Year 1, week 27, day 1, February 13

Sorry that I didn't post this yesterday!

Did you notice my change in title. Yes, I'm still doing AO, but with enough ADE thrown in that I now feel uncomfortable calling it that way. (For those of you not really IN this world, do not worry. Everything is still ok!!!) So, using the scheduling cards, I'm on a 4 day week. This week, I will only get through three of the four days, so day 4 will be next Monday.

Fina has been working a lot on her handicrafts, outside of school time. She has done A LOT of wood carving. Less crocheting, but she does do some.  Also, the temperatures have risen significantly (we are now hovering around 0 degrees celsius, which, for Manitoba in February, is quite something! Consequently, she has been playing outside a lot, and skiing as well!

Monday

We started our school day by reading Matthew 5:38-48 (the reading for Sunday). Shall I just gloss over the fact that, though I said "this is for narration" before I started reading, Fina cried that she did not know it was for narration after I was done?  I told her that she should always assume that everything is for narration. She informed me that I should always just tell her that this is for narration, for everything we do (even if sometimes it isn't for narration, like a free read). She says she would rather think it is for narration, even if it isn't. Needless to say, I did not get a narration about this passage. Ha!

She did 15 minutes of math, 14D (more practice of adding doubles plus one, and 8s and 9s).

She recited a few passages for me. She wanted to learn "The Lamb" by William Blake that we had read a few times last week.

Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing wooly bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice! Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee  

Little Lamb I'll tell thee, Little Lamb I'll tell thee!He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meek & he is mild, He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Little Lamb God bless thee. Little Lamb God bless thee.

Well, lo and behold, she already basically knew the first stanza!  This kid is incredible!

We read the next story from Viking Tales. She gave a good narration

Fina worked on the letter X in cursive.

We started a new nature lore book, on the recommendation of the "A Delectable Education" podcast ladies, Arabella Buckley's Eyes and No Eyes series. We started with the first book, Wild Life in Woods and Fields. We read the first chapter, "Spiders on the common" and Fina narrated it. I'm looking forward to reading more from this book.

We read our next poem, #112 from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, "The Star," which actually is "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with its many original stanzas.

We did our next catechism chapter, chapter 8.

We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina read "Spring" from Frog and Toad aloud to me. She is doing great.

We did our picture study, Hans Holbein the Younger's "The Ambassadors."  What an interesting painting with this anamorphic skull on the bottom. I had never heard of this technique, anamorphosis, but da Vinci used it too.  So cool!

See that white blob?  If you hold up some sort of apparatus to it, like a cylindrical mirror, it is actually this skull.

Cool, right? 500 years ago!

In the afternoon, we went out to the Museum.  We BOTH went out skiing.  I did not ski as much as Fina did, of course. Our good friend L took her son T and Fina out along the whole 3 or 4 km ski trail. She LOVED the hills!

What a lovely sight - a sled full of skis!

And just before supper, Fina went to the outdoor rink to skate with dad for an hour.  When it is above 0 celsius, it is easy to spend hours and hours outside!

(As it is now Tuesday morning, I can already tell you that I am sore from skiing. But I will ski again today at our outdoor playgroup!)

leading up to February 10

On Thursday, we went to dad's university for the day and Fina spent a couple of hours painting at a painting drop-in area.

You may remember that Fina did one like this a while ago and it is hanging outside of dad's office. She did this one from memory and it is quite different.

Waves in a stormy sea

St Therese de Lisieux with roses

Based on a painting of incense bowls she had seen at this drop-in 

On Friday, we had our co-op. It was lovely.

Fina gave three recitations (The Parable of the Mustard Seed, Epitaph on a Dormouse and from Twelfth Night My Father had a daughter loved a man).
We did picture study (looking at a Renoir), sang a hymn, narrated from Garfield's retelling of Twelfth Night, had a swedish drill,  and did some nature study. The children were to bring something to study and Fina brought some moss that was hanging around our nature dish!

After co-op, our group spent a few hours playing outside. Skiing and playing in the snow. I skied for a few minutes and nearly died.  I will have to try again!

AO year 1, week 26, February 8

We started with reading from Matthew 2:1-6 and Fina narrated it.
She did her 15 minutes of math, completing 14B p 2 and 14C.
She reviewed her recitations.
We finished reading the story of St Benedict from In God's Garden. Fina gave an excellent narration.
We worked on some cursive and learned the upper case W.  Only X, Y and Z to go!

We read "Oscar, the Cat About Town" from James Herriot's Treasury. It is a sweet story and Fina gave an excellent narration of this one as well.

We read our next poem, by Jane Taylor, "Greedy Richard."

We sang our folksong and hymn.
We read "The Wolf and the Shepherd" and "The Farmer and His Sons" from Aesop's Fables. Fina narrated both of them well.
She read "The Kite" from Frog and Toad aloud.

