Year 1, week 28, day 4, February 28

Monday

We went to fina's homeschooling dad's university for the day. We went to their library's used book sale and got a bunch of stuff, including a piano book.  Fina painted the afternoon away.

After supper, Fina was looking at the piano book, which just happened to be the beginner book I needed. She asked if she could start her lessons. And so she did! She was so deliberate, trying really hard, without complaint. She enjoyed it so much! (I need to make sure all the lessons remain this way!) I love that homeschooling affords me the possibility to let things happen at their right time. An impromptu first piano lesson, of her own volition, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit in helping me find that book. I had been reluctant, just picking up books as I happened upon them. Fina was open. And God provided the rest. There are just some moments in life that seem perfect. That lesson was one of them.

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Tuesday

This morning, Fina washed her hands and was ready to have a piano lesson at 7:30! I told her she should have breakfast first.

After breakfast, we had a piano lesson. We used Alfred 1A, we learned page 8 yesterday and page 9 today.  I'm also going to use the Bastien Performance Primer Level for extra practice as we go along.

And we had a little open piano investigation time. Fina loved it. I feel like I have been waiting for this moment for 20 years!

We continued our school day with our Bible reading, Matthew 4:1-11. Fina narrated it well.

She did 15 minutes of math and was able to complete 15E with time to spare.

She recited her various pieces and we worked on elocution etc with the recitations. She can be very dramatic and we might as well give her the place for that!

We read "King Lear" from Nesbit's Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare. Fina narrated it throughout. Yes, they all die at the end, but we enjoyed it!

We read the next Spanish nursery rhyme, "Almendras y turrón." Fina's pronunciation is very good. Though she can't really roll her Rs. She gets that from her dad!

She worked on her cursive / copywork.

We read the next two poems from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, "Truth the Best" and "How to Write a Letter" both by Elizabeth Turner.

We sang our hymn and our folksong. Tomorrow, we will be starting a new hymn and folksong.

Fina spent some time working on her single crochet stitch for her handicraft. And she spent some time painting a pony for her "drawing."  We have a separate notebook for this, and she is free to paint what she wishes.

Today was our outdoor playgroup, and Fina was outside playing for more than 6 hours.

Year 1, week 28, day 3, February 24

I started reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time last night. Fina's homeschooling dad is reading through the whole thing, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

We read some free reads over breakfast. (Fina was up at 6:30. This is is going to be a long day!)

I read Genesis 1:20-25 and Fina narrated it.
She did 15 C and D of her math.

We worked on her recitations. She is now ready for her parts in our co-op passage.

We finished reading "St Catherine of Siena" from In God's Garden. We stopped frequently and Fina gave excellent narrations!

We spent a few minutes learning our next nursery Spanish nursery rhyme, "Cinco Lobitos."

Fina worked on her copywork.  I stepped away from her for one minute and she decides to write in half-size. Not very useful, as it led to misformed letters, but whatever!

We read the next chapter, "The Woodpecker's Nest" from Eyes and No Eyes. Fina narrated it. It is very cute.

I read poem #123 "The Canary" from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse.

We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina read 6 pages aloud from Frog and Toad, "The Garden."

We listened to Palestrina's O Magnum Mysterium again as our second composer study of that piece. Fina told me a bit about what she heard.

She spent some time crocheting. She also tried to invent a new crochet stitch. A chain but with yarn over twice. It didn't work, but how fun!

Fina spent a few minutes doing some MEP math. We did p 7 #4+5, all of page 8 and #1-2 of page 9.

We got some outside time in the afternoon with some of our friends. It is nice and sunny but the temperature has dropped considerably.

Also, the two dear CM mom-bloggers at Learning How to Live have a giveaway for Riverbend Press's Book of Centuries. I'd love to win one!  They are so lovely!!!

https://learninghowtolive.com/2017/02/24/riverbend-press-giveaway/

Year 1, week 28, day 2, February 23

My Charlotte Mason poetry work is all coming along nicely.  In my morning quiet hours while the house is asleep, I am spending about an hour on it.

- I have been doing 30 minutes of transcription from the manuscripts of volume VII.
Art M. just published three stanzas from a poem we have been working on, "Increase our Faith," at CharlotteMasonPoetry.org  To think that I had a hand in transcribing that from Charlotte Mason's own handwritten notes!

