Skiing, hunting tracks and lots of poetry

Fina went skiing for the first time for the season on Monday. There wasn't much snow, but it was good enough. Later on that evening, she said that her muscles hurt. After having skied for maybe 45 minutes. It is funny, but I don't remember her complaining about sore muscles last year. Her old bones must be getting tired!

On Tuesday, we had a lovely outdoor playgroup. We built a lovely fire and then the kids built two more. Fina built this one with her little friend. Ski goggles really help keep the smoke out of your eyes!

And we were all so nice and toasty warm. It was just lovely!

We've got one more week of lessons, and then we'll do our term 1 exams. This term has flown by (albeit very slowly at times!) Exams are always fun. I'll have to think of something special to do to celebrate. I read about people who do something special every afternoon of exam week. But I think we'll keep it a bit more low key than that!

Our composer for the term is Chopin and Fina is really enjoying his pieces. I'm not a huge Chopin fan myself, but I "get" why she likes the piano pieces we have been studying. They are utterly danceable. We get many a fairy ballet dance happening while we listen to them. It's great to see her so excited about it. (Some of our previous composer studies fell kind of flat for her, in my opinion.)

Fina continues her love of poetry and of recitation. We finished reading Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and just for fun, I asked if she could recite (from memory) some of it. She already knows the first seven stanzas. And she loves it. She even does the voices. It is great to listen to her!

He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

Then, she was reciting "The Battle of New Orleans" by John Donne English, and as she got to the last few lines, she started singing it to the melody of "Blessed Be The God of Israel" which is Merle's Tune (for those of you in the know about hymn tunes). So we counted out syllables and saw that the metre of the poem is 7676, and the lines of 6 syllables rhyme in pairs. Such fun! This kid is really too much sometimes.

Another fun experience happened while we were reading our historical fiction read. We were reading Jeremy's War and who should we come sauntering in to meet General Brock, but Tecumseh! After he had gathered the first nations tribes together in an alliance, he comes to General Brock. We just read about that alliance Tecumseh had put together in our biography read, The Story of the Shawnee Chief: Tecumseh from the series The Great Stories of Canada. (Thanks to our friend L who loaned it to us) It is so cool to be reading about your biography study in your historical fiction! We had read about Tecumseh meeting General Brock in our history spine weeks ago, but now to read about him meeting Brock in Jeremy's War was very exciting for Fina and for me! Especially how the story was told in Jeremy's War. I'm reading along, and there is a first nation warrior who is coming and he is described and then Fina looks at me, with anticipation in her eyes, and says "it can't be who I think it is, can it?" and then, the great reveal. It was a priceless moment!

We had a nice walk in a lovely nearby spot (our friend H has a woodsy spot in behind her property. It is the old creek bed here in town) on Thursday and we came upon so many animal tracks. We hunted them for a while. Rabbits, squirrels, mice, cats and dogs.

And then we found these wing prints! It looks like there was a scuffle with a rabbit. We had fun imagining that it could have been a hawk or an eagle or something. We could see the prey scurrying about and finally succumbing to the predator. The wing prints are kind of small, but it could have just been the tip of the wing that printed in the snow. Or it could have been some smaller bird. Very interesting, either way!

Fina was able to capture, on camera, this Downy Woodpecker pecking at our bonfire logs. What a cute little guy. As if there aren't trees right there, though!

Blue jays, knitting, piano, free reads and more

Fina was sewing some pages together with a felt cover, to make a little booklet) and she sewed the whole thing onto the table cloth. We laughed and laughed as we ripped out the stitches and she started over again!

She has been working hard on some knitting. She wanted this fancy, luxurious velvet yarn and she is really enjoying working on it with some thick knitting needles that we picked up at our local thrift store.

We've got some new snow over here and Fina is quite pleased about that.

We started reading Susan Tan's Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinare and are enjoying it so far. It is a funny story about a little girl growing up in a family with a Chinese dad and a Caucasian American mom. The author, having grown up herself in that same kind of family, incorporates many of her own life-stories, as she explained on this episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast.

We also started another Edith Nesbit book, Five Children and It. There are already some similarities with The Enchanted Castle. It is a page turner, for sure!

We really are having a fun time with our free reads this term. We just need to find more time in our day to sit down and read!

I don't know why it took me years to come around to this idea. A little basket with our free reads and historical fiction and biography. The rest of our school books are on the shelf. But these are what we pull from when we are just doing some extra reading. Perfect!

