AO year 1, week 21, December 9

On Thursday night, Fina participated in her first sacrament of reconciliation at our parish. It was wonderful. The pastor read the story of the Good Shepherd and gave a homily about that.  As the children returned from their sacrament, they each added a sheep to this little scene. It was lovely!

We listened to some Zecchino D'Oro this morning (Friday) over breakfast.

We sang "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and caught up on our Jesse tree readings (we were two days behind).

Instead of cursive practice today, Fina wrote a couple of thank you cards for gifts received. We learned the upper case cursive M to write one of the recipients first name.

I read two new poems in The Oxford Book of Children's Verse and I reread the last three.
Fina recited her "What is Love?" from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and she pretty much has it memorized now. We read the Parable of the Mustard Seed aloud together.

We did chapter 10 from our catechism book speaking about Advent.
Fina took her math test for lesson 10. She only made a couple of errors (just careless mistakes, not actual comprehension problems). It was great.

We sang our folksong "My Paddle / Land of the Silver Birch."

Fina read a few pages of Tony's Birds aloud to her uncle on Facetime.

She spent the rest of the afternoon preparing her outfit and mask for a Christmas Banquet with a masquerade theme at dad's work.

AO year 1, week 21, December 8

Fina was out til 7:45pm again last night, in blizzard-y conditions, with her little friend K (and some other friends who came and went). They built a snowman!

We started our school day with reading through this cute book of poems, Whiskers & Rhymes by Arnold Lobel. It is very funny! You may know him as the author of the Frog and Toad series, which are also very funny. I think soon Fina will be able to read those on her own.

I read Daniel 6 (in the lions' den) and Fina gave an excellent narration.

I read the story of "St Margaret of Scotland" in Our Island Saints. I read the whole lengthy story and then Fina gave a short narration. It was a great story of a Queen who was a Saint.

Fina finished the last page of her math lesson, 10F. Next time she will take the test and then the unit test as well.

She finished learning her Shakespeare passage "What is love?"  We read the Parable of the Mustard seed aloud together.
We sang our folksong "My Paddle/Land of the Silver Birch" and our advent hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel."

Fina reviewed her upper case cursive letters and learned how to draw the G. Hers is really beautiful!

AO year 1, week 21, December 7

We did a shortened school day today. Dad was home because the university was closed. The schools are all closed. It is a real winter wonderland out there!

We started with Matthew 11:2-11.
Fina did lesson 10E of her math.
She read aloud a prayer from her catechism book.
She reviewed her recitation. I read the Parable of the Mustard Seed (I'm still hoping she will get it by osmosis, but she hasn't.  I'm thinking I'm doing this wrong and that we are supposed to read it aloud together, so I will type it out.)
She learned the fourth and fifth lines of "What is love?" from Twelfth Night. There is only one more line to learn from that passage.

Fina reviewed her upper case cursive letters A-E and we learned a fancy letter F.

I read chapter 16 of Paddle to the Sea. Paddle finally left Lake Superior. Very fun!

I read "The Mice and the Weasels" and "The World and the Lean Dog" from Aesop's Fables. Fina gave excellent narrations for both stories.

We read poems 39, 40 and 41 from our new poetry book, The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. I skipped the first stack of poems from the Medieval Era, and the 16th and 17th centuries. They felt a little dry and challenging after the lovely A.A. Milne poems. I think we'll come back to these earlier sections later on.

Fina read aloud six pages of Tony's Birds. She is doing a great job.

We sang our hymn, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel."

Then she went outside to play and has been out there for two hours already. I suspect this will be another long outside day. Which is great, because the forecast has the temperatures dipping below the -20 degree celsius mark. I'm glad she is taking advantage of it!

Here are the two tunnels they built last night, as seen in daylight. Pretty impressive!

December 6 outdoor day!

We had a wonderful snowy day yesterday (Wednesday December 6)!

Schools were closed yesterday and are still closed today. Our first big storm has brought terrible driving conditions. Highway 75 was closed since Tuesday at 6pm until just now, Wednesday at 3pm. 21 hours is a long closure!

This is what we woke up to yesterday.

