Early morning sunrise and more!

Fina woke up really early on Monday morning (though the sun is also rising later!) and she saw a lovely sunrise. She ran downstairs to tell us about it. So her and I put on our boots and our coats and ran outside in the chilly air to marvel at God's beauty. We ran out to the north edge of town (which is about 350 metres from our front door!), where we could watch the spectacle from the field, unhindered by any buildings or trees. Fina said "I wish I was quick enough to paint this, but by the time I get out my paints, it will be gone!"

On Monday afternoon, we started our special study on moss (and lichen) at the forest. We're wondering why moss seems to grow on the upper side of the trees. Even with the slightest incline, the moss is on the upper part. It is so interesting!!! There is a lot of moss in our forest, and every day we get to observe and make notes on different types in different spots.

On Thursday, we hit 1000 hours outside. I've mentioned this challenge before. It is to encourage families to spend more time outside (and less time watching tv!). We started counting on April 1. The lovely weather of this last week has really helped! We are getting a proper fall, after the snow of the beginning of the month. I think this is the fastest we've hit our 1000 hours. It is really great for us to keep track of Fina's time outside. It actually encourages me to see those numbers grow.

We've been enjoying brush drawing outside without frozen hands!

It took all of her will not to jump into that lovely rushing water of the creek!

We are enjoying Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. It is fun for the three of us to take parts and do a read through. So much fun.

Fina is really enjoying our historical fiction selection, Jeremy's War 1812. Jeremy becomes a "batboy" for General Brock. It's a great story that really captures one's imagination. We are both enjoying it.

We are also enjoying our biography about Tecumseh. He was a fascinating man. The book is well written, moving between very technical and historical parts, as well as some more "human" stories from his life.

History is really coming together for us this term, for which I am very grateful.

a little glimpse of summer

On Thursday, we had a high of 24 degrees! Fina was thrilled to be outside (from noon til 9 pm!), with shorts, a t-shirt and barefooted. Skipping rope through the park. Squishing her toes in the mud. Doing nature study with its brush drawing while outside! And playing, playing, and playing with her little friends. It was glorious. A break from winter! (You will remember my pics from last week. One week exactly!)

We know it won't last, so we enjoyed it while we had it! We don't have the Chinook in MB, but that is what it seems like. Maybe it was our "Indian Summer." We don't always have it that strongly either.

It is so nice to sit outside and paint. I did three entries myself. I could have sat there all day!
It is true that, in winter, you can observe a lot of things that get "crowded out" in the other seasons. So many things are bare, which brings to the fore the things that aren't bare, or the details you miss when they are overshadowed by vibrant foliage. We've been enjoying that in our nature studies this week. We tend to be pulled in by plant life in all of its forms. We see the birds, but they are harder to paint.

I studied this little tree. There were two of them along the path in our park. It still had full green leaves. I'm not sure what it is, but it is certainly beautiful!

The juncos are busily doing their thing right now. We're not sure what their story is, exactly, but they are flitting around, pecking at the grass, eating in large flocks. They are beautiful!

We are in the final stretch of our current free read, Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle. Fina really enjoys it. For some strange (unknown to me) reason, I find it weird, awkward, and sort of uneven. But I'm really not sure why I am having trouble with this classic! Chacun son goût, I suppose!

A week of firsts!

We started our first Shakespeare play! With salmon and potatoes baking in the oven for supper, we read through Act I Scene i of Much Ado About Nothing. Fina did a great job, reading the parts of the Messenger and the Prince. Fina's homeschooling dad read Leonato, Benedick and others, and I read Beatrice, Hero, Claudio and others. It was really great! I had a serious "moment" while we were reading. It is just so incredible to think that my little one can read Shakespeare!!! I loved it!
We have really enjoyed the Joss Whedon movie version of it. Not at all appropriate for Fina, but fun for adults and for Whedon fans.

We also started up our piano lessons. We're having a great review after way too much time away from them. Fina really enjoys playing, which is so great!

