A week of firsts!

We started our first Shakespeare play! With salmon and potatoes baking in the oven for supper, we read through Act I Scene i of Much Ado About Nothing. Fina did a great job, reading the parts of the Messenger and the Prince. Fina's homeschooling dad read Leonato, Benedick and others, and I read Beatrice, Hero, Claudio and others. It was really great! I had a serious "moment" while we were reading. It is just so incredible to think that my little one can read Shakespeare!!! I loved it!
We have really enjoyed the Joss Whedon movie version of it. Not at all appropriate for Fina, but fun for adults and for Whedon fans.

We also started up our piano lessons. We're having a great review after way too much time away from them. Fina really enjoys playing, which is so great!

Fina's homeschooling dad just started reading The Hobbit aloud to her. This is her first Tolkien experience ever. (She is a lover of C.S. Lewis. They have read through that series aloud together at least 4 times over the years. It's kind of their "thing.")

I was at the Charlotte Mason Living Retreat in Georgia on the weekend. It was so wonderful to see old friends, to meet many social-media friends I had never met "in real life" and to make so many new friends!

We've had our first couple of snows. It was not easy going to Georgia and then coming back to this! Fina is pleased. I'm needing a bit of time to adjust.

The ski goggles might have been a bit much!

The crab apple tree behind our house has all of its green leaves yet!

This rarely happens here - snow you can use for building!

We are really enjoying our biographies and historical fiction selections for this year. We are studying the 1800s for our history, so we are reading Canadian stories about that time period. Tecumseh by Luella Bruce Creighton (it is on of The Great Canadian Stories on loan to us from our friends), The Broken Blade by William Durbin (about a 13 year old that goes off to be a voyageur in 1800), Jeremy's War 1812 by John Ibbitson. We are also reading a biography about St Thérèse de Lisieux (from the Pauline Encounter the Saints series. Cute little books that are easy to get on Amazon). Am embarrassment of riches in the historical fiction / biography. Which is great, because we had had trouble with that in the past.

Our poet for the term is Wordsworth and we are enjoying those poems. Fina and I are reading E Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle as our read aloud. I'm having trouble getting into it, but she loves it.