January 28, AO yr 1, week 11

On Tuesday, we had our outdoor playgroup. A wonderful success. We are so blessed to be surrounded by like-minded moms. The kids had a great time. We were out for 4 hours.

On Wednesday, we went to the library to work in the afternoon. We did a lot of free reading in the morning and free play time. Halfway through the afternoon, our good friend L came to pick Fina up to play at her house, outside with her kids. It was plus 3 (incredible for January in MB!) and they played for a few hours. I picked her up and we came home and she got to play for another while outside in the dark with her friend K. She was outside for 4 hours. I'm so thankful L was able to help me out. I did not Fina to miss out on such warm weather. They got to build big boulders, though no snowmen. Again, not a common occurrence in MB.

Today, we started our homeschooling day with some cursive writing. We finished reviewing the letters. She is trying very hard to maintain a proper pencil group. It seems better.

The red is mom's writing, reminders of some of the letters. 

She wants to write Shakespeare tomorrow, so we had to learn k and p.

I read the next poem to her from When We Were Very Young, titled "The Four Friends." A cute poem. Fina recited her two poems from this book very well.  I didn't use the memorization box today, but I certainly will.

We sang our folksong "Home on the Range."

She recited all her Shakespeare passages to me. We continued working on the Theseus and Hippolyta passage. She knew the Theseus perfectly and wanted to learn Hippolyta's response to him, so she did. In just a few minutes, she learned the whole response.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

And there was a Bonus passage, so she learned that too.

Puck Act III, Scene 2, 474-476

Jack shall have Jill;
Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

This one still needs a bit of work. But in 10 minutes, she learned all these lines. It is just incredible!

That is it for the passages from A Midsummer Night's Dream.  She really has a facility for recitation. I'm excited to see what the future will hold for her. She certainly has artistic leanings.

I read from Judges 6:11-24 and she narrated back to me.

We continued with our math. We did 28B, C, D and E.  We went back to continue with telling time.

I read a short passage from our Italian kids' bible.

It was a shortened school day, but it was a good day for sure.

She got to play outside after her friends came home from school. It is a lovely, sunny day here!

January 25, AO year 1, week 11

On Friday afternoon we were listening to Brahms. And being inspired by watercolours at co-op the day before, Fina pulled out the supplies.  "I want to be an artist when I grow up, mamma" she said as she created these watercolour paintings.

"Peaseblossom mountain" (peaseblossom is one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"3-Dimensional Images" - a wall, a vine, a witch, an apple

She really enjoys painting. I need to provide more opportunity for her to do dry-brush technique for painting something from nature.

On Saturday, we finally got to go cross-country skiing for the first time! We went with our friend K and her mom L. It was beyond incredible. I can not believe how well the girls did. We probably skied about 2 kms and were out for more than two hours. Fina did such a great job. They both loved it and have been asking to go back.

We both had a great time!

Monday morning:

I was doing some maintenance on my blog, changing some labels to be more long-term, like changing artist names to just "picture study" when I had the bright idea to give the search box another go. It seems like blogger fixed something.
I now have a functioning search box!!! Yay, yay, YAY!!!  
😀😃😊😍😍😍👏👌👏💚💙💛💜💗💖✅ 
I'm not all tech savvy, so I don't know what else to write that can express my abundant joy at this now working! (You will have to content yourselves with these emoticons.)

Dear blog followers, PLEASE try to search something in the box and let me know in the comments that it does actually work! (I want to be sure that this isn't just a dream!)

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Monday morning school time:

Fina emptied the dishwasher with me.  We started our school this morning with reading part of the chapter called "The Unknown Land" from Parables from Nature. I read from the modern paraphrase today and it went well. We read about half of it, and we stopped three times for Fina to narrate. She did well with it. We followed the link to hear the warbler's song, which was neat.

We sang our current hymn and Fina recited "The Apostles' Creed."

Recitation: I asked Fina to recite all her poems from A Child's Garden of Verse and she was able to do all of them wonderfully. I think I need to make a memorization box with all of our poems. I had to flip around in iBooks to find the poems she knows. I'm going to write each poem on an index card and put them into a recipe card box, similar to the set up the SimplyCharlotteMason has on their website for scripture memorization. (Updated to add, Brandy just posted this at her blog, it is clearly laid out, http://afterthoughtsblog.net/2016/01/how-we-organize-our-memory-binder-an-update.html) I then asked her to recite "Corner-of-the-Street," the poem she knows from When We Were Very Young. She did that. She also had memorized another poem from there "Happiness" without my quite realizing it, so she asked to recite that as well.  I read a new poem from there, "Puppy and I," to her, and then we listened to Peter Denis' recitation of it on our audiobook.  Then I had her recite her Shakespeare passages to me as well. Which she did very well. We learned lines 5 and 6, the end of Theseus' speech. We will continue next time with Hippolyta's answer to him.

