Saturday 30 September 2017

a new kind of nature notebook!

We are having a good time, so far! Fina especially is enjoying the chalk pastels and brush drawing lessons. She is doing a great job with the Spanish lessons. Her narrations are great. And she likes the solfa and singing quite a bit.

We are doing some origami to help us with our paper folding skills. We have been working on a bunch of waterbombs. It is cool to see how, when you blow into this folded a piece of paper, a three-dimensional cube appears!

We are doing really well with our nature journalling. Almost every school day, we have taken at least 30 minutes to observe something carefully. Fina is dictating it to me and we have been writing quite a bit, recording what we see and think. Fina has also done some pencil sketches. We have started a different journal for these "non brush drawing" days, with thinner paper. We are saving our thicker mixed media notebook just for brush drawing nature studies.

Here are two examples, to give you an idea:




And we did a brush drawing entry on Wednesday. Fina drew this beautiful oak leaf. (Forgive my poor handwriting. Fina's handwriting will be much more beautiful for sure!



We had a fun playtime at a local riverbank with our great friends. Fina and her friend spent probably an hour digging out little caves in the sand of the river bank, using rocks and mussel shells.




Charlotte Mason had it right with the idea that children can learn to read difficult words more easily. Fina read "fragrant" with no problem, but was stuck with "air."

On Thursday, I went to our city's huge used book sale and I scored some gems. These are my prizes.


Hillyer's A Child's History of Art has the impossible-to-get book on Architecture that I've been looking for for two years. It sells on ABEbooks for $125USD. I paid $2 for it!

Chalk drawing: it is hard because I don't actually know what I'm doing. I'm going to look into it more. We tried using light yellow and erasing with a kleenex, but you can imagine how that went for perfectionist Fina. We're going about this the wrong way, I'm sure. I will look into it! (It's never fun knowing that you are setting your child up for disaster!) Her final product was certainly cute, but the process and principles behind the thing are not!


We had another great play time with friends at our local provincial park. They rambled for hours along the banks of the river.

The water level was quite low this summer. This is the base of the spillway.


We had a good week!

Saturday 23 September 2017

starting term 1

Dear blog followers:

I'm going to change up my blogging style a bit. I'm not going to post every day (with a detailed schedule). Rather, I'm going to just give you the highlights every few days.

We are enjoying our literature tales' selection for this term, Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Wanderings of Odysseus. Fina loved The Odyssey by Gillian Cross that we borrowed from a friend and read through twice over the last year, so Sutcliffe's (well, Homer's) story is a bit familiar to her.

With our Bible lessons, we have an atlas of the Bible that we are using and Fina is engaging well with the maps. We now know where the Jordan River is (John the Baptist) and where Egypt is (Exodus)!

And Fina really enjoyed her chalk pastel drawing. I'm not sure we're doing it "right." We'll have to work on not letting it smudge while drawing. Once she was done, I sprayed it with a clear fixatif which has coated it nicely. The smudging was all from before the spray.


We had a second great nature study on Wednesday. We are taking the "paint less, write more" approach. I don't know why I never "got" this before! We intently looked at a spruce tree on our Museum grounds and Fina dictated much to me. And she sketched this cone from the ground beneath the tree.


Here she is, sketching at the Museum.


On Thursday, we started Minn of the Mississippi and Fina loved the first chapter. She gave great narrations throughout and enjoyed the story so much. It is written in quite a different style than Paddle to the Sea (which she liked, but did not love.)

We started our sewing lessons. Fina knows how to sew, but I never had her wrap her own bobbin, cut her own thread, thread her own needle or tie her own knot. So we did all of those things.

On Friday, Fina was asking for chalk pastels, but we were doing bry-drush today. A wonderful part of a CM education is that you feel ok saying "we're sticking to the lessons. You will enjoy it more by waiting until next time." And because you've said it often, (like pertaining to reading another chapter in a book) the kid doesn't argue! She did get to do her same daisy drawing lesson in dry-brush and she liked that a lot!


Here's the "side by side" comparison. Aren't they pretty?


And she wanted to have me read aloud a free-read while she did her painting. I was going to chose something from this year's list (we have lots of fun things to chose from) but she wanted to continue with Lang's Olive Fairy Book which we haven't finished. We have a few of Lang's colour books left to read and I suspect she will be asking for those for a while yet. The other books will just have to wait (or be staggered in amongst the Lang's!)

We started reading Howard Pyle's The Wonder Clock and the story captured our attention for sure. Fina gave good narrations throughout.

We started our other nature lore book, Arabella Buckley's Trees and Shrubs. We read about the Oak Tree (and the Oak apple, how slugs lay their eggs inside a rolled up leaf, and galls, and all sorts of interesting things we did not know anything about!)

When we went out for our nature study, low and behold what do we find in a folded up leaf on a raspberry cane? A teeny, tiny caterpillar! She was thrilled. When Fina's homeschooling dad came home, she re-iterated, many times, that what we had just read about in our book we then saw in real life. She was thrilled. So was I! We did our non-dry-brush nature journalling today. Fina sketched a ladybug, a weed leaf with what-we-think-are-posssibly-galls and gave an oral narration of what she saw with the caterpillar (which I wrote down for her in her nature journal)!

