom, talked with the oldest for a while, and blogged a bit.  The kids ate lunch and watched Scooby Doo for a long time.

Organic Polish sausage with potato chips and blueberries

2:00 to 2:30 pm ~ I forced the kids outside on this lovely day.  Usually they are happy to go outside.  However, today they all seemed to be struggling with the temperature change (it's now in the 80s rather than the month we had of weather in the 90s every day) and did not want to be outside.

2:30 to 3:15 pm ~ We finished school by reading Suzzette and the Little Puppy.  This is a lovely story about Mary Cassatt, and we talked more about why she did not marry and her innocent yet intimate relationship with Edgar Degas.  We did a picture study of The Girl in The Blue Armchair (Art).

3:15 to 3:45 pm ~ Chore time ~ We changed all the pet cages, swept several rooms and cleaned up the front yard.

3:45 to 5:00 pm ~  The kids took turns on the Wii.  They played a horse show and Lego Indiana Jones.  I cleaned all of the windows inside and out while they played.  It feels great to get one more thing off my summer wish list.  Even though we have started school, the real busyness does not start until dance classes in the fall.

5:00 to 6:00 pm ~ Dad is home!  I made dinner while kids jumped on Daddy.  We ate dinner and made plans for an evening walk and play at the park.

100% buckwheat noodles with meat sauce and peas.

6:00 to 7:45 pm ~ We played at the park and took a walk.  This park has an amazing slide that works really well if you sit on wax paper.  You fly down the slide.

Little Red Ridinghood stuck the landing every time!

The end to another good and busy day.  The day was not without complications and interruptions!  Our resident toddler, aka the puppy Boomer, got into plenty of trouble.  He destroyed a child's pillow, ate another blue crayon (why only the blue ones?), plus stole a pan off the counter and finished off the potato soup.

Do you see the snout of our older dog looking on?  She did bark a warning bark at him.

Look at that face.  If he could talk he would say,
"I was framed, ignore the potato all over my face
and the pan at my feet."

Blessings,

Dawn