- I have also been spending 30 minutes editing and correcting the current documents of volumes I-VI (in my new role of the "digital editor" for CharlotteMasonPoetry.org). I started going through volume VI.

I read this poem today (from volume VI, Book II, Poem XIX, Matthew 11:28)

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At the fair (The Disciple)

EAGER we take our way through noisy mart,
Agog for bargains that shall souls appease,
Shall minister to happiness or ease,
Shall give us courage for our per’lous part,

Or soothe the soreness of our wounded heart!
They cry their tinsel wares nor ever cease;
We buy in hope of joy and wealth’s increase;
Brought home, our sorry bargain, stript of art,

Mocks our desire. But in the fair was One
We would no hear, whose cry was only, “Rest”;
“Why hither, thither, will ye frenzied run?
“Come, buy, but bring no money; cease your quest

For unguent never made beneath the sun;
Come unto Me, and I will give you rest!”

**********
What a wonderful poem. So à propos to our modern life!

I am enjoying this work immensely. All my years of undergrad and MA work in musicology prepared me for this kind of primary source work. It is incredible to be coming back to something like this after all these years! It is keeping me busy, but I feel like I really needed this Mother-Culture. The poetry work as well as having a more intentional reading schedule for myself. I feel that this was really lacking in my life. (FaceBook, blogs, CM schooling research etc really eats up a lot of my free time. But I'm able to hold off on that while I do these other things for the first few hours of my day).



TODAY

We started by listening to some Palestrina over breakfast.

It was snowing (which lasted all of 10 minutes) and Fina just HAD to go outside and put out our containers to catch snow to make tire-sur-la-neige. And to eat some snow flakes.

Needless to say, we had to bring the containers back in and they were empty!

We read Luke 5:1-11, "Fisher's of men," and Fina narrated it.
In her 20 minutes of math, we watched the video lesson for our next lesson (making 10), she did 15A and B and we still had a few minutes left over to do MEP p 7 #1-3.  A very good math day!

We went through Fina's recitations. She has her portion of our passage for our co-op performance pretty much perfected now. There is still an "and" that she keeps adding, but we will fix that up!

We read two Aesop's Fables. She gave an ok-ish narration of "The Three Bullocks and A Lion." She gave a much better narration of "Mercury and the Woodman."

We started our next saint story from Amy Steedman's In God's Garden, "St Catherine of Siena." We read a portion of it and Fina gave an excellent narration of it. In the story, we are told that her house in Siena still exists and is a museum. So we looked it up online. We saw something that looked like St Catherine's head on google and Fina right away remembered that St Thérèse saw it on her pilgrimage to Italy. (I did NOT remember this fact!)

We worked on the next two nursery rhymes in Pio Peep!  Fina is trying her best to pronounce the words, repeating the lines after me.

She did 10 minutes of copywork. We spent some time experimenting with some different sizes of lined paper and settled on one. I used this worksheet generator and just left it blank and printed it. You can also add text and it puts it in for you. The cursive isn't exactly like our cursive, so we will just use blank sheets. But the spacing and the third line for letters that fall below work well for us right now.

We read chapter 22 of Paddle to the Sea. We were excited because Paddle goes over Niagara Falls. We learned a bit about Lake Erie and the Welland Canal (all places we have visited many times).

I read our next poem, #122 in The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, "The Peacock 'At Home'" by Catherine Ann Dorset.

Fina read "The Letter" from Frog and Toad aloud to me. She is reading with a lot of expression.

We sang our hymn and folksong.

Fina did 20 minutes of drawing. She decided to paint the meadowlark that we read about yesterday in The Burgess Bird Book.

I am really enjoying having two 20 minute slots of drawing on our schedule, plus our nature study afternoon slot. Fina loves to paint and this is giving her more opportunities to paint during the week. And, of course, it isn't as difficult as I thought to take out the supplies etc. It is a WONDERFUL part of our day!

Then I asked Fina to do 20 minutes of crochet. She wanted to spend her time doing other handicrafts, but I was able to get her to do 10 single crochet stitches first. Then she worked on her crochet chain and then on some wood carving. I read some of our free reads while she worked.

Thanks for joining us!