I read another little chunk from our Italian bible. We are still on the story of Noah and the flood. We only spend 5 minutes with it, but she is listening.

We read chapter 9 of Paddle to the Sea and Fina was able to narrate it, well enough. We like to linger over the drawings and pull out the atlas and look at where Paddle is. It is interesting (incredible, really!) how something so small could lead to geography work in the way that it does.

We sang our current folksong, "Home on the Range." Fina actually sang along with me!

We picked up our cursive, after a very long time! She tried very hard to hold her pen properly. We reviewed most of our letters, though we still have 6 or 7 left to review next time. She did a good job with her pencil grip. Understandably, after such a long hiatus, she needed a refresher on the letters.

We went on with our math. She said she was "tired" of doing the clock, so we went on to SUBTRACTION! She did wonderfully with it. We did 29A, C and D. We will go back to the missing pages and the clock stuff next time.

She is doing an episode of yoga while I write this blog post and while I'm preparing lunch.

That is it for our school work today.

She is really on this Hermia and Helena kick with her little friend K. She wants to put on a play of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is long term work for her, prepping costumes, deciding who will do what, making lists of characters, signs with the name of the play, etc etc etc. Fina just LOVES it!

January 18, AO year 1, week 10

We started the morning with Fina's request to listen to some Zecchino D'oro, while she planned costumes for Helena and Hermia from A Midsummer Night's Dream. She has gotten it into her head that she wants to put on a play. I'm not sure with whom she plans on doing this: if it is for co-op or just with her friend K. We shall see how that progresses! She is certainly working hard.

We prayed the Lord's Prayer together(-ish). I read a bit from it Italian bible. We sang "Canticle of the Turning" (Gather, 527). We sang the first verse and the refrain. I think we'll stick with this one for a bit. The hope is that she will join in more and more.

She recited her four Shakespeare passages to me. She does an excellent job with that.

Fina did a couple of episodes of her cosmickids.com yoga.

We started reading from When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne. We have this big collection of Winnie the Pooh that includes both story books and both poetry books.  We read the first two poems, "Corner-of-the-Street" and "Buckingham Palace."  We also borrowed the audio book on Overdrive, read by Peter Dennis, and listened to his readings of the two poems as our second read through. Then we looked up a photograph of Buckingham palace and talked about how the Queen lives there.

I read "King Alfred and the Beggar" from Fifty Famous Stories Retold and Fina did an excellent job narrating it to me.

I read the story of the spies to Canaan and the grapes from Numbers 13:1-14:9. She also narrated that well enough.

I thought it was high time to start some folksongs, so I found this version of "Home on the Range" (sung by Gene Autry) and I sang along to it. Fina recognized it because my brother has sung a different, funny version to her. So she enjoyed that. We will stick to this folk song for a little while, I think.

We did our next lesson of math, session 27, just the hours in telling time. We reviewed minutes and she did a great job with that. Next, we will do hours AND minutes.

I read one story from The Red Fairy Book, her current free read. I read "Jack and the Beanstalk." It was great. Right at the start, someone has "fever and ague." We had heard about that in The Little House on the Prairies series, and we looked it up and it is malaria.  And then Fina remembered that in Hudson the sailors got malaria from not eating enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Charlotte Mason would call this the science of relations. I love when these types of connections are made.

We had a great start back in earnest today. I carefully avoided all writing with a utensil today. We need to keep working on that pincer grip and I didn't want to tackle that today, so I wrote down her math for her.

Leading up to January 11

On Saturday January 9, we spent a few hours playing outside in ridiculously low temperatures! We took Fina's friend K to the forest behind the museum. The girls had lots of fun. My toes and fingers were just frozen. We have been so spoiled this year with a warm winter. We kind of forgot what this feels like.

We have been reading a lot from our free reads, The Red Fairy Book, Paddington and The Chronicles of Narnia. Fina has also been doing a lot of Lego. What fun!

Fina continues to recite her three (plus one bonus) passages from Shakespeare. Incredible. I think she is ready for the next one, which is the final passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream. After this next one, Ken Ludwig moves us into Twelfth Night. Should be fun.

She also drew two things from artforkidshub. She really enjoys that as well.

(Almost) every night, dad reads a chapter or two from the Bible aloud to us after dinner. We finished Genesis and have moved on to Exodus. Fina and I also end each night praying Night Prayer and often Evening Prayer as well from divineoffice.org.  I am really enjoying it.

