November 2, AO year 1, week 8

Well, we spent 1084 hours outside over the last year!  I'm very pleased that we actually got past the 1000 hours mark. I wasn't sure we would be able to get there, but we did!

Our new year started on November 1, with 0 hours outside, due to a chilly, dreary and gray Sunday (boy am I happy I don't live in BC. I would love the mild temperatures, but I don't think I could do gloomy for very long. We have many sunny days here in soon-to-be-frigid Manitoba!) and Fina having a bad cough and cold!

Here we are at week 8 of our first year of homeschooling.  I feel so blessed to have gathered an entire network of homeschoolers around me (seemingly all of a sudden). Some are here in town, others are not so very far away. A year ago, this network was not formed, and yet, here we are.  Let me encourage you. You might not think you will have homeschooling people around you, or parents who share your same ideals and values, but take a good look around and be open.  (Homeschooling or not. I am also so happy to have gathered an entire outdoor playgroup network of people as well. Again, you may think it is hard to find people willing to play outside, especially when you see the park etc empty, all the time. But look hard enough and be open, and you can find like-minded mamas!)
I am so happy!

Fina is pretty sick, but we will do some school work just the same.
We started with our morning prayer. Today is the day we remember all the people in our lives who have died. We remembered nonno Bis and baby Celeste Flavia. We lit a candle and remembered what we could about them (Fina didn't meet either of them, but those are the closest deaths she knows anything about).

On to section 19 of our Math - skip counting by 10s. She is doing well with this concept. We got to 100. There was a big chart that when to 100 and she wanted to test it out to see if it ACTUALLY is 100. So, she counted it patiently, one square at a time. And yes, in fact, it IS 100. It was incredible to watch! (Inquisitive minds want to know. I LOVE it!!!) She did all but the last page of section 19.

I wanted her to finish up the 19F, but she didn't want to, so it is better that we left it there!

We read Exodus 2:1-10 and Fina narrated - the story of Moses being put in the river in a basket. (This was her favourite story when she was a toddler).

We reread some poems from A Child's Garden of Verses." She learned the first stanza of "Night and Day" which is as follows:

When the golden day is done,
Through the closing portal,
Child and garden, flower and sun,
Vanish all things mortal.

She learned it quite quickly. We also read "The Flowers" and "Summer Sun."

On to the cursive letter c.  We can write cat, can, cab, cast, call and caw. She did a great (and stress-free and frustration-free, yay!) job with her letter c.

We read chapter 4 of The Burgess Bird Book, "Chippy, Sweetvoice and Dotty." Shout out of thanks to our friend E and her son S who loaned us their reprint copy of the book!

It is so funny that we seem to have less frustrations and fewer problems with our school work when Fina is sick. She just doesn't have the energy to fuss, I guess!

Sometimes I have trouble gauging (yes, I had to look that spelling up. "Gauging" is the Canadian / British spelling of the American "gaging." Both look strange written out to me, but I pronounce it with a long A) how much she is learning in a day. The good thing is I know she is retaining it, as much of what we learns comes up at the dinner table or other times throughout our days. I feel like we could do more in a day, but that might come at the expense of learning. I am happy with how today went. The flow was pretty good and there was a definite lack of frustration. So that is great. I am sure as we continue, we will be able to accomplish more and more in one day.

October 30, AO year 1, week 7

Fina is sick AGAIN. She didn't actually get completely over her cold from a few weeks ago and she has one again. Yuck!  Although she said she was too sick for school, I was able to convince her!

We did our morning prayer together and listened to some Brahms. During breakfast we listened to some Zecchino d'oro kids' songs in Italian. (She has been requesting this a lot lately. I don't know if it is too counter-balance the Brahms or what!  And she often asks what a certain line means etc. So I am happy about that.)

We finished reading The Velveteen Rabbit. It was very nice. I had never read that story, though it is so well-known in pop culture.

For math, she finished up 18D, E and F (adding 10s). I have never seen math be so smooth for her!!!

We read a new poem "Nest eggs." Cute, but a bit long to memorize.

We continued with her cursive letter b - also so wonderfully done. She even figured out how to write an l after b in blast by herself. without me showing her!!! And she somehow thought of writing Alabama, because we had written bam. And, of course, we do know the letters, so I wrote the uppercase A and she wrote the rest.

Then we read the first half of the chapter about St Patrick in Our Island Saints. We looked on the map to see where Scotland and Ireland are. She narrated it quite well. It was interesting. We heard the story of how he would use the shamrock to explain the Trinity.