For the first time, we did a big composer study lesson, à la Megan Hoyt's A Touch of the Infinite. Our composer for the term is Palestrina. (We are a bit behind the AO lists, but I wanted to do this composer to match Holbein's art work).  
I read the chapter on Palestrina from Harriette Brower's The World's Great Men of Music: Story-Lives of Great Musicians, free here at gutenberg.  Fina gave a short narration.  We quieted down to sit and listen attentively to the excerpt. (We started with his "Tu es Petrus.")  Then I gave Fina the chance to narrate. She spoke in such a lively manner. It reminded her of the music from the Vatican. It gets soft and loud, fast and slow. She realized there were no instruments, only voices. It was wonderful!
Now, we will add this to our "casual" listening and will do our next piece in a similar way, reviewing a bit about Palestrina himself and then listening carefully to that next piece.  I am already convinced that Fina has connected more with this 4 minute piece than with all of our Brahms and Schubert listening. I'm so glad I bought Megan Hoyt's book. It really gave me the encouragement I needed to do this in a more in-depth way. (Terrible, I am a music history major, but, like in other things relating to homeschooling, I was frozen with the choices. Once I found something that worked for me, it was easy to just dive in!)

Fina spent some time doing some fingerknitting (in place of her crochet).

We spent the sunny, chilly afternoon doing this and that and reading some free reads. Our current reads are Graham Oakley's The Church Mice and The Ring and Church Mice Adrift. We also started reading Thornton W. Burgess' Mother West Wind Stories to Read Aloud.  And we are continuing with our Orange Fairy Book by Andrew Lang.

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We have continued on with our new timed schedule and it is working well. I've been doing some Facebook research and have found a few things I need to tweak.

I need to do "drawing" which we haven't done, separate from nature study. Well, we kind of have, with Fina doing her artforkidshub.com stuff. But I want to do dry brush painting of other stuff, not just nature. So I have pulled out another notebook for her to use for this type of stuff. I do have Mona Brooke's Drawing with Children and we may try to do some of that as well.

We need more nature lore than what AO schedules, in order to do 20 minutes twice a week. So I have finally found the way to incorporate Arabella Buckley's Eyes and No Eyes series into our work. I have looked to buy it, but for now, we will use the free ebook from archive.org.

And I need to do something about foreign language. I need to bite the bullet and start some French. 10 minutes, three times a week. That isn't impossible. I really want to use this by Cherrydale Press, but I don't want to spend $20 USD. But I want something that is laid out for me. I should just do it!

We are going with dad his university tomorrow to do some painting with acrylics in their drop-in paint area. And on Friday we have our co-op. I will report back after that.

Thanks for coming alongside us!

AO year 1, week 26, February 7

Today, we continued with our timed schedule. It is working well so far! (It does keep the minutes moving.)

We started the morning with our Bible reading, Genesis 1:6-13.
Fina did 15 minutes of math, completing 14A and page 1 of 14B.
She reviewed all her recitations. We have our co-op this week and she has planned what she wants to recite there.
We read "Snow White and Red Rose" from The Blue Fairy Book. We really enjoyed this story. Fina said "it has nothing to do with Snow White at all!" No, Fina, it does not!

She learned to write the upper case cursive V.

We read chapter 20 of Paddle to the Sea.  We learned about Lake Huron.
We read a new poem from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse #110 by Taylor, "The Gleaner."  Fina really enjoys poetry.

Fina read a whole story from Frog and Toad, "Tomorrow." She is reading so well!
We sang our folksong and hymn.
We did some nature study. Fina wanted to paint her "favourite" bird from memory. We always thought it was a chickadee, but it isn't. It has dots or spots on its tail. (We have looked through our field guides, but have never found exactly what she is looking for).

Our lesson was scheduled for 20 minutes, but Fina just could not stop! So she also painted this picture of her and her friends building a canoe.

And we did 15 minutes of crochet work.

In the afternoon, we had our outdoor playgroup. It was VERY cold out, but sunny and not too windy. Fina and her friends skied and played all afternoon. It was great!

AO year 1, week 26, February 6

We finished up Racketty-Packetty House this weekend. It is a very sweet story. I had never heard of it, but we both enjoyed it immensely. I would highly recommend it.

I've added a couple more things to my reading list.  Gene Stratton-Porter's The Girl of the Limberlost which I have heard mentioned many times.  And Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Educated Mind. I heard her speak on an episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. In it, she gives lists of good things for adults / parents to read. I borrowed it from the library, so I will just give it a quick read before returning it.

*****

Today, we started with some bible readings. We read John 2:1-11, the wedding at Cana, and Fina gave a great narration of it.

We did 15 minutes of math. She finished up 13F and did the test for 13. She even had a few minutes left over to start the extra page from the activity book for lesson 13.

Fina reviewed her recitation. She pretty much finished up "My father had a daughter loved a man" from Twelfth Night.

We started a new history book, Viking Tales. We read the first chapter, "The Baby" and Fina gave a great narration. She really wanted to keep reading. She was so excited! (But we didn't! I held on!)

We read the first half of the story of St Benedict from In God's Garden. She narrated it. We will continue next time.

She learned the cursive upper case U.

We read chapter 12 from The Burgess Bird Book, about the cowbird and the oriole. She was more engaged with this chapter. We enjoyed looking at photos of these birds and watching a video and hearing their song.

We did chapter 7 of our catechism. We sang our hymn and folksong.
Fina read the rest of the Frog and Toad Alone story aloud to me. She is doing a great job!

