Home Educating With Four: Update!

I think it's fair to say that I haven't updated for a while! Here's a brief glimpse into a few things we've been doing in the past 5 months.

First of all, L has finished her exams for this year! Or, should I say, exams were cancelled... officially... which in fact actually equated to her having to do exams anyway (just shorter, and taken at home, and two months earlier than she would have taken them if it had been a normal year), as well as submit zillions of past papers and pieces of work, in order to obtain a tutor marked grade.

It was long, and complicated, and involved weeks and weeks of stress. I'd rather just forget about the whole thing!

She dropped Astronomy; turns out there was still too much physics for her liking. So she's taken IGCSEs in Biology, Maths, and History, and GCSE Classical Civilisation. Results on 12th August - fingers crossed she did okay.

We celebrated the end of the exams with a delicious meal, and a hair dye session at L's request:

Next year's subjects have had a slight shake up for L. She's going to be doing IGCSEs in Psychology, Computer Science, English Literature, English Language, and GCSE Ancient History. I really like the flexibility of home educating, because if you realise something isn't quite right for you, you can always change your mind.

A will be continuing at InterHigh next year. Their GCSE / IGCSE course runs for 2 years, and exams are at the end of Year 11. He's chosen his subjects:
IGCSEs in Maths, English Language, English Literature, Biology, History, and Computer Science, plus GCSE Film Studies.

I've just been planning out what J will be doing from September. I'm going to spread out his IGCSE GCSE subjects over the next 5 years, but I'll write more about that in another post.

So what have we been up to since December? Obviously lots of work on paper and from textbooks and worksheets and so on, but otherwise:

We did Christmas stuff, including taking the kids to a drive through grotto, and having a Christmas party (plus other stuff like decorating Christmas tree shaped biscuits):

We did general wintery stuff:

We did baking and cooking:

We did games and jigsaws:

We saw animals:

There has been music, and arts & crafts (including Viking longships, and Stonehenge!):

When the weather was fine a couple of weeks ago, we did a lot of studying in the garden. We also went out on bikes quite often. J and N like riding up and down the street on a daily basis, whereas A and L like going out for evening rides with me. We also took a family ride on the Trans Penine Trail: