The 8th of March brought with it some small form of normality, in that we’re no longer legally obligated to remain shut up in our houses for the rest of our lives. On Monday this week I promptly asked a couple of my friends if they’d like to meet up for a walk, so hopefully that will happen one day soon!
That morning, having completed the GCSE Astrophysics topic last week, I did all the questions in the textbooks I have. I also had my first violin lesson in forever! Tilly and I did Latin all afternoon. Having got our exam results on the 4th, we’re both starting from the beginning of the textbook to recap everything we know before moving on to the harder parts. This time around, we’re using the OCR textbooks as opposed to the Cambridge ones as they’re harder. It’s really fun working through the books with my mum and Matilda 🙂 In the evening, we started watching a new WW2 documentary called Hitler’s Circle of Evil, and I watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries featuring a Kansas hate crime (my new favourite TV genre is true crime!).
On Tuesday, Tilly went back to college and my mum and I worked on some more Latin. We learnt the first four declensions of nouns and how to conjugate all the verbs in them, a gazillion more words to add to my Latin vocab and the different declensions for female, male and neuter nouns! In the afternoon, I read some more of The Count of Monte Cristo (it’s impossibly long!) and did some piano music theory. In the evening I had my Physics session with Dave, in which we talked about Energy. It’s a topic I haven’t covered yet, but I just managed to pick up on what they were talking about! The courses are aimed at GCSE students and discuss GCSE subjects at a higher level─usually Further Maths level or A-Level level─so we were covering some pretty tricky questions that evening!
After dinner, I watched an X-Files episode with Andy, and a new episode of Unsolved Mysteries which was about one of the many unexplained UFO-related phenomena that have occurred in Berkshire, USA.
On Wednesday, I did Latin for most of the morning and then moved onto my Odyssey analysis, working through Tilly’s A-Level book to add anything missed in my Massolit courses. Then I read through a few chapters of Susan Wise Bauer’s book History of the Ancient World and took notes on them for both History and English. In the evening, we started watching a documentary called Hitler’s Circle of Evil, I watched the next episode of Unsolved Mysteries and some of The X-Files with Andy 🙂
The next day, I did more Latin in the morning and then finally finished my Odyssey analysis! Tomorrow I hope to move onto the Oresteia, the next book on my Great Books reading list. After lunch, I read some more of The Count of Monte Cristo and took notes on another chapter of History of the Ancient World. I also resumed working through an English textbook for Year 9 students, answering questions about a passage from Charles Dickens’ American Notes.
Up until Friday this week, I didn’t actually do any maths. I think that’s one of the best things about home-educating─when you’re busy with other important things, you can drop whatever you like and pick it up again later when it’s more convenient! Having spent so much time on Latin this week, I hadn’t had time to do a lot of maths (besides from my online courses). Anyway, I did some work on ratios on Friday morning, followed by more Latin!
Over the weekend, I did some violin and piano practice and lots of yoga with Tilly! I’m nearly at Grade 5 on piano now (I should have taken the Grade 4 exam last November but that didn’t happen because of coronavirus!), and though I’m still working on pre-Grade 1 techniques and other basics with my violin teacher, I’ve also been learning some songs from a Grade 1 songbook in between lessons.