October 16, AO year 1, week 5

We had a bit of a later start this morning because I decided to do some baking (lots of pumpkin) and dinner prep.  Fina helped me by emptying the dishwasher after she had done some drawing, colouring and crafting on her own (she made a little rat with a house with an awning for when it rains). Fina is still sick, but we are going to try to do as much as school as we are able to do today.

Fina narrated Genesis 28:10-22 very well. Jacob's Ladder.

Fina wanted to use her princess etch-a-sketch thing to do some 1-20 number drills. She had said so yesterday, and we had a sticky note in our math book to remind us. So, we did a bunch of them. Again, using 1T1 etc and it worked fine.
Then I decided to give her a timed math time. 15 minutes and she was able to do 15D and E. Not bad at all. I'm trying to encourage her to use her time wisely. But she spent some time making curly-cue 2s etc. When the timer rang, she really wanted to do one more page. I explained to her that she had wasted some time doing fancy numbers and that if she hadn't wasted that time, she would have been on the next page already.   She was ok with that (surprisingly!)  They are pretty, though!

Fina is doing two episodes of her yoga. There are 20 plus episodes from her to choose from, and again, she likes to take 7 minutes to leisurely scan through them to decide which one to do. I stopped her right away and told her that she can not spend 5 minutes choosing which one to do. So she is doing number 1 and we will be doing them in order. Unless she has one that she can tell me immediately that she would like to do, then that is fine. If not, I will be choosing the next one. I hope this helps her not to dilly-daddle over things and get more use of her time and more enjoyment. We'll see if this works! The habit of prompt attention...

I should do her yoga with her, but I prefer to take the opportunity to write this blog and to tidy up the kitchen a bit from all my morning pumpkin baking!

We read chapter 2 "Law of Authority and Obedience" from Parables from Nature. We tried using the modern translation and it worked much better. She was able to understand it more clearly, I think, and her narration demonstrated that. It is a cute story about a worker bee who overhears two children talking about bees and how there should be no queen, but that all bees should be alike. She

We read chapter 4 of Paddle to the Sea. She narrated it ok. We mainly talked about it together, looking at the pictures and talking about how dams are made, how the pond can flood over the dam, how the beaver makes a hollow house with an underwater entrance but how there is an above ground portion in it, above the water, with air.

Cursive upper case S. It is the only upper case until the remaining lower case letters have been learned. They incorporate it here so that we can start writing sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation too, I think. It works for us, because Fina's name actually starts with an S (though we are still missing a few letters from her name). She did a great job with S. We practiced some previous letters as well.  Then she wrote Sam, Sat and Santa. Then we went on to the next lesson, with punctuation: "Sam sat."  Wow, even a period!!!

We finished with Fina reciting all her poetry to me. She still wants me to recite all of them to her, but I can't. She thinks it quite funny that she has to correct my small words (and, as, etc).  We read a new poem today, "The Unseen Playmate," but haven't yet found another to memorize and recite.

Well, we had a three-day week, but we covered (basically) everything. I'm happy to start week 6 next week and fill in some missing things (like artist study, catechism, hymns).

Thanks for following this week with us!