FINA'S FIRST DAY OF HOMESCHOOLING

Oh my! Here we are.
Fina's friends started school yesterday, so she decided she would like to start school as well. Our family is homeschooling in the Charlotte Mason method, using the free Amblesideonline.org curriculum. Fina turned 6 in April and we have done some MUS (Math-U-See, our math curriculum) already and regular-life learning and lots of outdoor nature play. She is a precocious child, loved by all (with a bit of an independent streak in her)!

I'm her mom. I ran around all last evening pulling together the things I've been gathering, collecting, linking, downloading over the last year. I am still reading CM's 6th and final volume on her method of education (I meant to have them all finished before we started), but I will continue reading it as we begin. All 6 volumes are available for free from here, in the original and in a modern English version. I'm reading the modern one, here.


8:24am. She finally woke up! The joys of homeschooling. Her friends are already on the bus! Here is dad and Fina's first day of school pic (dad is a professor at Providence University College and today was his first teaching day of his 8th year). She was still asleep when he left.  In our bed. She woke up at 3:30 (I suspect she was excited about school, and possibly cold, as the temps in southern MB Canada were about 5 celsius overnight).

After some fussing because I had erased her whiteboard drawings to put this on it

We finally got down to breakfast at 9am, while listening to morning prayer on divineoffice (my new fave. We can respond but I don't have to read it all aloud myself).

Next, our first cursive lesson, the letter a. One the white board, and with my homemade glitterglue tactile letters.

So, that was a bit tricky for a few minutes, but then she got the hang of it, on the white board. She was very proud of herself and we drew a box around it and she added "a little green S" so we would know it was hers, and not mine!

Now, on lined paper with her Lamy ABC fountain pen on our home made slant board (a 3 inch binder with our clipboard resting right on it. Right now we have no need to glue or velcro it on). She did a great job with the letter a!!!

For those of you who know her, this is her typical "I made a mistake" face! We covered it with a sticker and moved on.

I almost forgot to try multiple connected As. And, who didn't see this happening, her fountain pen ran out of ink. So, it took me 5 minutes to refill it (it has a bladder, and I've never filled one like that. I meant to have dad do it last night, just in case!) She made a lovely line of connected 'a's.

Yikes, 9:47.

Our Island Story
Ch 1 - 1.5 pages, she narrated very nicely about Neptune, Albion, the mermaid and her island.

Now, she wants to write a book, and for me to type it. So we will try that for a few minutes.

Oh my, this is quite something today. First she wants to eat a carrot, because she is a baby bunny named "Lily" who is hungry and whose feet are cold, (go get slippers), then she gets the Beatrix Potter book to look at what her character could look like, etc etc. Oh, the creative process!

In the mean time, I put on Brahm's "Variations on a Theme by Haydn. op 56a" so we can do our composer study as she writes.

Here is what she wrote:
******

Once upon a time, there was a little squirrel and his name was Squirrel Nutkin. And he was supposed to meet with Jeremy Fisher and Tom Kitten for lunch.  And they met Jemima Puddleduck on the way, and they asked her to come along with them.  But Jeremy Fisher said “where are we going for lunch?” Tom Kitten said “We’re going to the Mushroom Stool Cafe.”  But Jemima Puddleduck got lost on the way and Tom Kitten noticed and said “where is Jemima Puddleduck?” Jeremy Fisher thought they should look behind the tree. And, sure enough, there was Jemima Puddleduck, right behind the log. Then, Jeremy Fisher said “wait a second, where is Tom Kitten?” and Jemima Puddleduck said “how about you look in that broken down log?” And, sure enough, there was Tom Kitten, in the log, stuck. So they had to pull him and pull him and pull him and pull him, until he went “pop” like a cork bottle. And then, they walked to the Mushroom Stool Cafe.

The Mushroom Stool Cafe had booths to sit in, and the tables were made out of mushrooms and the benches were made out of broken down logs. 

******

Now she wanted to illustrate a picture to go along with this part of the story. Now I've lost her to drawing for a bit, I think.

Here is her drawing.

We sang through CBWIII 13E "Blessed be the God of Israel" which is the Canticle of Zachariah. We are using it as our hymn study as it is part of morning prayer. I sang it through twice while Fina had a snack.

MUS Primer, section 5C through 6F on her own. I'm setting the timer for 10 minutes. She says she will want to do more than that. (She ended up doing 20 minutes)

I'd still like her to do her yoga, we have to do a bible reading and a poem.  Also, I think I'll try facetiming my mom to do our foreign language study for the day. We are going to read a story in Italian that she loved when she was little.

And maybe the first artist study. We are looking at 6 works of art by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot this term, as per the AO schedule for 2015-2016.

Our first painting is The Bridge at Nantes. 

We'll see if we get to that today. The idea is to look at it for a few minutes, then look away and describe what we remember seeing in it. We repeat the same piece of art a few times per week for two weeks, covering 6 different pieces by the artist in our 12 week term.

I'm going to try posting this blog for now. I may have part 2 later on in the day.