We keep struggling with Fina's pencil grip. I am going to take the advice of one of my Montessori friends and try having her play with tweezers, playdough, tongs etc to strengthen her pincer grip. I really wish we had dealt with this a long time ago. But I have to be thankful for all the things that are going well, and not focus on what is a struggle. I just don't want her to get discouraged or exasperated. "Parents, do not exasperate your children" the Bible says (Ephesians 6:4)!

We had a good Sunday on January 10th, heading into the city for church etc.  We read another two chapters from The Red Fairy Book. The chopping up of humans by trolls etc does not seem to phase Fina in the least. I love it!!! And it is funny, of the first 5 fairy tales we have read, two are from one of the authors of the Norwegian Fairy Tales book we borrowed from our friend. Who would have known!?!

On Monday morning, we woke up to the news that David Bowie had died. (Dad wrote a book about Bowie in 2015. Dad also wrote a book about Morrissey a few years ago.)  Fina's comment, as I told her what had happened: "I'm glad Morrissey didn't die too, because there wouldn't be anyone left for dad to write a book about. Though, wouldn't it be funny if dad wrote a book about Adele?" Oh the innocence and joy of childhood!

Fina spent a good hour playing with our homemade playdough. We made two half batches on Sunday night and two more half batches on Monday morning using this recipe from artfulparent.com (we used the second recipe, the boiling water, no cook one). It is very soft and nice.

This is a pic of the first two batches we made. Then we also made purple and pink.

Fina also wanted to read a few stories from The Red Fairy Book before breakfast, so we did that. She really loves fairy tales. I'm flabbergasted at times.

Then we got very busy following dad's busy day of interviews regarding David Bowie's death.  He gave an excellent radio interview live on Newstalk770 out of Calgary that we listened to. It was quite the experience for Fina and I to hear dad live on the radio (well, on the computer). He had many other interviews, for print media, for radio and even a TV news crew came out from the city to interview him for the 6-o'clock news. All very exciting!

We got the chance to read A Midsummer Night's Dream: For Kids, by that same author of The Tempest that we own, Lois Burdett. We got through ILL. It was equally as cute!

Fina played with a lot of playdough today. Here is to hoping that it will help her with her pencil grip down the road!

It was a fun, but hectic day. We had planned on starting schooling today, but that didn't quite happen, but we are good with that!

Thanks for reading!

December 3

Our homeschool co-op ended up getting postponed (one of the siblings in our group has croup!!!) so we decided to go with dad to Kids College at his work. It is a fun moms and tots type of play time in the school gym. Fina has been asking to go to it, expressing her concern that now, because she is homeschooling, she never gets to do fun stuff like that anymore!  Right. So, we went.

We watched the video for chapter 24 before leaving the house, making 10s (you know, 9+1, 8+2, 7+3, 6+4, 5+5 all equal 10). Once we got to the university, we sat and did a bit of math (24A-C) before the play time started.

I am having a hard time right now with her not holding her writing utensil properly. Even with her Lamy ABC fountain pen, that has the grips built right in, she is doing acrobatics to get her third finger into strange places. I'm not quite sure what to do about that. It is causing so much frustration that during this math time, I took the pen and filled in the answers for her.  I read somewhere online about using stubby pencils (or taking a pencil and cutting it into three and sharpening the tiny pieces). I might have to try that. I don't want it to be an issue of contention, but now I feel like she is doing it on purpose!

We had a nice day at the university. Went for lunch with dad and his (and our) professor friends.After lunch, we went for a short hike on campus. There is a lovely forest-y area towards the (nearly-frozen) river there. We had never walked there before. We came back in and Fina played some Rush Hour Jr.  I read a few chapters of our free-read, Pinocchio, to her. Then it was time to go.

We had an eventful drive home from school, however. We were rear-ended (by a student, no less) as we came to a stop at the stop sign before turning on to the highway. Fina was drinking from her water bottle, so her lip was bleeding. And she was crying from the scare. I felt it in my neck and shoulders right away. Dad seemed ok. The car is fine (just the back bumper took the hit) but we are filing a claim. Time to replace the car seat.  Say a prayer that injuries don't pop up in the next few days. And a prayer of thanksgiving that it wasn't more serious of a crash.

I was worried Fina would be more traumatized, but she was so good once we got home. Busying herself with making a wardrobe out of cardboard and lots of tape for her 18" doll's clothes (and keeping quiet and out of the way as dad was on the phone with the insurance).  This is how we do stuff around here.

I am thankful we are all ok, the other driver too. It reminds us how important seat belts and car seats are. And how things can change in just a minute. We are very grateful to be alive and well right now!