Winter is coming! Not yet. Autumn is short in Manitoba!

Well, the temperature just dropped terribly here, and we are hovering just above 0 celsius. Windy, grey. We had 10 minutes of heave snow thing morning. It didn't amount to anything, but still. It isn't easy.

We had to take our nature journalling indoors. We were looking at a pineapple weed in the park, but it was too cold to even write in our journals! So we wrote and painted inside.

Today, Fina did her first written narration. I call it written, though she dictated it to me and I wrote it out longhand. This requires her to slow down and think about her narration. We read the first half of Chapter 97 of Our Island Story. This is the narration she dictated to me.

I read the first paragraph, and she narrated:

They [the British] killed their King and Queen, so then they had a Prime Minister. This guy was very peaceful. And France went against them, and they started fighting by land and sea.

I read on, and she narrated:

Only the British were strong enough against Napoleon, a guy who only cared about himself. He didn't care and gave the crown of the kings to his friends. He didn't care how much the people suffered. Napoleon was from France. 

I read, and she continued:

Napoleon wanted to conquer England. He knew the Irish hate the English too and would be willing to help the French. So he wanted to invade the Irish but the Irish wouldn't let them, so they were forced to leave. Then the people decided to be united instead, and not be at war and be nice to each other. The British soldiers spoiled everything, they spoiled Napoleon's plans and they made peace with France.

I read the last portion of our reading, and she finished her narration:

Every sailor felt his courage rising, because they were on ships and this guy [Nelson] said "I am like a cat watching for the Spaniards like mice and I know I might be filled while I am at it." And he sent a signal from the top of his own ship the Victory, "England expects that every man will have to do his duty."

This is a fine narration, as far as I'm concerned. (So, we'll have to work on the "guy" thing. I should write the names on the white board before we start, so that she has a reference.) She is not proficient enough in her writing, so I thought we'd do it this way to start. Down the road, I will have her write the first few lines herself and then just give an oral narration for the rest of it. I really wanted to give her the chance to hold her narration, and slow it down to the speed of my writing, which is quicker than her writing, of course, as an intermediate step!

I went with some of my friends to the big used book sale in our nearby city and got these gems, among many others. It was a great day!

Abe Lincoln is my first ever Landmark!

Fina is working hard on keeping her cursive writing to be precise and consistent. We are making our way through the alphabet as a review, and we'll move on to word and sentence copywork as soon as we are able.

We are really enjoying our Canadian historical fiction, Jeremy's War 1812. It is so fun to see how it lines up exactly with our Brown's The Story of Canada as well as the British Our Island Story. After reading the OIS passage that we read above, we read Jeremy and they were speaking about General Brock (from our Brown reading from a few days ago) as well as Napoleon. We are really enjoying history this year!

I found a neat biography of Robert Louis Stevenson through our province's educational library and we've been reading it. We pulled out our old copy of his A Child's Garden of Verses and read the poems that are alluded to in stories of his childhood. It is so interesting to see how much his poems were inspired by his actual life. He actually suffered from tuberculosis and spent a lot of time playing in bed, which inspired his poem "The Land of Counterpane." He also actually had a lamp on the street outside his window and the neighbourhood lamp lighter was actually named Leerie. This biography is a great read. She has written a bunch of other biographies that I hope to track down. They are 48 pages, with pictures and quite accessible for form 1 and 2, I think.

During her nature study today she was singing our hymn "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which she claims she doesn't really like. But it certainly is catchy!

It has been a good week. We are enjoying the feast. It isn't always easy, but it is delicious!