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!