November 25, AO year 1, week 9

Fina has had lots of outdoor time the last few days. It was lovely yesterday at our outdoor play group. The kids went tobogganing. Then we went for a nice walk in the dark before supper as well.  Today she said to me, as she was climbing up a snow pile, "this is why I love winter!" Good thing she loves it, because winters in MB are towards the long side!

Silly geese!

We listened to some Brahms as we had our lunch. We had a medical appointment in the morning, and I figured, since we were dressed and out, that we'd take some time to play and running some errands before heading home to do our school work. Big mistake (see the end of our school day!)

We started with some math. We did sections 22D, E and F. That skip counting by 5 song is really working.
Next time we will be moving on to tally marks. Exciting!

We read chapter 5 from The Burgess Bird Book, about the robin and the bluebird. She was once again wanting to colour in the colouring page that goes with that chapter and then she was quite unable to narrated the chapter. Fool me twice, shame on me. That won't happen again. I was able to tease some basic things out of her (like the bluebirds build their nest in the fence post, while the robins build their nests out of mud and it can get washed away by rain or blown down by the wind).

Read some of our next free read, Pinocchio. She says she remembers some of it from dad reading it to her. She remembered the bitter water the fairy gives Pinocchio. We read three chapters of it. I have never read it (strange enough, as my family is Italian) and it is quite something. In the third chapter, Pinocchio has himself a hissy fit and throws himself down on the ground, while the onlookers,

Continuing to work on the cursive letter g. She wrote glass. Then she learned the letter j. She did fine with it.

She made a few Chi Rho symbols too (☧), for some unknown reason! 

So, they are backwards, but still.

Fina: "mom, do you know what this is?" Mom: "yes, it is the Chi Rho." Fina: "yup, you're right!" Fun!

This precious and lovely moment devolved a few minutes later into the following scenario: Fina crying, whining, making a hoarse donkey kind of braying while working on her letter j. Mommy-fail moment, I brayed right back at her, and loudly. Which led to more crying, tears, gnashing of teeth etc etc. Should I remind myself again that afternoon schooling does not work so well for us!!! So, we had to have some cuddles, apologies and a chat about why this kind of behaviour does not help us, it does not help our cursive to look nice and so forth. I had to send her upstairs (to be out of my sight) for a little while, so she is playing a few rounds of Rush Hour Jr.  As she is doing that, I hear her singing her skip counting by 5s song at the top of her lungs. She is over it, it seems (for the moment at least)!

So I ran upstairs to take a pic of her playing nicely and she proceeded to be a brat by rolling back onto the bed so that I couldn't get a good pic of her.

And now she is reciting from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream "I know a bank where the while thyme blows" "on my nose, on my nose, on my nice, clean nose." Yikes!

Oh, my life is quite something, isn't it? Go ahead and laugh, my dear friend J!

She now came back downstairs, wanting to colour, and asked to hear the quote from Midsummer Night's Dream that she was referencing, with the caveat that she "does not want to learn it," but just to hear it. So I found the audioclip of that passage and she is listening to all the passages while colouring.

I might as well share this resource with all of you, my loyal blog followers. Our friend L is using this book with her kids in her homeschool, to learn to recite passages from Shakespeare.  There is a website that goes along with the book, How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare by Ken Ludwig. On the website, the quotes that are to be learned are available to be printed and there are also links to audioclips of those same quotes. Scroll down and you will find them too!