December 14, AO year 1, week 10

On Sunday morning, Fina (basically) learned the second passage from Ken Ludwig's book, Teach Your Children Shakespeare.  Also from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It is a passage that Puck says in Act III, scene 2.  It is incredible how quickly she can memorize and recite a passage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

We also learned this short bonus passage of Puck's. The author says to use it whenever we are in a hurry! Fina learned it right away as well.

I go, I go, look how I go,
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow.

While I am at it, I should provide you with the text of the first passage she memorized from Act II, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
And make her full of hateful fantasies.

A great shout-out goes to our friend L., who introduced us to this book. Fina loves learning Shakespeare.  She asked to learn the second passage. She is also really enjoying the retold stories from Shakespeare we have read. She has told me that she asked her little friend K if she had ever heard of Shakespeare. Poor K answered no. (She is only 5, of course! But they share this love of Narnia, so I guess Fina thought K would be familiar with all good literature!) so Fina recited the "I know a bank..." passage to her. And told her all about the story. So wonderful!

She says she wants to teach something at our next co-op meeting. She wants to teach her friends how to draw a Chi-Rho.  Ha! But she is worried that the moms will laugh. Which is so strange because E and L have done nothing but make her feel comfortable. All the adults she knows have done the same. She has never suffered ridicule from adults, at least adults unrelated to her. We will see if she does it. I told her it would be nice.

Before breakfast this morning, we received a desperate cry for help from our kindly local librarian. So, I rushed around like a whirlwind preparing this and that in order to arrive at the library by 9. We were only a couple of minutes late.

The drop-off bin was jam packed! So Fina spent an hour emptying it and then checking in the books at the circulation desk. She loves that!

We did get do the entire chapter of math, chapter 25, the area of rectangles, by skip counting.
She sat and flipped through books for a good long while. She also combined her Math-U-See blocks with the Rush Hour game and played with all of that.

We got to the park on my lunch break for about 45 minutes.

An exceedingly light day for school. I had hoped to do some cursive, but the library was so busy in the morning, we just didn't get to it.

Our kind friends J and J came to pick Fina up at 2:45 to take her to the park for some more play time while I finished up at the library. So that was great!

That is it for today. We have our outdoor playgroup tomorrow afternoon, which is always fun.

December 11, AO year 1, week 10

We have been playing a lot of Go Fish lately. Fina wanted to make up her own version, whereby instead of fishing for a number, you fish for a suit (hearts, or diamonds or whatever). Well, she realized after one game that that was not as exciting. And we were left with two cards each, with no matching suit (13 cards of each suit). She did not want to play that way again. Deductive reasoning?  Ha!

Yesterday we FINALLY got some good snow and, yes, you guessed it, Fina FINALLY got to do her "tire sur la neige!" She was beyond ecstatic!

Is that a happy face, or what???

For those of you that are interested in the recipe. You get a bowl or tray and let the snow fill it. Pack it down a bit. We keep the bowl outside until we are ready to use it. Inside, bring some maple syrup and a little bit of butter to a very low boil. Allow the syrup to reduce a bit. Then, pour the warm liquid onto the snow in little strips. Get a popsicle stick (or anything like that) and stick it on one end of the strip. Allow the snow to cool the syrup down for a minute or so. Then you roll it up. And voilà, maple taffy! The poor kid has tried three times at least to gather enough snow.

Today, we hope to get out and build some snowmen. The snow was so wonderful yesterday, nice and sticky. That rarely happens here in Manitoba. Fina got to play with some of her friends and they made giant boulders of snow. It packed together so easily. (Sorry, I did not get any photos of their play time.)

Of course, drivers don't like this kind of weather. It is very wet and slushy. I often think that Manitobans would not be able to handle Ontario weather. They would go through the same (well, similar) shock we Ontarians go through coming here!

And, at church, there was a call for kids to take part in a nativity scene for Christmas eve. I told Fina about the email I had received and she right away said that she wants to be in it (I was shocked. She is usually very shy and wary to participate in things like this!). She wants to be either Mary, an angel, or a lion. We have to be prepared to provide our own costume. The kids aren't going to be speaking or anything. They will just be forming the scene as our Pastor incorporates them into his homily. So, they have asked for volunteers and will be picking the children randomly next week. We are going to borrow a lion costume from our friend S, who was a lion for Halloween. We have the Elsa costume that Mrs K made for Fina for last year's Halloween, which would be great for Mary. And we have the large, alternate flower girl dress Fina had for zia Aia's wedding (we had kind of forgotten about that dress. She can wear it for Christmas this year, and as often as she can while she still fits in it) and we are getting a pair of angel wings from some friends here in town. So, she is ready for the three parts. Chances are she won't get any of them. But I was pleased at how willing she was to take part in it!