We looked at our fourth painting by Corot, The Letter. We talked about the difference between a portrait and a self-portrait.  And she described what she saw in the painting. (We did it with the print visible. It seems to work better for us for now. We will see next week at our co-op, if we cover it up and other kids are remembering things they have seen, that might help her. Her competitiveness should help!)

We finally read chapter 3 from The Burgess Bird Book and listened to the song of a little sparrow on youtube to go along with it. She enjoys those stories.

October 29, AO year 1, week 7

Last night we read from our free-read list: St George and the Dragon as well as half of The Velveteen Rabbit.

Fina did a lot of drawing this morning, from our favourite youtube channel, artforkidshub.com. As I have said before, I just pop it on (with the volume off) and Fina follows along and draws with the dad and daughter team. So much fun!

We listened to some Brahms through breakfast.

We did our morning prayer together to start our homeschooling day.

Fina wanted to start with math. So, lesson 18, adding 10s.  She is really having a hard time concentrating. She seriously wanders off in her mind in the middle of writing a number, like halfway through writing the 6 of 60, she just stops!  GAH!!!  We did 18A-D. She understands it. It really is about making it be a more pleasant experience for the both of us.

We read the story of "Horatius at the Bridge" and she narrated it well. We looked up where the Tiber River is in Rome, and where the Etruscans came from on the map.  We also saw a couple of paintings of Horatius at the bridge (thank you google).

We also read two Aesop Fables "The Lion and the Mouse" and "The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf." She narrated each of them very well.

She made a mess with the Thinking Putty she was playing with while I read to her, so now I am having her do an episode of her yoga while I clean the couch up.  Grrr!

We continued working on her cursive "w" and we even learned a new letter, the letter b.  We have written bat and ball and what and wax. She is doing well with her letters. She knows which letter is which, so I am happy about that. And she is also good at remembering how the certain letters are connected together.

She recited her poems to me as well as the Apostle's Creed.  We read a new poem, "Night and Day."

So, I'm done for today!!!  What a little stinker she can be sometimes! Seriously, today's frustrations have not been about schooling, but about parenting.  Sometimes I think I must be nuts to school at home. But I love it, (and so does Fina) and we will stick with it! She drives me a bit nuts, though!

Thanks for reading about our frustrating day!

October 28, AO year 1, week 7

We finished session 16 in our math on Tuesday morning.  Next we will be adding 10s.

Did our morning prayer together. And we did a couple of puzzles before breakfast.

We are listening to Brahms as we are working on our cursive letters! Her "w" is getting better and she also wrote "wa" and "ww." I hadn't even realized that there are different ways of connecting the "w" to what comes after it, depending on that second letter.  No wonder cursive isn't easy to learn!

The black pen is mom's. The blue is Fina's work.

Read and narrated Genesis 41:15-49, 53-57. Joseph and the Pharoah's dreams of 7 cows and 7 ears of wheat.

She practiced reciting "The Cow" properly and loudly in preparation for our first CM Co-op meeting next week (with our friend E and her kids S and E, and our friend L with her kids T and S). She did a good job with it today. She recited all her other poems and we read two new poems "Armies in the Fire" and "The Little Land."

We read chapter 4 form Our Island Story, "How Caligula conquered Britain and How Caractacus Refused to be Conquered." The story (I believe it is a legend) of Caligula not actually conquering Britain, but bringing his soldiers to the coast of France, having them dressed in the war attire, and ordering them to pick up hundreds of sea shells (that they would say were their trophies of war) and having them pretend to have conquered Britain, and then turning them back home was quite hilarious to both Fina and me!

October 26, AO year 1, week 7

We started the day by finishing the last two chapters of Peter Pan.  We both enjoyed it immensely.
We listened to some Brahms this morning as well.

Note to self: do not do free reading in the morning before school starts! She found it very hard to concentrate after that.

Cursive letter w. We had a few tears. She is so stubborn. And it really isn't that hard and she is so good at it. It is frustrating for her to learn a new letter. I'm sure it is my fault (perfectionism)!

Fina recited her poetry to me and we read a new poem "The Land of Story-Books."

Then we read chapter 6 from Paddle to the Sea. It is still hard for her to give much of a narration. But she likes it. I should let her give a one-sentence narration for the chapter. Because she gets it. She just can't recount the details. She gets the action, for sure.

We watched the "Log Driver's Waltz" vignette from the NFB of Canada.  This is one of my favourites from my childhood. It showed us how they had spikes on their shoes and how they use their poles to drive the logs. The only thing missing from Paddle is that you don't get to see the sawmill itself. I forgot how it starts with black and white footage of real log-drivers!

