November 9, AO year 1, week 8 continued

We are still not completely over our colds, but we are much better. We have some beautiful fall weather today (high of 12 celsius, very warm for MB) so we will be heading outside for lunch time to spend the afternoon outside, and hopefully we will be able to go for a night-time walk with dad. The sun sets so early right now and since it will be not cold and clear skies, we hope to enjoy a walk to see the stars.

Our good friend L gifted us with a free mp3 copy of "Seeds of Courage" from seedsfamilyworship.com.  I would encourage you to check them out. The songs have the Bible chapter and verse titles built right into the lyrics. We are just listening to them randomly during the day. I am not using them "intentionally," I'm just hoping Fina picks up the chapter and verses by just listening and singing along. They are really fun!

We have also been trying to read one chapter from the bible each evening after supper.

Fina has been working on her finger knitting. And lots of random crafting of this and that. She is being creative just on her own. And she has been enjoying her yoga. Because the weather has been so favourable, we have also been trying to go for a walk as a family each day. We have fancy new exercise equipment that was just installed in our park, so we have been trying that out. Fina loves the spinny stretching thing.

Today, we started with our morning prayer. Fina has taken to listening to Zecchino d'Oro during breakfast and today's pre-breakfast Lego building time as well.

We read the second half of the chapter on St Patrick. Not so much with the narration. I do find that Amy Steedman's Our Island Saints are very well written, but the language can be complicated at times. I think Fina got the basic story of St Patrick, so that is good enough for now!

We started reading Hudson by Janice Weaver.  Henry Husdon was an explorer (Hudson Bay was named after him). We read about how he tried to find a navigable passage from England up through the north pole to Asia in 1607. He couldn't find an unfrozen passage, but ended up finding a bay full of whales in Spitsbergen (northern island belonging to Norway) and by the 1630, a thousand ships were going there a year to exploit the riches of the whales (blubber and bone for corsets etc).  I like this book. Again, hard to narrate from, but fuel for much discussion, map work, learning about explorers etc. It was the most fruitful 30 minutes we have had, though not immediately quantifiable in terms of checking off boxes on our homeschool work. It was great!  We got to page 18.  The books is meant to be read over three weeks.

Fina recited some of her poetry to me and we read a new poem, "The Dumb Soldier."

We also were able to do chapter 5 of our Catechism. We learned about the liturgical year, ordinary time and God's creation.

That is it for us for week 8. Tomorrow we have our outdoor playgroup, and Wednesday is Remembrance Day here in Canada. So I guess week 9 will begin on Thursday for us.

Off to enjoy the great outdoors. Thanking God for his creation!