And dad had our car assessed by the insurance company, and the damage isn't worse than we had feared. It is just the back end of the car that needs repairing and the insurance company even waives our deductible because we were not at fault. So that is all great news! And none of us have lasting physical effects from the collision, so we are so grateful.

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So, today we started with our morning prayer and our advent devotional, including our next Jesse tree ornament. We listened to some Brahms as well.

For those of you asking to see our advent wreath, here it is. We are still on the search for pink tapers to match our purple ones, but for this year, we have used a white candle with pink fabric on it.

We read through the two Aesop Fables for this week. She narrated them well.

We finished reading Hudson. We spent a lot of time with the globe, the map and the atlas, learning to find Hudson Bay, the Hudson Strait and the Hudson River. We also took the opportunity to review the continents. She knows all of their names and their locations too.

We read chapter 8 of Paddle to the Sea and we did some more map work to go along with that. Fina is enjoying that story.

I had her recite all the poems she knows from A Child's Garden of Verses. She recited: Rain, Singing, The Cow, Happy Thought, Time to Rise, Fairy Bread and the first four stanzas of Night and Day.  I read the last two poems to her from the end of the book. We will now be moving on to poetry from When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six from Winnie the Pooh.

Fina then proceeded to recite Oberon's speech from Act 2 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She basically knows the whole thing. She recited it a bunch of times. She is replacing "throws her enamell'd skin" with "sheds." She feels she knows better than Shakespeare in terms of word choice! "Mom, a snake sheds his skin, he doesn't throw it!"

I actually didn't realize she knew the speech this well.

AO year 1, week 10

We did our morning prayer. We were unable to hold our second co-op meeting, due to illness in one of the families. Even with only three families, it is going to be tricky to find a week where EVERYONE is healthy!

We started with artist study. This is our final painting by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, "Mur.". She did better with it today, she was less stressed. I asked her to just look at it and then narrate it to me, just like she does with readings. And I reminded her that narrating never stresses her out, so not to worry, and just tell me whatever she remembers.

We took a look at lower case print letters. Before we start reading, I figured she had better learn to recognize these. She knows how to write upper case print, and now cursive. We never learned lower case print. A good thing about waiting this long to introduce it, she learned them all in about 3 minutes.  Just to recognize them, not to actually form them herself.

We caught up on yesterday's Jesse tree, and today's, as well as our advent devotional for both days.

We worked on some Christmas cards that need to go into the mail for our long-distance family members.

And we listened to a whole lot of Brahms and sang a few advent hymns.

December 9, AO year 1 week 9

Yesterday's outdoor play group went very well. Such lovely weather we are having, for December in Manitoba!

Dad had the car assessed by our insurance and the damage is reparable. I am so pleased there wasn't more extensive, frame damage.  We are all feeling fine, which is wonderful.

This morning, I read "The Tempest" from Nesbit's Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare. Fina was able to narrate it to me. I did not know the story.

Fina and I finished listening to the Little House on the Prairie audiobook. Fina followed along with our novel.

I read chapters 21-23 of our current free-read, Pinocchio.

We did some math. 24 C-F. Making 10. She is doing fine with this. I happened to look at the Instruction Manual for this chapter as Fina was doing her work, and they have a cool activity called "racing to 100" where you fill a hundred block with different ways of making 10. She did it and then she read all the statements she had created to me. "1+9=10, 7+3+10." It was a fun activity.  I am glad I happened upon it.

Fina then wanted to build some mosaics on her hundred block, so she did that.

We have been keeping up with our Jesse tree and advent devotionals. And lots of outdoor time and lots of random stuff at home (crafts, playing, dressing up, this and that!)

Hopefully tomorrow we will be having our second homeschooling co-op meeting (if everyone manages to stay healthy). It should be fun!

December 7

Hello faithful blog followers.

