AO year 1, week 20, December 2

We listened to some Zecchino D'Oro over breakfast.

We started with our math. Fina has been wanting to use a timer to do if she can get one lesson done in 10 minutes. She finished 10C just a few seconds after the timer rang.
Fina reluctantly tried her current recitation. She knows the first two lines (though she thinks she does not).
I read the next two poems from Now We Are Six, "Pinkle Purr" and "Wind on the Hill."

Fina learned her upper case cursive D. And we continued working on the C.

We did chapter 13 of her catechism, talking about forgiveness and reconciliation with God and with others.

We read all of Janet Lunn's Laura Secord: A Story of Courage. This is one of our three Canadian replacement biographies. We stopped throughout for Fina to narrate. She really enjoyed the story. The book has great illustrations and is written in a clear, yet exciting, way. I know it is a CM faux pas to read the whole thing in one sitting, but I chose to do it today. We don't often do that. We were both enjoying it and she was giving such good narrations.

Fina read aloud the next 5 pages from Tony's Birds.  She is reading very well.

When we bought the Lego Disney Castle, we got this Christmas build up set for free.  There are 24 little builds. We started it yesterday.  Here are day 1 and day 2's creations.

Sailboat

Reindeer (in front of our old Lego calendar)

Fina got to play outside with her friend K for a few hours in the evening.

We did our Jesse tree devotionals as a family after supper (we had to do yesterday and today's readings and ornaments since we missed it last night).  We have been singing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" during the day as our hymn, but tonight we sang it as part of our advent family devotional time. Fina then wanted to read and sing all 7 verses for dad. It was incredible!

Then she pulled out two balls of yarn and taught dad how to fingerknit.

And they did some Lego work together as well. Now they are upstairs, in bed, reading Paddington.

We are finished up week 20 and I'm looking forward to week 21. I just noticed that even our chapter from Fifty Famous Stories is about Napoleon. You can't even plan this kind of serendipity. (Well, you can if you are doing unit studies, but this just happened!)

Thanks for joining us today.

AO year 1, week 20, December 1

I'm sorry I didn't get this post out yesterday! You will hopefully get two posts today.

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We read Isaiah 11:1-10 (the lion will lie down with the lamb) and Matthew 3:1-12 (John the Baptist) and Fina narrated both of them very well.
We continued on with our math (adding plus 8). Fina did 10B and the 10X.

I read two new poems from Now We Are Six: "Cradle Song" and "Waiting at the Window." We only have a few pages left of this collection. Fina loves them and often requests that I reread previous ones, even from weeks or months ago. She somehow remembers them, by content and by title (which surprises me every time!).

We learned upper case B and C in our cursive. She got to write some fun names of people she loves!

We sang through our current folksong "My Paddle / Land of the Silver Birch." We just sing through it once as a fun thing to do and then move on.

We repeated the first two lines of "What is love" from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. And I read through our mustard seed parable. Charlotte Mason (or her people) say that you can just read the parable once every day and the child will just learn it one day. I'm going to test that out. With Shakespeare and poetry, I always say one line and have Fina repeat that line three times (as suggested by Ken Ludwig in his book How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare) and that has always worked for us. But I thought I'd try this out with the parable. We will see how it goes.

Fina wanted to hammer a nail into a piece of wood with her dad's toy hammer from 40 years ago. It has a wooden handle and a hard plastic head. As she kept hitting her fingers, she thought she'd try to use her oven mitt (from her kitchen set - she still loves playing with that stuff). Somehow, she made it work and got the nail in to her little scrap of wood (which you can't see in the pic!).

I read "The Stag and his Reflection" and "The Peacock" from our Aesop's Fables and Fina gave excellent narrations for both.  I read "Picciola" from Fifty Famous Stories and she narrated that quite well.  It is the story of a wrongfully imprisoned person who befriends a little flower in the prison yard and in the end Napoleon's wife saves him. I'm looking forward to our next picture study, which is of Jacques-Louis David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps!" She's going to love that!

I also borrowed Millicent Selsam's Tony's Birds from our provincial education library (homeschoolers in Manitoba are fortunate to have access to this library). Fina read a few pages of it aloud. We still haven't finished Selsam's Plenty of Fish, but I have that as an ebook which is a bit trickier for her to read. I highly recommend her Science I Can Read Series of easy reader books. They are wonderful.

We had an adult faith formation session at church in the evening, which was about reclaiming the adult meaning of Christmas. During the 90 minute session, Fina sat quietly colouring in her The Chronicles of Narnia Official Coloring Book a wonderful book, by the way!). Then she drew these two lovely works of art, inspired by pages in the book.  She was really well behaved and even listened in a bit. We had a nice discussion about what we had heard on our 50 minute drive home.

Enjoy!

We know it isn't the white witch saying such a kind thing to her dad!

AO year 1, week 20, November 30

A few more things from yesterday:

This is how we recite Shakespeare around here. 

I asked her to please open up a little hole near her head so I could hear her more clearly.

Fina painted all of the Jesse tree ornaments she had drawn. She did a great job!

For the last bunch of years, we used these free printable ornaments that the children can cut out and colour.  They are wonderful! And they do the "O Antiphons" on the last 7 days.

We attended our first outdoor playgroup since we have returned home. Fina just LOVED seeing all her friends and rambling around the forest with them. It was great. Here are some pics. (Check out the beaver's hard work.)

