a week in the life, day 4

Thursday, January 27- Classical Conversations

Thursdays are full days for us, although this week is a bit different since we switched bible study from Thursday to Tuesday. Anyway, the day starts early, no hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off at 6am because it takes some serious work to get the six of us fed, dressed, lunch made and ready to walk out the door by 8:15am. It is all worth it, though, because, like most kids, they would tell you they don't like school but they LOVE CC.

So, here is our CC day (warning, there are LOTS of pictures in this post!)

6am get up and get showered
By 7am, lunch is packed...
and I am working on a brain-boosting breakfast

During our 25 minute drive to CC we review our memory work from the past 5 or 6 weeks and listen to the new history song once or twice. Once at the church we drop off Addie at the nursery and head to the sanctuary to meet with the whole Foundations group. (there are actually close to 35 families in our group, we were just a few minutes early this morning).
We have devotions (some of the kids are acting out part of The Dangerous Journey).
Say the pledge and have announcements before heading off to the different classes.
My kids are in 4 different classes, so I take turns each week rotating between the classes (except Regan's because she is too cool for me and does not want me to go to her class. :( I did get to sit in once because there were two other parents out that day). Anyway, today I was in Tallulah's class.

The board if full of all our new grammar when we get to the classroom.
They memorize a history sentence, math facts, Latin conjugations, English grammar, science facts, geography and 8 timeline cards. The memory work is new every week and there are a total of 24 weeks.
Here they are singing a song about the area of a square, rectangle, triangle and the radius and circumference of a circle, jumping to the next definition as they sing.
Time to pull out the maps!
It is amazing how much a 4 year old can understand and learn!
Today we learned about the Balkan countries (in case you are looking that closely and wondering about some of the names of the countries, we are studying the medieval period, so some of these are their former names).
Next we have snack and presentations. Here is Tallulah giving her presentation on Build-A-Bearville. The topic was geography and they were aloud to do it on a place, real or fantasy.
At this age it is really just getting them used to standing up in from of people and not so much what they say. The bigger kids spend more time planning for there presentations, but even with them it is only 3 minutes so it does not take up too much of our time during the week.

Then we had science, which I was too busy playing to take any pictures. We learned about Newtons 1st law of motion.

After Science it was on to art where we learned about Monet and did our own impressionist paintings.

The last 30 minutes is spent reviewing the material from the last 6 weeks and then we head over to the lunch room to eat, visit and play games. I was trying to capture this moment here of a group of kids age 4 to probably 14 playing boggle together, but I just couldn't get the right angle.
I love how the big kids watch out for the younger ones, one of the many blessing of homeschooling :)

At one point I was doing a headcount of my kids and couldn't find Max, then I turned around and found him playing Polly Pockets with this group of girls, lol!

We load up and head home at 1pm. Next year we will be staying until 3pm because Regan will be in the Essentials program. When we got home we spent 15 minutes cleaning out the van. It still needs the shop vac and probably a whole container of Clorox wipes, but at least there is no more dirty laundry (why was that in the car anyway?) bags and wrappers from our last drive threw meal, weeks worth of Sunday School and Preschool papers, coats, gloves, hats, colored pencils... I think you get the point).

Since we did not have to worry about cleaning up for bible study I finally let the kids decorate the gingerbread house we got on clearance post Christmas while I checked email.

I think they might have had a little too much fun :)

Don't worry, I did not let him eat that whole thing.

Things were getting a bit elevated at this point, we are talking a MAJOR sugar rush, so I kicked them all out of the house to burn off some sugar energy while I cleaned up the mess (and threw the rest of the gingerbread house away).
After I cleaned up I called my sister and chatted for awhile, then researched all in one printer/copiers online.

Addie decided that just unloading the cabinet is not enough anymore, now she's started climbing into the cabinet :)
Isn't she the cutest?
Did I mention that Addie has gotten 4 teeth in the past week?!?

Well, the kids are (almost) all in bed and I am going to watch the office and fold some laundry before hitting the sack myself!