For the first part of the term, alongside reading from our poetry anthology year round, we read some poems by William Wordsworth. And in the second part of the term, we are reading some poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I was able to sign out the Coleridge book from the Poetry for Young People series from our provincial education library (if you homeschool in MB and don't know about that library, please ask me! It is a great resource. And if you don't know about that PfYP series, ask me about that too!) We are in the middle of their selection from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." And we are loving it. So much to talk about. Such lovely language. We are really getting into it. We read only 5 or 6 stanzas a day. I knew of that poem, but had never read it. This is a trope with our poetry. What a blessing to be exposed to so many wonderful things through our children. Moms are persons too. And moms also deserve the feast!

There are a couple of blue jays that spend a good part of their day in the crabapple tree behind our house. They keep coming to our tiny window feeder. They are much bigger than our feeder! Along with a dozen chickadees, a handful of white-breasted nuthatches, and some cool reddish thing we've yet to identify. We could sit on our couch for hours and watch them flit back and forth. Last year, we thought the chickadees were afraid of the blue jays, but these ones seem to take turns alighting on our bird feeder.

I hope he doesn't pull our feeder down. We are firmly entrenched in the below-freezing temperature range, and I don't know when I'd next be able to attach those suction cups. They need a warm-ish window to start. Then they will hold for a very long time!

And if anyone can help us identify this little guy with reddish on his back under his wings, that would be great! Zoom in to see some details.

Fina caught this picture of one flying away.

That band of red is on its lower back, usually hidden under its wings.

Please ignore the pyjamas. And the vibrato French. And the poor hand posture! Fina wanted to play it four times in a row with her eyes closed. And she did it! After much practice. We are having wonderful piano lessons right now.

This kid (aka "person") has a real knack of driving me 'round the bend at times. But I love her dearly and am so greatly enjoying the beauty of the everyday. Not all day, I'll be the first to admit. I have constant struggles. But every day. This is Charlotte Mason IRL, my friends.

Mosses and lichens and fun with a skipping rope

On Monday morning we had a disastrous lesson time. Just disastrous. I'm not sure why. The weekend was extremely busy and Fina was just in a state. If I'm being honest, I was in a bit of a state myself. At any rate, we packed up to go to the forest for our nature study just the same. On our way out Fina said "mom, can I bring the long skipping rope to tie to trees and stuff?" Sure, Fina, bring whatever will get us out of the door right now!

Well, give a girl a good, sturdy rope and wait and see what you get!

She tied the rope around her waist and was "mountaineering" on the trees.

And then she somehow decided to make herself a swing. I was working on my nature study and didn't help her at all. She tied this knot.

And then swung and swung, sitting and standing. For like an hour. She was so proud of herself

I looked at this cutest mushroom, that was growing on a felled tree.

And we read about our cute red-topped moss from last week. It is actually a Cladonia, a lichen with fungi spores! We are reading Dorothy Sterling's The Story of Mosses, Ferns and Mushrooms.
Dorothy Sterling says "The prettiest of all the lichens are the Cladonias. Many of them are so tiny that you have passed them by without noticing. Once you meet them, you won't forget them, however." Too true!

It is called the Scarlet-Crested Cladonia. This one is nicknamed the "British Soldier" because there are bright red knobs on top of the stalks, "as bright a red as the uniforms worn by British soldiers during the American Revolution." Fungi spores are formed in those scarlet knobs.

This pic is from last week. Zoom in and you will see our brush drawing of the "British Soldier." We knew it was special, we just didn't know what it was! It was our dear friend Linda who first noticed them last week while we were walking together and Fina and I went back for further investigation.

On Monday, we searched high and low elsewhere in the forest to see if we could find more of them, and we did not. Only on this original tree stump! We are so thankful to have spent some time observing it and learning about it!

We finished reading E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle. I fear Fina has a bit of me when she said, at the end of the book, "I didn't love the ending. I feel like something else should have happened." I know, my dear one, I know! Sometimes it is hard when books end because you don't want them to end, or sometimes the ending just feels unsatisfactory. I get it.

We're reading some great historical fiction right now. We're really getting "into" the 1800s. We are reading Jeremy's War 1812, The Broken Blade, and now we started The Incident at Hawk's Hill. I thought of it as our new free read, but after the first chapter realized that it is set in the 1870s and talks a lot about the same things we're reading about in history - the Red River Valley, the settlers coming north of Winnipeg and more. It is so wonderful to make connections between things and to make connections with things. What a blessing!

Fina is really enjoying our Spanish lessons. Today we started a new little poem and I continue to marvel at how much she understands. She can translate into English with great facility. I can hardly believe my eyes (well, my ears) sometimes.

We have our struggles, do not delude yourselves about that, my dear readers. But the blessings far outnumber the heartache!