SEPTEMBER 14 2015, AO yr 1, week 1, sort of day 3

Over the weekend, Fina continued her story. We went back and called the first part Chapter 1. This new part starts Chapter 2

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But Squirrel Nutkin said “where is our baseball bat and our baseball ball?”  And Jeremy Fisher said “you’re right.” And they looked together. And there was no sign of the baseball bat and the baseball ball. So they said “why don’t we just go inside?”  On the way inside, they saw a snail and they said “ hi, little snail, do you want to come live with us?” The snail nodded and said “yes, please, I’ve been looking for a home, but you better put me in a cage because maybe I’ll make slimy marks.”

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No idea why she had baseball on the brain, but still!

We've had a bit of a slower start this morning, lingering over breakfast and our morning prayer.

We are doing a slightly tweaked AO year, by replacing Trial and Triumph (a little too brutal, a little too anti-Catholic for our likings) with two books by Amy Steedman. On the advice of some wise CM moms, namely Celeste at joyouslessons.blogspot.ca, I'm replacing the first 24 weeks with Our Island Saints, one chapter every two weeks. And the last term will by In God's Garden, by Steedman as well.

Today, we did Chapter 1 of Our Island Saints, the story of St Alban. It follows our history as it is a Roman living in early Britain. Fina narrated it. We did the whole chapter (though it was intended to be spread over two weeks). She did ok with it. I'm still trying to figure out what works best. I did large chunks and I think she got it, just not with much detail. More of a basic overview. I'm satisfied with that for now.

Part of the fun of homeschooling, is that we get to read our books like this:

And this was what she made with her thinking putty while I was reading:

Then we did some foreign language study, with our Richard Scarry book again. I read "La gallinella rossa" in Italian, then translated the whole thing into English, then I reread it in Italian. Fina chose the story because she knows it and thinks it is funny that no one wants to help the hen until it is time to eat.

We continued to read from our poetry book. We read a new poem, "Rain" and Fina is trying to memorize it. She almost has it down. There are four lines. She starts by stating the title "Rain."

Here is the poem:

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The rain is raining all around,

It falls on field and tree,

It rains on the umbrellas here,

And on the ships at sea.

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She enjoyed trying to learn it. We will try it again. She ALMOST has it!

Being 11:00 already, I decided she should do an episode of her yoga. The newest episode, which is new to us as well, is Alan the Camel from cosmickids.com. I love this yoga for kids, and Fina does too. Here she is in a pose:

(And I got to work on this blog and did some meal prep while she did her yoga).

Catechism - we got our catechism book from church on the weekend. Finding God grade 1 by Loyola Press. It looks good. We'll try to do a bit every day. There are 25 lessons plus items specific to the liturgical year, so we will basically do one a week. They even have a homeschool section, the At-Home Edition, so I can do it without the teacher's guide. We just bought the student book.  

We did up to page 5 of the first lesson.

Cursive: "am"- She learned how to write mamma. That works for me!

For those of you who are interested in how I'm doing cursive, I'm using this from Don Potter. One lesson a day so far.  He got his ideas from Samuel L Blumenfeld. We are just using paper with a dotted middle line (I got it from ablesideonline.org, it is the large line) and it is working well so far, without other workbooks or anything.

MUS to 9B page 1. Learning place values isn't easy, but she is trying.

Then she wanted to build with the blocks a bit, so she is doing that now.

Time for lunch. 12:45.  A lot of hard work today. We are still trying to get into the routine of maximum attention instead of dilly-dallying. Things are a bit slow just because we stop for this and that question. We will keep working on that for sure.

She did well today, all in all.