November 6, AO year 1, week 8

Yesterday, Fina did indeed end up spending much more time than I had anticipated in learning to finger knit. She was able to pick it up easily, right away. She even knows how to "cast on" herself, which is far beyond what I had hoped. She ended up doing two one-metre lengths of finger knitting. Her intention is to make a rectangular carpet (try as I might to convince her to start with something smaller, like a rounded coaster or placemat, or tiny carpet). She worked at it for over an hour for sure.

As an aside, she was listening to The House at Pooh Corner read by Peter Dennis.  We are listening to it on overdrive, borrowed from the MB libraries. It is an excellent version. This is a quote from overdrive:

This is the only reading of these enthralling stories authorized by A. A. Milne's son, Christopher Robin, who wrote, "Peter Dennis has made himself Pooh's Ambassador Extraordinary and no bear has ever had a more devoted friend. So if you want to meet the real Pooh, the bear I knew, the bear my father wrote about, listen to Peter."

We have also heard his volume 1 of Winnie the Pooh. We also enjoy Stephen Fry's dramatization (with many actors playing the voices, including Judy Densch.) Also very well done. I highly recommend both of them. If you can get them on overdrive through your library, go for it!

Anyway, here are some pics of Fina's finger knitting work.

Here she is wearing the two lengths of finger knitting that she made.

She also spent some time last night doing some pencil drawing. The excitement was that she use her newly-acquired kneadable eraser (we bought an Artist's Loft one, from Michael's store in Canada for $2.29, still quite cheap).  I have never used one before, but it is very exciting.  No erasing crumbs, no ripped paper, fun to play with and you can also do this cool thing with it:

She drew the entire sock, and then used a technique called subtractive drawing, where you mold and shape your kneaded eraser to erase or remove some of the pencil, to leave different gradations of pencil.  You can make stripes! Very fun. Check out this video for how to use the eraser. We are waiting on a friend to save some water bottle caps for us to use for storing our kneaded eraser in, so it doesn't collect as much stuff in it when you throw it in a pencil case. We got the idea from this video.

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We listened to some Brahms this morning.
She did one episode of cosmickidsyoga.com.

We also did our morning prayer together.  We are feeling much better (not 100%, but much improved) after a good night's sleep.

She has been asking to read more stories from The Blue Fairy Book, so we read Charles Perrault's short fairy tale "Toads and Diamonds." A cute story that Fina narrated very well.

Then we read "Cincinnatus" from Fifty Famous Stories Retold. She narrated it in three chunks. Funny that I have never even heard of this figure of Roman history.  Cincinnatus was a wise and noble Roman who lived as a farmer. When the Roman army had been trapped by "a tribe of half-wild men," the white-haired fathers of Rome asked him to take the boys and guards who had stayed in the city to go and rescue the Roman army. He was the ruler of Rome for 16 days, and in those 16 days he saved Rome.  He then relinquished his power and went back to his life as a farmer.

The we went back to The Blue Fairy Book and read "Prince Darling." I told Fina it was a long story and if she was sure she wanted to do it now, but she did. It is a wonderful fairy tale, new to me as well.  So, I read the whole thing and she narrated it well. It deals with the virtue of keeping to your word and being in the habit of doing good. A very CM friendly fairy tale, I thought.

Fina wanted a "recess", so she did another two episodes of yoga. I think all the being-inside-because-we-are-sick is leaving her longing for physical activity!

Well, we didn't finish week 8, though we schooled 5 days this week! They were lighter days as we were sick. So we will try to finish up on Monday.