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Today, Fina started the morning with doing some Art For Kids Hub How to Draw episodes. She loves to draw. I have sung their praises before. Such fun stuff. Fina also listened to some Zecchino D'Oro songs while she worked.

I printed off a page from the Math-U-See worksheet generator for Fina to review her lesson 9 material (adding plus 9). She thought and acted as though she was frustrated, but she remembered her facts and did the page quickly.

We read the story of the three men in the fiery furnace from Daniel 3. I stopped various times and Fina gave an excellent narration throughout.

We started lesson 10, (adding plus 8) and Fina did 10A.

We pulled out Jacques-Louis David's "Death of Socrates" again, and Fina spent some time drawing from it. This is not what I would call a detailed drawing, but this was her rendition of what is going on.

The guy IS crying, and Socrates does have his finger pointing upwards! Ha!

We continued on with our cursive, learning the upper case letter A.

We sang our advent hymn, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel."
We reviewed our last few recitations of Shakespeare. And we started our next passage, from Twelfth Night II, iii, 48-53, as spoken by Feste. Fina learned the first line today.

What is love? Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
     What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
     Youth's a stuff will not endure.

I also read the parable of the Mustard Seed to her, from Matthew 13. My intention is for Fina to learn to recite it.

We read the next two poems, "Twice Times" and "The Morning Walk," from Now We Are Six.
I read chapter 9 from The Burgess Bird Book, about the woodcock and the sandpiper. We watched a few videos to see and hear the birds.

Fina read a few pages from Plenty of Fish. Her reading is really coming along nicely.
I read another story from our free read, The Pink Fairy Book.

Fina spent a bunch of hours playing outside with her friend T, and then K joined them after school. The sun goes down early, and they are enjoying playing outside in the low light!

AO year 1, week 20, November 28

We are finally back into the swing of things.

Yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent. So we started our Jesse Tree. Upon the advice of a good friend, E., we are using this website from Loyola Press for the readings. We cut out two inch circles from some cardstock and Fina decided to draw the picture on each ornament. She punched a hole in each one and they are all drawn and ready to be painted, tied with a yarn and hung on our little tree.

Here they are, all drawn and ready to be painted

our tree, the first ornament is towards the bottom 

and we will work our way up to Christmas

Day 1, the Jesse Tree stump/root itself

This morning, we did chapter 12 of our catechism book. We are jumping around a bit, to work with the liturgical seasons etc.
I read chapter 12 of Our Island Story, the story of King Arthur. I read it in chunks and she narrated it all very well. She enjoyed it. So did I.
We sang our folksong, "My Paddle / Land of the Silver Birch."
We reviewed the points of the compass.
We re-read a bunch of poems from Now We Are Six.  And we read one new poem, "Explained." It was very cute.
I had her recite all of her Shakespeare passages. She remembered all of them perfectly. Even the most recent one, Sir Toby Belch's speech from Twelfth Night. We'll move on to our next passage. I'm also wanting to have Fina memorize a parable. I'm not sure which one yet.
We sang our hymn, "Canticle of the Sun" and began our new hymn for Advent, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." We sang the first verse and then Fina asked to continue to the second verse, and she surprised me - she knew the second verse off by heart as well! And she was really singing nicely and loudly, participating along with me, which was great.
I had Fina review all her cursive letters. We will continue on with the upper case letters.

We read the Fir-tree story from Lang's Pink Fairy Book as part of our free reads. It is a very cute story.

Then Fina went outside to play all afternoon with her friend T. She has had a few fun outside hours with her friends since we returned.

Speaking of outside time, on October 31st, we completed our second year of the 1000 hours outside challenge. In 2015, our first year, we reached 1084 hours. In 2016, we got to 1384 hours. I'm pretty impressed with us!

We are back!

On October 12, Fina and I left for our trip to Ontario. Somehow, in the morning, she managed to do the following:

She did the test for lesson 9 of our math, adding +9.
Fina finished reading "The Gingerbread Boy" also. And we listened to some Zecchino D'Oro.
And she wrote a goodbye note to dad in cursive letters.

We got in more school than I was expecting, seeing as it was seamlessly happening as we just lived our morning. (I can see why some people love unschooling!)

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We returned from our visit in Ontario last week. We had a LOVELY visit with my family. Busy, but lovely.  We had a couple of weddings (two of my sisters), a baptism (my little newborn niece - Fina just LOVED her) and an extended visit from some third cousins visiting from Italy to improve their English.

We didn't get to much official schooling, but we learned and lived so much! Fina read everything she could get her hands on, and her progress over the last few months has been astounding!
We went to see "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" at Stratford. It was great fun.
We made it to a couple of petting zoos, a wonderful aqarium (Ripley's, at the base of the CN Tower. I would highly recommend it!), up on the glass floor of the CN Tower, to Niagara Falls a couple of times, pumpkin picking, pumpkin carving, apple picking, trick-or-treating, she climbed a great many numbers of trees, we ate lots of yummy food, we spent a lot of time just hanging out with our family, Fina got very spoiled by many people in their 20s and 30s who just adore having her around,

Here are some pics of some of the fun things we did.

new baby cousin

photo bombed by a bride and groom

apple picking

Lake Ontario

flower girl

climbing downed trees

"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" at Stratford, ON

wedding shower

Niagara

reading to her cousin

Sitting on the glass floor up in the CN tower

swimming with the sharks at the Ripley's Aquarium

learning to cook passatini with nonna bis (my grandmother)

Wpg airport, coming home

the joys of finding snow!!!

Thanks for joining us!