We looked at our same picture study from last week and she did this drawing.

I re-read the last poem we did, "My Mother," from The Oxford Book of Children's Verse and I read the next two poems aloud. 106 "Meddlesome Matty" and 107 "The Pin."

Fina spent 10 minutes crocheting.  Look at these nice, even chains!

In the afternoon, Fina got in a short ski in all our new powdery snow. She skied right from home to the ski trail (which wasn't groomed since the snow, but the tracks were still usable).

*****

Today, we sort of started our new schedule. Using the scheduling cards as suggested by the ladies at "A Delectable Education" podcast.  It worked well. Here is a pic of our schedule at the moment.  It did help us keep our day moving. Here is my slightly tweaked schedule. We will see how this works.

AO year 1, week 25, February 3

Yesterday, we went to a huge used book sale in the city and I bought a stack of books. I found many wonderful books, field guides, picture books, piano books and art books.

We started reading one, and it is, in particular, very cute. It is called Racketty-Packetty House by Frances Hodgson Burnett (of The Secret Garden fame.) We read the first few pages. It is about a little girl who has an old doll house that belonged to her grandmother and then she gets a brand new doll castle.

We finished up our school week today. We started by reading Matthew 1:18-25 and Fina gave an excellent narration!

I set the timer for 15 minutes and she was able to complete 13E and the front page of 13F in her math book.

We read this lovely poem from Oxford Book of Children's Verse.

"My Mother" by Ann Taylor (1782-1866).

Who fed me from her gentle breast,

And hushed me in her arms to rest,

And on m cheek sweet kisses prest?

My Mother.

When sleep forsook my open eye,

Who was it sung sweet hushaby,

And rocked me that I should not cry?

My Mother.

Who sat and watched my infant head,

When sleeping on my cradle bed,

And tears of sweet affection shed?

My Mother.

When pain and sickness made me cry,

Who gazed upon my heavy eye,

And wept, for fear that I should die?

My Mother.

Who dressed my doll in clothes so gay,

And fondly taught me how to play,

And minded all I had to say?

My Mother.

Who ran to help me when I fell,

And would some pretty story tell,

Or kiss the place to make it well?

My Mother.

Who taught my infant lips to pray,

And love God's holy book and day,

And walk in wisdom's pleasant way?

My Mother.

And can I ever cease to be

Affectionate and kind to thee,

Who was so very kind to me,

My Mother?

Ah no! The Thought I cannot bear,

And if God please my life to spare,

I hope I shall reward thy care,

My Mother.

When thou art feeble, old, and grey,

My healthy arm shall be thy stay,

And I will soothe thy pains away,

My Mother.

And when I see thee hang thy head,

'Twill be my turn to watch thy bed,

And tears of sweet affection shed,

My Mother.

For could our Father in the skies

Look down with pleased or loving eyes,

If ever I could dare despise

My Mother?

Isn't that so moving? When I finished reading it, Fina was moved and hugged me and kissed me and told me that I was "the best mommy in the world" as she says! What a sweetheart. She understood it! I just love moments like these!


We continued with her cursive work, reviewing S (from many months ago) and learning T. And Fina wanted to review all her letters so far, so we did. My letters are in red.

Fina reviewed some of her recitation, and she learned the next line from her current Twelfth Night passage.
She read 6 pages from Frog and Toad aloud to me. She is doing wonderfully.
We sang our hymn and our folksong.

And Fina started learning how to crochet! It takes a lot of co-ordination, but she gave it a good effort. We will work on it a bit each day.

She spent a few hours outside playing with her friend T in the afternoon. It was cold, but it was a sunny day!

AO year 1, week 25, February 1

We started with reading genesis 1:1-5 and Fina narrated it very well. (I'm trying something new for our Bible. On Mondays, we read our Bible readings for the following Sunday. The next day, we will do the AO reading for the week. And the other days, we will alternate between Genesis and Matthew, as per Charlotte Mason's PNEU schedule for Form I year A).

I read chapter 19 from Paddle to the Sea, the forest fire. Fina enjoyed it and her narration was evidence that she connected with it this time!

I read "The Cat, the Cock and the Young Mouse" from Aesop's Fables and Fina gave a very detailed narration of it.

We did our lesson 6 from our catechism book, based on the 10 Commandments.

She reviewed some cursive and learned the letter R.

She recited a bunch of things for me and we continued working on "My father had a daughter" from Twelfth Night.

Fina dad 13A and B of her math.

We started our new artist, Hans Holbein the Younger. We looked at "Portrait of a Young Man." Fina did such a great job with it!

We sang our folksong "Farewell to Nova Scotia" and we started our hymn "Be Thou My Vision."

Fina read "Down the Hill" from Frog and Toad aloud to me. She is reading wonderfully.

Then I read a few more stories from Frog and Toad to Fina. They are such cute and funny stories.

We read the story of "St Ursula" from Amy Steedman's In God's Garden. Fina says "aren't there Ursuline nuns?" Yes, Fina! Yes there are! Really?!?! I'm not sure how she knows this stuff, or how she makes these connections?