Christmas break

We've had a Christmas break from formal lessons and spent a lot of time just reading aloud.

Fina's homeschooling dad finished reading The Hobbit with her and they started The Lord of the Rings.
He read Kate Seredy's A Tree for Peter aloud for all of us over a few days at Christmas and it was a very touching story.

Fina and I read a bunch of Christmas-y books.
We absolutely loved Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. I can't believe I've never read it. We both were impressed at the language, the turn of phrase. You can just tell a living book, even reading a few sentences. That book is beautiful, through and through. We ILL'd the version illustrated by P. J. Lynch, upon the recommendations of some CM moms, and it did not disappoint.
We also greatly enjoyed Astrid Lindgren's The Children of the Noisy Village. Such a cute book, with the Christmas chapter in it.
Rumer Godden's The Story of Holly and Ivy is the sweetest book we've read in a long time. It's a new favourite.

We were on a Tomie DePaola kick. We read his Francis: The Poor Man of Assisi which is a beautiful book! The Lady of Guadalupe, The Legend of Old Befana, The Legend of the Pointsettia, and The Story of the Three Wise Kings.

We read a few other more modern books.
We liked Susan Tan's Cilla Lee-Jenkins: Future Author Extraordinare. It is nice to see a biracial girl exploring her identity.
We also read Karina Yan Glaser's The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street. I really wanted to like that book, but I think it ever so slightly deals with things in a little bit more of a mature manner than I had hoped, based on the reviews. I didn't always love how the kids treated each other. And I didn't care for the love interest. But you do feel like the brownstone is a character. It is well-written. Fina really wants to read the sequel. We shall see.

Fina is loving all things E. Nesbit. After having read The Enchanted Castle in the fall. We read her Five Children and It and Fina loved it! As soon as we finished that, we started reading The Phoenix and the Carpet. I did not know that it was a trilogy, the third book being The Story of the Amulet.

She got this cute loom from Ikea and has been making tiny carpets and mats with it.

Plus lots of playing outside, some skating and some skiing.

We have had quite a few days where the snow is buildable this year. More than usual. Which has been fun.

We started back to school last week, but I'm working on a new post for that. Thank you for your patience, kind readers!

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!

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!

Early morning sunrise and more!

Fina woke up really early on Monday morning (though the sun is also rising later!) and she saw a lovely sunrise. She ran downstairs to tell us about it. So her and I put on our boots and our coats and ran outside in the chilly air to marvel at God's beauty. We ran out to the north edge of town (which is about 350 metres from our front door!), where we could watch the spectacle from the field, unhindered by any buildings or trees. Fina said "I wish I was quick enough to paint this, but by the time I get out my paints, it will be gone!"

On Monday afternoon, we started our special study on moss (and lichen) at the forest. We're wondering why moss seems to grow on the upper side of the trees. Even with the slightest incline, the moss is on the upper part. It is so interesting!!! There is a lot of moss in our forest, and every day we get to observe and make notes on different types in different spots.

On Thursday, we hit 1000 hours outside. I've mentioned this challenge before. It is to encourage families to spend more time outside (and less time watching tv!). We started counting on April 1. The lovely weather of this last week has really helped! We are getting a proper fall, after the snow of the beginning of the month. I think this is the fastest we've hit our 1000 hours. It is really great for us to keep track of Fina's time outside. It actually encourages me to see those numbers grow.

We've been enjoying brush drawing outside without frozen hands!

It took all of her will not to jump into that lovely rushing water of the creek!

We are enjoying Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It is fun for the three of us to take parts and do a read through. So much fun.

Fina is really enjoying our historical fiction selection, Jeremy's War 1812. Jeremy becomes a "batboy" for General Brock. It's a great story that really captures one's imagination. We are both enjoying it.

We are also enjoying our biography about Tecumseh. He was a fascinating man. The book is well written, moving between very technical and historical parts, as well as some more "human" stories from his life.

