September 30, AO yr 1, week 3

We had a great day outside yesterday. We had a birthday party in the park for our friend M who turned 5, and all the kids (9 of them, 8 of them aged 6 and under, one who is 8) had so much fun, running around and playing together. All kinds of unstructured, imaginative play.  The afternoon warmed up more and more. It was all we could do to drag ourselves in for supper.

Today, after our breakfast and morning prayer time, we started with some "beyond free reading." Random twaddle from the library!

We read the first half of the chapter on "St Augustine of Canterbury" in Our Island Saints. We read about Pope Gregory allowing Augustine to go with his gang of 40 monks to England to convert them, after having seen fair-looking boys being sold as slaves in Rome. We have just been introduced to King Ethelbert of Kent (a heathen) and his already Christian wife Queen Bertha (she had brought a priest with her from France and she already had a tiny chapel, St Martin in their kingdom).  Fina narrated it well as we went along the story. We will finish the second half of this story next week.

On to poetry: she re-recited her three poems to me, and we read a few new ones. "The Wind" which I thought was cute and has a repeating two-line couplet at the end of each stanza, but Fina said she didn't want to learn it. We also read "Keepsake Mill," "Good and Bad Children" and "Foreign Children."  They were all too long and I myself didn't care for the content of the second and third ones. We will find something else to memorize.

Cursive: the "t"s are good. She also wrote "at" today. We also reviewed "man" and "sass." She can almost spell the words when I ask her to write them. Almost!

We read Chapter 3 of Paddle to the Sea.  She is excited about it now that the little canoe fell through the melting snow into the brook.  She narrated it well.

MUS Primer 12C and 12D. She is doing well with math. I also had her do a few pages of the Primer Activity Sheets, the entire book is free to download online. I had printed it a while back, but we only did the first 4 pages. They have sheets for Alpha and Beta as well.  Today she was able to do pages 5 through 11. It was a fun way to review the concepts, actually.


That is it for today. Thanks for reading!