I’m documenting my life every day this week (Monday to Friday) as part of Melissa’s fun Week in My Life series. I’ve often wanted to be a fly on the wall in other homeschoolers’ homes. I hope this series gives a glimpse into everyday life here at Navigating By Joy. Here are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.
Thursday mornings, unusually, we’re at home until 11:30 AM, so I try to organise an activity we couldn’t easily fit into a shorter time slot.
Today I set up acrylic paints for us to play with. We used the Art Together:E-Zine, which I at Raising Cajuns, as our guide.
We each started with blue, red and yellow acrylics on our palates. First we mixed the secondary colours.
Then we chose a paint chip colour each and tried to mix a colour to match, using only the three primary colours plus white. This, we discovered, was harder than we’d thought!
J(8) was delighted with his blue within a few tries, but C(9) and I were convinced we must both have chosen particularly unusual hues of green!


As well as learning about colour mixing, we all came away from this activity with much greater appreciation for the work artists do!
We used up our leftover paints – and enjoyed making free with colours after the restrictions of the colour-matching exercise – by painting on black line drawings.


After the paints were cleared away, C(9) cooked us a stack of pancakes. I read aloud Understood Betsy (still loving this story!) as we tucked in.

At 11:40 AM we left for French class. I walked the dogs while C(9) and J(8) made French Halloween cakes.

I made turkey and cheese croissants for lunch – another fab MOMables recipe (who knew you could get croissant dough in a can?).

Inspired by yesterday’s game of History Heroes: How Well Do You Know Your Monarchs?, as we ate we listened to the story of King William II in the Our Island Story audiobook.
Instead of copywork today, we enjoyed a few rounds of Telephone Pictionary and Consequences.

Then someone suggested searching YouTube for a Horrible Histories video about William II. We’ll definitely remember the details of William’s lonely death in the New Forest now!
And then there was just time for twenty minutes’ room time (meditation for me, Minecraft for the kids), before we left for C(9)’s gymnastics class.
I hope you’ll join me again tomorrow for my last day of Week in My Life.

This fly-on-the-wall peek into your homeschool days is very interesting. I sure look forward to reading each day’s post. The colour mixing exercise is a very difficult one. Definitely a good practice (if not a frustrating one) to appreciate the different hues!
Thank you so much, Hwee 🙂 I have been wondering if I’ve been inundating people, rather! Only one more day to go though 😉
Looking back at the colour mixing, I think C(9) and I got closer to our greens than we realised. It was certainly an excellent introduction to colour. I am intrigued to try it again. I wonder also if J(8) found his colour relatively quickly because blue is a primary colour whereas C(9) and I chose a secondary? I know so little about art! (Hurray, lots to learn :-))
I love it when I revisit and there’s more than 1 post to enjoy!
Thanks for all you share…
Claire x
Thank you, lovely! I wonder if six posts in a week is a bit much! But it’ll be back to my usual one or two next week 🙂
I hope you guys have had a great week too! x
No!! Not ever… Love them all!
Cx
🙂 🙂
PS being called lovely is so nice 😉 That’s exactly how I want comments to be ‘heard’ but with no tone sometimes hard to know…
Loved following your link to Sue Elvis site… Am feeling more and more drawn to natural learning ways – tho am yet to totally let go!! Just a page of Maths a day and write SOMETHING!! Please. Pretty please 😉
Oh I’m still there with the maths and English, believe me! Sue says she barely even mentions the word “maths” but I can’t seem to help myself. I figure Sue has a few years of experience on me … and it seems to be going reasonably ok for the moment with my “guinea pig” children (the only ones I’ll have!) so I guess I’ll just keep reading Sue’s lovely blog for inspiration and carry on doing the best I can.
I know what you mean about comments and tone. I think that’s why I use so many emoticons. 😉
I have really enjoyed these posts this week. Makes me tempted to do the same thing, but I am afraid that our days are less productive than yours. 🙂
Thank you, Phyllis. I think we must all imagine each other to be much more productive than we are, LOL! I certainly am in awe of all you do when I read your blog!
I’m really enjoying your week in a life posts. It makes me seriously want to do my own just to peek into the daily routine 🙂 As it happens, we did a pumpkin color mixing exercise. My 6 year old ended up crying though, so we had to stop! Maybe another day on that one 🙂
Thank you Rebecca – I really appreciate you saying that because I did wonder if anyone would actually find it interesting! But I thought I’d give it a go anyway. It was rather more work but much more rewarding than I’d anticipated! I’d love to read about your week if you do decide to do it.
Lots of our projects have to be abandoned due to tears, too – I empathise! 😀
Oooh what are French Halloween cakes??? Looks like a fabulous day!
I suspect French Halloween cakes are cupcakes decorated with “les araignees” and “les citrouilles”, Heather! They disappeared into my children’s tummies too quickly for me to make a more detailed examination!