AO year 1, week 20, November 28

We are finally back into the swing of things.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. So we started our Jesse Tree. Upon the advice of a good friend, E., we are using this website from Loyola Press for the readings. We cut out two inch circles from some cardstock and Fina decided to draw the picture on each ornament. She punched a hole in each one and they are all drawn and ready to be painted, tied with a yarn and hung on our little tree.

Here they are, all drawn and ready to be painted

our tree, the first ornament is towards the bottom 

and we will work our way up to Christmas

Day 1, the Jesse Tree stump/root itself

This morning, we did chapter 12 of our catechism book. We are jumping around a bit, to work with the liturgical seasons etc.
I read chapter 12 of Our Island Story, the story of King Arthur. I read it in chunks and she narrated it all very well. She enjoyed it. So did I.
We sang our folksong, "My Paddle / Land of the Silver Birch."
We reviewed the points of the compass.
We re-read a bunch of poems from Now We Are Six.  And we read one new poem, "Explained." It was very cute.
I had her recite all of her Shakespeare passages. She remembered all of them perfectly. Even the most recent one, Sir Toby Belch's speech from Twelfth Night. We'll move on to our next passage. I'm also wanting to have Fina memorize a parable. I'm not sure which one yet.
We sang our hymn, "Canticle of the Sun" and began our new hymn for Advent, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." We sang the first verse and then Fina asked to continue to the second verse, and she surprised me - she knew the second verse off by heart as well! And she was really singing nicely and loudly, participating along with me, which was great.
I had Fina review all her cursive letters. We will continue on with the upper case letters.

We read the Fir-tree story from Lang's Pink Fairy Book as part of our free reads. It is a very cute story.

Then Fina went outside to play all afternoon with her friend T. She has had a few fun outside hours with her friends since we returned.

Speaking of outside time, on October 31st, we completed our second year of the 1000 hours outside challenge. In 2015, our first year, we reached 1084 hours. In 2016, we got to 1384 hours. I'm pretty impressed with us!