Year 1, week 28, day 1, February 22

Fina started the morning with doing some woodcarving. I also read a chapter from Mother West Wind Stories to her.

We read Matthew 2:7-12 and Fina narrated it - the story of the wise men.

She took the test for lesson 14 and did an excellent job. She made no errors!

She reviewed her recitations. She almost has her passage ready for our co-op performance.

We read "Olaf's Farm" from Viking Tales.  She narrated it - ish!

We read our next nursery rhyme in Spanish from Pio Peep!

She worked on her cursive. Now that we have learned all the letters, we need to work on different letter combinations. I wanted her to write Frog and Toad, but we needed to work a lot on -og and -oa.

We read about Bob-white the quail and the Meadowlark in chapter 14 of The Burgess Bird Book.  We searched for them online, saw some photos and listened to their songs.

We read a new poem, "The Butterfly's Ball by William Roscoe in The Oxford Book of Children's Verse.

We did chapter 11 of our catechism book.
We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina finished reading her story "A Swim" from Frog and Toad.

We took another look at our picture study from last week. Fina decided to draw the anamorphosis of the skull.

Then we did some work on Fina's crochet. She (reluctantly and with a very bad attitude!) learned to do the single stitch. It is a very complicated stitch with many steps. And she did it. But she would not let me see that she was pleased. But she was. It was wonderful! (Aside from the bad attitude!)

She went out to play for a while in the afternoon.

Year 1, week 27, day 4, February 21

I am also reading The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards in the hopes to get some ideas for Fina's 20 minute drawing lessons twice a week.

And I started reading Charlotte Mason's Scale How Meditations, edited by Dr Benjamin Bernier. I bought the ebook.

Fina did a lot of drawing, colouring, wood carving etc yesterday as she was sick.  We played monopoly. We read. She listened to the last few chapters of The Orange Fairy Book on Librivox.

She also started doing some MEP math as enrichment. Over the weekend, she did the first 5 pages of level 1.

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Today we did a slightly shortened day because Fina is still feeling under the weather.

She listened to our two Palestrina pieces over breakfast.

Today, we started with reading our Gospel reading for Sunday, Matthew 6:24-34. We used our narration jar and I got to narrate.  Fina added some things I was missing.

Fina reviewed her recitations. She practiced her lines for our performance at co-op. She almost has them memorized.

I read the rest of "The Law of the Woods" from Parables from Nature by Margaret Gatty. Fina gave an excellent narration.

We did some geography. We learned about the horizon and how the world is a sphere, using Charlotte Mason's Geography, "Our World, Part II." We talked about the horizon.

We read a new poem, #120 "Loving and Liking" by Dorothy Wordsworth in The Oxford Book of Children's Verse.

Fina read aloud from Frog and Toad "A Swim."

I have decided to take the plunge and try to do foreign study as part of the schedule. I was inspired when I saw a book (that we also have) in a fellow CMers pics on FaceBook. Pio Peep! Traditional Spanish Nursery Rhymes.  I read the first poem, "Pito, pito, colorito." I asked Fina what it meant and she was able to decipher much of it.  I had her repeat the poem, line by line, and she did. No questions asked. No explanations given. Ha!

She thought the little bird was doing nature study, because he has a pencil crayon that is the same colour of the worm.  How cute!

I set the timer for 20 minutes of drawing. I told Fina she could draw whatever she wanted. She went and found one of our free reads, Mother West Wind Stories to Read Aloud, and she wanted to draw the raccoon on the cover.

We started listening to The Red Fairy Book by Andrew Lang on Librivox, while Fina continued painting.

She went on to do some more woodcarving while we continued to listen. She is working on a paddle because she wants to make a giant raft for paddling in the creek this summer. (I have no idea if we can make this happen!)

We were outside for 6 hours this afternoon with our outdoor playgroup. Fina is full of mud and soaked but she had a blast!

Charlotte Mason Poetry et al

Some mother culture notes.

I finally finished reading Evangelii gaudium by Pope Francis. I just started Amoris Laetitia.

I finished reading Anne White's Minds More Awake.  I'm going to start Charlotte Mason's Scale How Meditations.

I'm still working on Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain and CM's volume II Parents and Children.

I might try to pick up Girl of the Limberlost again, since I have a physical book of it. The only other physical books I'm reading right now are CM's volume II and Thomas Merton's book.