History is really coming together for us this term, for which I am very grateful.

a little glimpse of summer

On Thursday, we had a high of 24 degrees! Fina was thrilled to be outside (from noon til 9 pm!), with shorts, a t-shirt and barefooted. Skipping rope through the park. Squishing her toes in the mud. Doing nature study with its brush drawing while outside! And playing, playing, and playing with her little friends. It was glorious. A break from winter! (You will remember my pics from last week. One week exactly!)

We know it won't last, so we enjoyed it while we had it! We don't have the Chinook in MB, but that is what it seems like. Maybe it was our "Indian Summer." We don't always have it that strongly either.

It is so nice to sit outside and paint. I did three entries myself. I could have sat there all day!
It is true that, in winter, you can observe a lot of things that get "crowded out" in the other seasons. So many things are bare, which brings to the fore the things that aren't bare, or the details you miss when they are overshadowed by vibrant foliage. We've been enjoying that in our nature studies this week. We tend to be pulled in by plant life in all of its forms. We see the birds, but they are harder to paint.

I studied this little tree. There were two of them along the path in our park. It still had full green leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but it is certainly beautiful!

The juncos are busily doing their thing right now. We're not sure what their story is, exactly, but they are flitting around, pecking at the grass, eating in large flocks. They are beautiful!

We are in the final stretch of our current free read, Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle. Fina really enjoys it. For some strange (unknown to me) reason, I find it weird, awkward, and sort of uneven. But I'm really not sure why I am having trouble with this classic! Chacun son goût, I suppose!

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.

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!

Back to school!

We started back to school last week!

"How do we make our nature walk and journalling time shorter?" asked nobody ever! We had our first nature walk this week, on Monday (I couldn't get myself organized enough to actually take Fina on a nature ramble last week. She got in hours and hours of outdoor play, but either with her friends or with me, but without any journalling).

We went down to the creek and I asked her to wander a bit to find something that would catch her fancy.  Fina found a tiny clam (she loves clams!) and painstaking painted one half of its shell, from the convex side and from the concave side. And look at what she had me write!

This first photo shows three 3 images - the first is Fina's painting of the outer side of the shell, the second shows the painting of the inside of it. The blue splotch was Fina trying to trace the clam with paint -- the paint ran, she worked furiously to try to contain it, and then to wash the paint out of the paper etc. She was a bit upset as this was her new journal, but she did not get frustrated (which completely surprised me. I expected her to cry!) and decided it would be a lovely colour for a background and traced her shell in pencil. She really wanted to depict the actual size of the shell. I told her that next time she could draw just the outline with a really fine brush (without tracing, but free hand.)

We were out for 2 hours that afternoon. We had a lovely ramble and a detailed observation time, with lots of discussion and enjoyment and gazing at God's splendour, focusing on a tiny clam shell that is only1cm in diameter.

And on Thursday, she did these brush drawings during our nature time, with ample written narrative as well. (It was freezing cold, windy with such a terribly cold northerly wind blowing on us. But Fina would not be deterred. Good thing, because I would not have chosen to stay out there to journal.)

We got a new sloyd book this year and we are really giving it a go!

I'll have to get a pic of Fina cutting her folds with an exact-o knife. She just loves it!

One of our poets for the term is William Wordsworth. We read his "There was a Boy" poem on Thursday.

I didn't really know what this poem was about, but after we read it she told me that she thought the boy was maybe actually the sun, or maybe even God. Because she figured the boy wasn't human. How on earth did she get that? But she did!!! Incredible. She said it was because how he had his hands held, with fingers interwoven, and shouting across the Vale, and being received into the Lake. The sun could do all of that! We had this interesting discussion about this poem.

A little group of us have started a mom's study group to read volume 1 of Charlotte Mason's Home Education series. There were 8 of us at our first meeting. Such a blessing to have an actual, in real life, local group. This is something we've been praying and hoping for for a long time!

I'll leave you with this cuteness: Fina and her little friend built this house at outdoor playgroup this week.