October 26, AO year 1, week 7

We started the day by finishing the last two chapters of Peter Pan.  We both enjoyed it immensely.
We listened to some Brahms this morning as well.

Note to self: do not do free reading in the morning before school starts! She found it very hard to concentrate after that.

Cursive letter w. We had a few tears. She is so stubborn. And it really isn't that hard and she is so good at it. It is frustrating for her to learn a new letter. I'm sure it is my fault (perfectionism)!

Fina recited her poetry to me and we read a new poem "The Land of Story-Books."

Then we read chapter 6 from Paddle to the Sea. It is still hard for her to give much of a narration. But she likes it. I should let her give a one-sentence narration for the chapter. Because she gets it. She just can't recount the details. She gets the action, for sure.

We watched the "Log Driver's Waltz" vignette from the NFB of Canada.  This is one of my favourites from my childhood. It showed us how they had spikes on their shoes and how they use their poles to drive the logs. The only thing missing from Paddle is that you don't get to see the sawmill itself. I forgot how it starts with black and white footage of real log-drivers!

Then we took our first foray into the wonderful world of Shakespeare today. We read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as retold by E. Nesbitt.  It was really good. I have never seen Fina laugh so hard as when I read the following descriptive paragraph about Puck:

"Puck was the spirit of mischief. He used to slip into the dairies and take the cream away, and get into the churn so that the butter would not come, and turn the beer sour, and lead people out of their way on dark nights and then laugh at them, and tumble people's stools from under them when they were going to sit down, and upset their hot ale over their chins when they were going to drink."

Against CM recommendations, I reread her the paragraph a few times. She laughed and laughed!

I think we should make cut out dolls for the people and see if we can recreate the story. It is a little confusing (even for me) with all those names, but she certainly understood the gist of the story.

It has been a long morning, so I told her we could skip math for now. Fina said "Skip math? You mean skip counting?" And she recited 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20.  All on her own!!! So, there you go!!! And now she is singing it around the house, and against my belief, she knows the non-number lines of the song as well.

All in all, a good start to week 7!