I'm hard at work, trying to edit and correct Charlotte Mason's poetry in The Saviour of the World, starting with volume 6 (which needed major stripping down of its formatting).

I'm also trying to spend a bit of time with the transcription of the manuscript of volume 7. My partner Linda is way better and way faster than I am at transcribing that (wonderful) chicken scratch!

And... look who made it on to the Contributors list at CharlotteMasonPoetry.org! (scroll down)

All I can say is "Wow!"  I am so blessed to be a part of this!

Year 1, week 27, day 3, February 17

We re-listened to Palestrina's Tu es Petrus over breakfast.

I read Genesis 1:14-19, continuing on with the creation story, for Fina to narrate.

We learned the upper case cursive Z, and wow, our whole system fell apart here. We played with a few different ones. Fina has settled on this, it looks like an L with a line across the middle of it. (Rather than the one that looks like the lower case z, just bigger)

Here is her whole list of cursive letters.

And yet, we have finished all of our cursive letters. On to copywork next! That is going to be fun!

Fina reviewed her recitations. She has nearly the whole poem "The Lamb" memorized now. And has learned the first two of her six lines for our A Midsummer Night's Dream passage that we will be performing at co-op.

We read about "King Alfred" in Our Island Story. We stopped to narrate throughout and Fina gave excellent narrations. This story was a bit easier to relate to, I guess, since it involved less war description and more about cooking!

She did 15 minutes of math and completed 14F. We will do the test for lesson 14 next time.


We read about the Bobolink from The Burgess Bird Book and other blackbirds as well. Fina narrated.

We read our next poem, "Address to a Child during a Boisterous Winter Evening" by Dorothy Wordsworth from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Such lovely imagery about the wind. We enjoyed it!

We sang our folksong and hymn.
Fina read "A Lost Button" from Frog and Toad aloud.

We listened to our next piece by Palestrina, "O Magnus Mysterium" a 6-part motet. It was composed for Christmas and we looked up a translation of the Latin lyrics which speak of the babe being born in a manger and the angels singing etc.  We listened attentively and tried to discuss what we heard. It was a great study!

Fina crocheted for 30 minutes while I read to her from The Orange Fairy Book.

Then we did our nature study. We looked at the Bobolink, since we had just read about those birds.

Fina's dry-brush painting of the Bobolink

This is my painting. Try as I might, my beaks always look weird. I hope to improve!

It is still unseasonably warm here (with a high of plus 5 degrees celsius) and Fina was able to spend a few hours outside playing in the slush/snow/puddles with only splash pants and no coat on! Incredible for February. (Not so good for skiing!)

Year 1, week 27, day 2, February 16

Over breakfast, we re-listened to Palestrina's "Tu es Petrus."

Fina also spent a long while preparing her costume for our co-op's upcoming performance of a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

We read John 4:5-42, the story of the Samaritan at the Well. I stopped a few times and Fina gave excellent narrations.
In her 15 minutes of math, she was able to complete 14E.
I read "The Goose and the Golden Egg" as well as "The Astrologer" from Aesop's Fables and she narrated both.  We then started "The Law of the Wood" from Parables from Nature. We stopped at the bottom of page 26. These stories are scheduled over three weeks, so we will just keep reading from it at our literature time slots of 20 minutes until we are done.

We are learning a passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream to perform at our co-op. Fina is playing Hippolyta and will also be speaking the Lion's four lines (the Lion is being played by our youngest member, so she will just act the Lion and Fina will speak the lines).  Fina started learning her 6 lines. We have another week to learn the lines. She will be fine! We also reviewed our other recitations. She almost knows all of "The Lamb."

We learned upper case Y in cursive.

We read chapter 21 from Paddle to the Sea.  We learned about Lake Erie.

Fina wanted to do another chapter from her catechism, and since we are a little behind, we did chapter 9.

We read two new poems, "The Sheep" and "The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog." They are both cute poems. We are enjoying The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. I was a little leery at the beginning, because we started with the early Medieval poems, but now that we are in the Nineteenth Century, we are cruising along comfortably!

Fina read a few pages from Frog and Toad, "The Story."
We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina did 20 minutes of her handicraft. She continued with her crocheting. She learned how to make a slipknot.  While she crocheted, I read to her from one of our free reads, Mother West Wind Stories.