And here is Fina jumping off of the swing at our park, on our way home from our nature walk. Yup, swinging in her comfy lounging (aka pj) pants and rubber boots. That is how we roll around here!



Thanks for joining us this week!

Tuesday 19 September 2017

First day of school!

Well, I had hoped to give you a summer recap post, but I haven't had a chance yet. I hope to do so. The short version is that we had a lovely Manitoba summer (without mosquitoes and with beautiful weather) and then we left for a visit with the in-law family to Florida (Disneyworld with the cousins was a highlight for Fina). Then we went to visit my family in Ontario for a few weeks and Fina got to enjoy lots of time with her two baby cousins. And now we are back home!

A cool thing: our local library got a flag that was flown on Parliament Hill in June.



In preparation of starting school today, I wanted to get back into a proper morning routine of spending some time in prayer and reading etc. Look what God had in store for me this morning.

- I read the beginning of Mark 1, which is what we will be looking at today in our Bible lesson. It is the story of John the Baptist. Fina will love it!

- The Cloud of Witness p 385, thanksgiving. "What shall I give THEE got all these thousands of benefits? I would I could serve THEE all the days of my life!" (Thomas à Kempis)

- I wanted to read a bit from my fancy new CMPEdition volume 1, CM's Home Education. I just picked it up where I had the bookmark (I have not read from here in a few months). I read the small section on "Hindering the Chidren."
The most fatal way of despising the child falls under the third educational law of the Gospels; it is to overlook and make light of his natural relationship with Almighty God. "Suffer the little children to come unto Me," says the Saviour, as if that were the natural thing for the children to do, the thing they do when they are not hindered by their elders. And perhaps it is not too beautiful a thing to believe in this redeemed world, that, as the babe turns to his mother though he has no power to say her name, as the flowers turn to the sun, so the hearts of the children turn to their Saviour and God with unconscious delight and trust. (CM, vol 1, 15-16)
-this led me to look up, in my fancy old SOTW volume IV, book IV, poem LVII:
“Of such is the Kingdom” (The disciple)
IN the Kingdom are the children; You may read it in their eyes;All the freedom of the Kingdom In their careless humour lies.
Very winsome are the children,— Say, whence comes it, their sweet grace?Small the pains they take for goodness, Scarcely know they Duty’s face.
Frail and faulty little lieges,—
Yet well-pleasing to their King:
Scanty thought they take to serve Him;
Yet the chosen Offering bring;
Ours, the weary long endeavour;
Theirs, the happy entering in:
Ours, to strive and wait and labour;
Theirs, to joy before the King!
“Except ye be as the children,
Have ye in my courts no place:”—
Lord, how meekly would we ponder
The glad secret of their grace!
Not in holy painful living;
Not in tears nor suppliant prayers;
Not in white days free from sinning,—
Not such sanctity is theirs.
What do they to take the Kingdom?
Only this leave they undone—
Suffering Christ the King within them,—
They in nought invade His throne:
On the children’s brows no witness
That themselves do fill their thought;
In the children’s hearts no strivings
That to them be honour brought.
Therefore finds the King an entrance; Freely goes He out and in;Sheds the gladness of His presence; Doth for babes great victories win!

All I can say is "Wow!"

We are using Mason's Alveary by CMI, doing 1A this year. Our schedule looks great! Another new thing is that we are leaving MUS behind and using Richele Baburina's Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching, a CM Living Math. I am very excited to try this out.

I mentioned to Fina last night that I thought it would be a good idea to get dressed before starting school. But she really wanted to stay in her pjs. That is part of why she likes to homeschool, she says! And who wouldn't want to stay in their pjs if they were so comfy as these ones are?


We started our day with morning prayer and our Bible lesson.
Fina wanted to do math next, so we explored the numbers 1, 2 and 3. It went really well.
Recitation will work a little different this year. Each day, we will be reading through a different recitation piece. We started with reciting a hymn today. Fina really enjoyed trying to read in a beautiful way. She almost memorized the first verse. And reading the other verses was great reading practice for her.

We did some sol-fa work, learning Sol and Mi.

We reviewed some cursive writing.
I read a handful of poems.
I read and Fina narrated a portion from one of our current nature lore books, Dallas Lore Sharp's The Fall of the Year. It is quite different than other nature lore things we have read. It is very flowery and poetic, but Fina surpassed my expectations with her narrations.

We learned to sing "A Sailor Went to Sea Sea Sea." It is going to be fun when we add the clapping game to this one. This is a blast from my past!

We continued on with our Pio Peep for our Spanish lesson. I love that Fina is never reluctant to speak words in Spanish.

We went out for our outdoor playgroup and got to spend some time journalling about a spruce tree at a museum before our friends met us. We did no painting or sketching. We observed the tree carefully and Fina dictated her observations and I wrote them in her nature journal. This is really going to work well for us!

Thanks for joining us today!