Fina just had to go outside right after breakfast to play. One of our neighbours joined her for a bit.

We had to leave for our outdoor playgroup after an hour. I was hoping to have lunch before going, but she did not want to come in. So I packed her lunch in a thermos and off we went.

Fina and her friend K stopping at the town nativity scene on our walk to our playgroup location.

Because of school being closed, we also got out some of our "older" crowd (I'm talking grades 1 and 2 here!) kids who only come to outdoor playgroup on school holidays. It is always lovely having them with us.

We went sledding for a long while and then ventured into the forest.  The temperatures were mild (they are about to drop by 20 degrees celsius in the next few days) and the kids had a great time.

Fina is the only one with a bare head. (Second on the left)

Into the forest

The "tree fort" as they call it.

I am so grateful to have a group of people around me who value this kind of unstructured, outdoor play in such weather!

When we came home, Fina and the same K did not want to come in yet. They stayed out until 7:30 digging tunnels and caves in the snow pile in our parking lot.

Fina climbing through her tunnel.

Fina spent 9.5 hours outside. Incredible!

This morning, look at our birdfeeder. Fina is so happy that there is a little roof to shelter the birds. We haven't seen any birds yet, but we know the will come! The schools are still closed and so is the highway. But things seem to be calming down now.

AO year 1, week 21, December 5

We got this suction-cup-to-the-window bird feeder (thanks to my good friend L who gave me the heads up, free shipping and all), filled it with black oil sunflower seeds and stuck it to our back door. The perfect place for Fina to create a little Birdwatching Studio.

She wasn't sad. The pic is to show her sign. "Birdwatching only" 

She spent a long time on Sunday setting up her studio, complete with pencils, pencil crayons, sketch books, loose papers and all her field guides. We have the bird feeder in the perfect spot, because we can open the other French door and just stick our hand out to fill it. Fina sat there, quiet and still, for over a half an hour this morning, waiting to spot something, but no birds came. I believe that conventional wisdom suggests it can take a few days for the birds to come. We hope to see some soon.

We read the last three poems from Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne. All three were very cute. We are a bit sad to leave this poetry, but we are moving on to The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, edited by Iona and Peter Opie. I found this 1973 edition at a used book sale, so we are using that one.

Fina has been wanting to time her math lesson. In 10 minutes, she was able to complete one lesson, lesson 10D today.

I read "How Napoleon Crossed the Alps" from Fifty Famous Stories. A short story. Fina gave an excellent narration and recognized that we heard about his wife in "Picciola" from the same book just last week.  We looked at the map and the globe to see where the Alps are and how Napoleon crossed from France to Italy over them.  I showed Fina some photos of the Alps, which led to us looking at people taking pics of themselves on the peaks, which led us to watching a video of a group of people who climbed up the Alps. Fina said "one day, SF and I are going to climb up the Alps. We would love that. Is there anywhere in Manitoba where we can practice climbing up rocky mountains like that?"  Poor kid! No, we live in the Prairies!

We sang our Advent hymn. Fina learned the cursive letter E.

Fina worked on her recitations. She now knows the first 3 lines of "What is love?" from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

And we did our next picture study, Jacques-Louis David's "Napoleon Crossing the Alps at the St Bernard Pass."

"This is Napoleon? The same Napoleon?" she says. How fun! She did a great job, seeing many details and really enjoying seeing the scene with the soldiers, the cannons and the horses.

Fina finished reading Plenty of Fish to me and we read another few pages of Tony's Birds. It is astounding at how she can read!

We listened to some Schubert over lunch (we have been neglecting our composer study since we returned home).

We spent the afternoon visiting a good friend of ours, and then Fina stayed out playing for quite a few hours.  We have snow now (and much more on the way this week, it seems) so she tried out her $3 thrift store plastic skis and her snow shoes from last year as well.

Fina also received some lovely gifts and $20 from a kind colleague of dad's. Fina had painted a painting for her office, entitled "Sparkly Cat." Wow, money for her art. Incredible!  I can't seem to find a photo of it, but I will get one and post it here when I am able. Again I say incredible. Fina said she will use her money for art supplies or towards a wood carving set that she wants.  Look out world!

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!