She is making tiny scarves for her tiny pony store.

With these scheduling cards, we now have 20 minutes of drawing scheduled twice a week. So I gave her a new notebook where she can paint anything she wants (including drawn narrations). While she painted, we listened to a Librivox recording of "The Clever Cat" from The Orange Fairy Book (another one of our free reads).

We got out in the afternoon for a ski and some play time with friends!

Fina carrying her skis with our fancy new ski straps!

Of her own volition, after supper, Fina wanted to show dad how to tie a slip knot and how to crochet a chain!

leading up to February 15

We had out outdoor playgroup on Tuesday. Our friend L took the three boys and Fina on the big loop ski. They had a great time!

Is this a lovely childhood, or what?

On Wednesday, we spent the day at the university. Fina painted in the morning, then we saw  "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" the Musical in the afternoon and finished up some painting in the afternoon.  She painted Squirrel Nutkin to thank one of the professors who gifted her his set of Beatrix Potter books.  Isn't he cute?

After supper, during our Bible reading time, Fina continued working on her crochet skills.

Year 1, week 27, day 1, February 13

Sorry that I didn't post this yesterday!

Did you notice my change in title. Yes, I'm still doing AO, but with enough ADE thrown in that I now feel uncomfortable calling it that way. (For those of you not really IN this world, do not worry. Everything is still ok!!!) So, using the scheduling cards, I'm on a 4 day week. This week, I will only get through three of the four days, so day 4 will be next Monday.

Fina has been working a lot on her handicrafts, outside of school time. She has done A LOT of wood carving. Less crocheting, but she does do some.  Also, the temperatures have risen significantly (we are now hovering around 0 degrees celsius, which, for Manitoba in February, is quite something! Consequently, she has been playing outside a lot, and skiing as well!

Monday

We started our school day by reading Matthew 5:38-48 (the reading for Sunday). Shall I just gloss over the fact that, though I said "this is for narration" before I started reading, Fina cried that she did not know it was for narration after I was done?  I told her that she should always assume that everything is for narration. She informed me that I should always just tell her that this is for narration, for everything we do (even if sometimes it isn't for narration, like a free read). She says she would rather think it is for narration, even if it isn't. Needless to say, I did not get a narration about this passage. Ha!

She did 15 minutes of math, 14D (more practice of adding doubles plus one, and 8s and 9s).

She recited a few passages for me. She wanted to learn "The Lamb" by William Blake that we had read a few times last week.

Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee  

Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee!He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.

Well, lo and behold, she already basically knew the first stanza!  This kid is incredible!

We read the next story from Viking Tales. She gave a good narration

Fina worked on the letter X in cursive.

We started a new nature lore book, on the recommendation of the "A Delectable Education" podcast ladies, Arabella Buckley's Eyes and No Eyes series. We started with the first book, Wild Life in Woods and Fields. We read the first chapter, "Spiders on the common" and Fina narrated it. I'm looking forward to reading more from this book.

We read our next poem, #112 from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, "The Star," which actually is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with its many original stanzas.

We did our next catechism chapter, chapter 8.

We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina read "Spring" from Frog and Toad aloud to me. She is doing great.

We did our picture study, Hans Holbein the Younger's "The Ambassadors."  What an interesting painting with this anamorphic skull on the bottom. I had never heard of this technique, anamorphosis, but da Vinci used it too.  So cool!

See that white blob?  If you hold up some sort of apparatus to it, like a cylindrical mirror, it is actually this skull.

Cool, right? 500 years ago!

In the afternoon, we went out to the Museum.  We BOTH went out skiing.  I did not ski as much as Fina did, of course. Our good friend L took her son T and Fina out along the whole 3 or 4 km ski trail. She LOVED the hills!

What a lovely sight - a sled full of skis!

And just before supper, Fina went to the outdoor rink to skate with dad for an hour.  When it is above 0 celsius, it is easy to spend hours and hours outside!

(As it is now Tuesday morning, I can already tell you that I am sore from skiing. But I will ski again today at our outdoor playgroup!)

leading up to February 10

On Thursday, we went to dad's university for the day and Fina spent a couple of hours painting at a painting drop-in area.

