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,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.
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
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!
No comments:
Post a Comment