Then we took our first foray into the wonderful world of Shakespeare today. We read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as retold by E. Nesbitt.  It was really good. I have never seen Fina laugh so hard as when I read the following descriptive paragraph about Puck:

"Puck was the spirit of mischief. He used to slip into the dairies and take the cream away, and get into the churn so that the butter would not come, and turn the beer sour, and lead people out of their way on dark nights and then laugh at them, and tumble people's stools from under them when they were going to sit down, and upset their hot ale over their chins when they were going to drink."

Against CM recommendations, I reread her the paragraph a few times. She laughed and laughed!

I think we should make cut out dolls for the people and see if we can recreate the story. It is a little confusing (even for me) with all those names, but she certainly understood the gist of the story.

It has been a long morning, so I told her we could skip math for now. Fina said "Skip math? You mean skip counting?" And she recited 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20.  All on her own!!! So, there you go!!! And now she is singing it around the house, and against my belief, she knows the non-number lines of the song as well.

All in all, a good start to week 7!

We just reread The Odyssey by Gillan Cross for the second time. It is on loan to us by our good friend L and her kids. Fina just loves it and asked if we could buy it at some point.  I see Cross has written a kid's version of The Illiad as well, I should look into getting it (and then we could return the favour to our friends and loan it to them).

We are almost finished reading Peter Pan (from our free-reading list).  We got to the point where Tinker Bell drinks the poison to save Peter and we really thought she was going to die.

SPOILER ALERT:  She doesn't die!!! It was well written. Dad happened to be in the same room while I was reading it, and he also gasped, thinking that was the end of Tink.

Fina is really enjoying Peter Pan, though I think many of the fighting scenes and descriptions are quite over her head. She just listens attentively all the same.

Fina and dad went out to a soccer game yesterday afternoon. It was a lovely and sunny (though chilly) day. They had a lot of fun (I think!)

Oh, and yesterday I picked up this half completed Knot-a-Quilt kit at our local, very friendly, crafty / collectibles / "re-purpose and recycle stuff to make cool stuff" shop, The Artist Pivot. (We love Kim, the owner!)  And Fina got into it right away last night. Essentially, there are fleece squares with this little fringe all around them. You take two of the fringe strips and double knot them together. And you keep doing it around and around.

This is one she started.

This gives you a better idea of what it is and how the knotted-fringe looks.

She thinks she is going to make little quilts for her dolls and possibly some for her friends as well. Christmas presents? We'll see. Anyway, she set up a quilting corner behind her bedroom door and said that this morning before coming down (if her glowing clock was not yet glowing, which tells her she is allowed to actually come out of her room!) she would work on her quilt. Well, at 7:20, 20 minutes before her glowing clock glows, I heard her bedroom door slam (at least she shut it to not wake us up with the bright light) so I guess she is working on it.

(Wait, she might not be that considerate. She MIGHT have shut her door because she needed to get in behind there to her quilting corner!)

She has been at it for 40 minutes already! Without coming downstairs!!!

UPDATE: this is what she was working on in the car on the way to the city today.

Does she look happy or what?!?!

October 23, AO year 1, week 6

Morning prayer, some listening to our Italian kids' choir songs during breakfast and morning play time. (Read, while mom tackles these pumpkins!) And we listened to some Brahms.

Fina recited all her poetry and we read a new poem "Block City." We are still in search of one that is recitable.

We started lesson 17 of her math. Skip counting by 2s, up to 20. As soon as we started the video portion of the lesson, she had me stop it, saying that she knows how to do this. And she proceeded to count "2, 4, 6, 8, 10." I was kind of floored. She says we learned it when we started our homeschooling, but I myself don't remember that!  At any rate, she  now knows almost the whole thing. Sometimes she gets mixed up between 14, 16 and 18. They have a cute song you can learn "two four / six eight  / ten twelve / fourteen / sixteen / eighteen / twen-ty!..."  She did really well with this. We will continue with skip counting (prepares us for multiplication!)

For her cursive work, she learned the letter l. It needs a bit more work, but she is doing well.

We were elbow deep in pumpkin here today (muffins, gnocchi overnight oats, soup, etc!) after our pumpkin patch run yesterday, so we have yet to read a chapter from the Burgess Bird Book. We will try to do that this weekend.

We reviewed some other things as well, and read some library books. It was a good end to our week.
Now we are heading out to splash in the rain!