snow!

Here is a little summary of our last few weeks:

We started our Architecture lessons! I found V.M. Hillyer's elusive A Child's History of Art (including the three sections on Painting, Sculpture and Architecture) at a used book sale in September and I was so excited! We did the first chapter on Egyptian houses of the dead: pyramids and tombs cut from rock. Fina really enjoyed it!

Fina absolutely loves Wanderings of Odysseus. She isn't squeamish, like other kids can be, about Cyclops banging their heads on the ground and crushing their brain etc.

For our handicrafts, Fina is continuing to work on her loom knitting, knitting with two needles (that  grandma taught her), and whittling.

We started reading The Courage of Sarah Noble as part of our historical fiction. And we started reading George Vancouver, a biography, to go along with our Canadian history.

Fina is loving doing the brush-drawing work. She paints something almost every day.

We saw this manequin at the ROM last month and she wanted to paint the Pharoah's wife.

Fina also greatly enjoys drawing with chalk pastels.

Her cursive work is coming along nicely. We are learning a lot through copywork. I just pick a line or a poem from her readings and she works on that, one word at a time.

Fina reads aloud for at least 10 minutes every day. She is progressing by leaps and bounds.

Aside from our poetry compilation, we have been reading some poems by Robert Frost in Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost. She is reciting his winter poems wonderfully!

Her Spanish is coming along nicely. We work on our story, our song, our nursery rhyme and associated vocab. And she loves it. She has also created a strong relationship with a certain Topo Gigio album while visiting my parents (and their record player). Thanks to YouTube, we found a copy of it. Further continuing our Spanish and Italian lessons through song!

We are in full winter over here, but had a temperature respite this week. These are the kids at outdoor playgroup. They were actually able to build snow structures!

This morning, before we started our school, we spent a long while observing the birds at our window feeder. We saw many chickadees, who darted back and forth, and then two blue jays came. They scared away the chickadees who did not return for a long while. For our drawing lesson at the end of our morning, Fina drew this chickadee, first from memory (she laughed and laughed, because it looks like a seagull!) and then from her field guide.

It actually wasn't terrible. She got the cap and the neck part quite right, actually. It is just the body shape that was off.

In other news, I finally started keeping my own Book of Centuries. I'm using Laurie Bestvater's. I have another one, by Riverbend Press, ready for Fina when she is older. My first entry? 1576, Martin Frobisher's first voyage. It is all very exciting!