After our car collision on Thursday evening, we haven't done much schooling since, as you can imagine. My neck and shoulders were sore, but I am feeling much better. Back to normal, I'd say. Fina isn't traumatized. She wasn't scared to get back into the car, so that was great. Dad is ok too. Not exciting, but we are grateful things weren't worse.

On Friday, we had a fun outdoor playtime with some friends in their backyard. The weather is so warm and lovely here right now. This is not regular December weather in MB.

On Saturday, we went with some other friends to St Malo beach to play. Fina was so pleased to see the "lake" was frozen over.  It was a gorgeous day.

In the evening, we headed back to the university for a Christmas musical celebration put on by the music department. The Winnipeg Brass Quintet was also there (WSO brass players, I believe). They were wonderful as always. Fina and I enjoyed it (dad was involved in reading some of the Bible passages, so he was up on stage). Though we have listened to a fair amount of classical music, I guess we have never listened to any opera. There was a mezzo-soprano soloist who sang a couple of pieces. The first one was in German. Fina leaned over and whispered "what is she saying? I can't understand it." So I told her it was in German. Further on in the programme, this same mezzo-soprano sang again. "Mom, I still can't understand it!" I told her it was in English. She made a disgusted face at me and said "why does she have to sing so loud? It doesn't sound good at all!"  Hillarious. Goodness knows, the operatic voice takes some getting used to. Some of us will never acquire the taste for it. I believe Fina will fall into that category. (As an aside, she has been listening to a lot of Adele right now. And loving that. So, Adele's crooning voice, or a very harsh operatic voice... You be the judge!)  All in all, Fina did really well. We didn't get home until 10:30pm.

On Sunday, we headed to Winnipeg for church etc, and Fina and I spent a couple of hours at one of our favourite places, Bois des Esprits, in the south end of the city. Just lovely!

The Seine River (no, not the one in Paris! The one in Winnipeg!) was mainly frozen over. Fina was so pleased to see that. There were some still moving water parts, but it was much more frozen than our Joubert Creek in town. Strange. The Seine is much wider, but it must be shallower and maybe less flow-y!

We have been keeping up with our Jesse tree and our advent devotionals. Last night, Fina and I played a few roungds of Go Fish with some cute Disney cards we found.

Today, we are heading to dad's school again (shocking, I know!) for a Christmas party for the Moms and Tots group. In the afternoon, we plan on heading back out to the forest area there. It is supposed to climb up to plus 5 this afternoon, so we will take advantage of that while dad teaches until late in the afternoon.

And tomorrow, we have our outdoor play group. And Wednesday we have a Christmas banquet at dad's school. And Thursday we have our homeschooling co-op (if everyone is healthy again!) and Friday we are going to our friend's house to decorate Christmas cookies. Considering we have no family within 2500kms and have very little Christmas commitments, we are pretty busy right now!!!

So, all different kinds of learning and experiencing over the last few days!

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!

December 2, AO year 1, week 9

We had a wonderful afternoon yesterday with our outdoor play group. The kids were having so much fun and the weather was so mild, that Fina and I ended up being outside for 4.5 hours. Just lovely!

Here she is sledding with some of her friends.

We started our day today with our Advent devotional "stuff." We lit the advent candle, did our devotional, and I read the Bible verse that goes along with our ornament of the day for our Jesse Tree. Fina colours in the ornament as I read it.

We started with some cursive work, our new letter, the letter "r."

We went to story time at the library, it was pyjama day. We can say that is our foreign language for the day, as it is in French.

Fun, though useless, craft with shaving cream. She had so much fun doing the buttons! Olaf snowman on a moonlit, starry night.

After a quick jaunt through town, to the post office and The Artist Pivot, we continued working on the letter r. The letter r is very hard and quite personal, I think.

You can see mom's red "r"s are all different.

Not great, but we will keep working on it. We just had to learn i and e so she could write her name! She was beyond pleased!

We did some poetry. Fina recited a few poems to me and I re-read some of the more recent poems. We read a new poem today, "To Minnie." We are almost finished with A Child's Garden of Verses. Soon, we will be moving on to our next poetry selections from A. A. Milne's Now We are Six and When We Were Very Young.

On to math. We did MUS 23X from the extra activities book as a review of tally marks. She MAINLY gets it. We will move on to the next chapter next time.

We read chapters 15-18 of our current free read, Pinocchio.

It was a bit of a light school day, but we will continue.
Tomorrow we have the second meeting our homeschooling co-op and we are really looking forward to that.