You may remember that Fina did one like this a while ago and it is hanging outside of dad's office. She did this one from memory and it is quite different.

Waves in a stormy sea

St Therese de Lisieux with roses

Based on a painting of incense bowls she had seen at this drop-in 

On Friday, we had our co-op. It was lovely.

Fina gave three recitations (The Parable of the Mustard Seed, Epitaph on a Dormouse and from Twelfth Night My Father had a daughter loved a man).
We did picture study (looking at a Renoir), sang a hymn, narrated from Garfield's retelling of Twelfth Night, had a swedish drill,  and did some nature study. The children were to bring something to study and Fina brought some moss that was hanging around our nature dish!

After co-op, our group spent a few hours playing outside. Skiing and playing in the snow. I skied for a few minutes and nearly died.  I will have to try again!

AO year 1, week 26, February 8

We started with reading from Matthew 2:1-6 and Fina narrated it.
She did her 15 minutes of math, completing 14B p 2 and 14C.
She reviewed her recitations.
We finished reading the story of St Benedict from In God's Garden. Fina gave an excellent narration.
We worked on some cursive and learned the upper case W.  Only X, Y and Z to go!

We read "Oscar, the Cat About Town" from James Herriot's Treasury. It is a sweet story and Fina gave an excellent narration of this one as well.

We read our next poem, by Jane Taylor, "Greedy Richard."

We sang our folksong and hymn.
We read "The Wolf and the Shepherd" and "The Farmer and His Sons" from Aesop's Fables. Fina narrated both of them well.
She read "The Kite" from Frog and Toad aloud.

For the first time, we did a big composer study lesson, à la Megan Hoyt's A Touch of the Infinite. Our composer for the term is Palestrina. (We are a bit behind the AO lists, but I wanted to do this composer to match Holbein's art work).  
I read the chapter on Palestrina from Harriette Brower's The World's Great Men of Music: Story-Lives of Great Musicians, free here at gutenberg.  Fina gave a short narration.  We quieted down to sit and listen attentively to the excerpt. (We started with his "Tu es Petrus.")  Then I gave Fina the chance to narrate. She spoke in such a lively manner. It reminded her of the music from the Vatican. It gets soft and loud, fast and slow. She realized there were no instruments, only voices. It was wonderful!
Now, we will add this to our "casual" listening and will do our next piece in a similar way, reviewing a bit about Palestrina himself and then listening carefully to that next piece.  I am already convinced that Fina has connected more with this 4 minute piece than with all of our Brahms and Schubert listening. I'm so glad I bought Megan Hoyt's book. It really gave me the encouragement I needed to do this in a more in-depth way. (Terrible, I am a music history major, but, like in other things relating to homeschooling, I was frozen with the choices. Once I found something that worked for me, it was easy to just dive in!)

Fina spent some time doing some fingerknitting (in place of her crochet).

We spent the sunny, chilly afternoon doing this and that and reading some free reads. Our current reads are Graham Oakley's The Church Mice and The Ring and Church Mice Adrift. We also started reading Thornton W. Burgess' Mother West Wind Stories to Read Aloud.  And we are continuing with our Orange Fairy Book by Andrew Lang.

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We have continued on with our new timed schedule and it is working well. I've been doing some Facebook research and have found a few things I need to tweak.

I need to do "drawing" which we haven't done, separate from nature study. Well, we kind of have, with Fina doing her artforkidshub.com stuff. But I want to do dry brush painting of other stuff, not just nature. So I have pulled out another notebook for her to use for this type of stuff. I do have Mona Brooke's Drawing with Children and we may try to do some of that as well.

We need more nature lore than what AO schedules, in order to do 20 minutes twice a week. So I have finally found the way to incorporate Arabella Buckley's Eyes and No Eyes series into our work. I have looked to buy it, but for now, we will use the free ebook from archive.org.

And I need to do something about foreign language. I need to bite the bullet and start some French. 10 minutes, three times a week. That isn't impossible. I really want to use this by Cherrydale Press, but I don't want to spend $20 USD. But I want something that is laid out for me. I should just do it!

We are going with dad his university tomorrow to do some painting with acrylics in their drop-in paint area. And on Friday we have our co-op. I will report back after that.

Thanks for coming alongside us!