Fina's homeschooling dad just started reading The Hobbit aloud to her. This is her first Tolkien experience ever. (She is a lover of C.S. Lewis. They have read through that series aloud together at least 4 times over the years. It's kind of their "thing.")

I was at the Charlotte Mason Living Retreat in Georgia on the weekend. It was so wonderful to see old friends, to meet many social-media friends I had never met "in real life" and to make so many new friends!

We've had our first couple of snows. It was not easy going to Georgia and then coming back to this! Fina is pleased. I'm needing a bit of time to adjust.

The ski goggles might have been a bit much!

The crab apple tree behind our house has all of its green leaves yet!

This rarely happens here - snow you can use for building!

We are really enjoying our biographies and historical fiction selections for this year. We are studying the 1800s for our history, so we are reading Canadian stories about that time period. Tecumseh by Luella Bruce Creighton (it is on of The Great Canadian Stories on loan to us from our friends), The Broken Blade by William Durbin (about a 13 year old that goes off to be a voyageur in 1800), Jeremy's War 1812 by John Ibbitson. We are also reading a biography about St Thérèse de Lisieux (from the Pauline Encounter the Saints series. Cute little books that are easy to get on Amazon). Am embarrassment of riches in the historical fiction / biography. Which is great, because we had had trouble with that in the past.

Our poet for the term is Wordsworth and we are enjoying those poems. Fina and I are reading E Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle as our read aloud. I'm having trouble getting into it, but she loves it.

Winter is coming! Not yet. Autumn is short in Manitoba!

Well, the temperature just dropped terribly here, and we are hovering just above 0 celsius. Windy, grey. We had 10 minutes of heave snow thing morning. It didn't amount to anything, but still. It isn't easy.

We had to take our nature journalling indoors. We were looking at a pineapple weed in the park, but it was too cold to even write in our journals! So we wrote and painted inside.

Today, Fina did her first written narration. I call it written, though she dictated it to me and I wrote it out longhand. This requires her to slow down and think about her narration. We read the first half of Chapter 97 of Our Island Story. This is the narration she dictated to me.

I read the first paragraph, and she narrated:

They [the British] killed their King and Queen, so then they had a Prime Minister. This guy was very peaceful. And France went against them, and they started fighting by land and sea.

I read on, and she narrated:

Only the British were strong enough against Napoleon, a guy who only cared about himself. He didn't care and gave the crown of the kings to his friends. He didn't care how much the people suffered. Napoleon was from France. 

I read, and she continued:

Napoleon wanted to conquer England. He knew the Irish hate the English too and would be willing to help the French. So he wanted to invade the Irish but the Irish wouldn't let them, so they were forced to leave. Then the people decided to be united instead, and not be at war and be nice to each other. The British soldiers spoiled everything, they spoiled Napoleon's plans and they made peace with France.

I read the last portion of our reading, and she finished her narration:

Every sailor felt his courage rising, because they were on ships and this guy [Nelson] said "I am like a cat watching for the Spaniards like mice and I know I might be filled while I am at it." And he sent a signal from the top of his own ship the Victory, "England expects that every man will have to do his duty."

This is a fine narration, as far as I'm concerned. (So, we'll have to work on the "guy" thing. I should write the names on the white board before we start, so that she has a reference.) She is not proficient enough in her writing, so I thought we'd do it this way to start. Down the road, I will have her write the first few lines herself and then just give an oral narration for the rest of it. I really wanted to give her the chance to hold her narration, and slow it down to the speed of my writing, which is quicker than her writing, of course, as an intermediate step!

I went with some of my friends to the big used book sale in our nearby city and got these gems, among many others. It was a great day!

Abe Lincoln is my first ever Landmark!

Fina is working hard on keeping her cursive writing to be precise and consistent. We are making our way through the alphabet as a review, and we'll move on to word and sentence copywork as soon as we are able.

We are really enjoying our Canadian historical fiction, Jeremy's War 1812. It is so fun to see how it lines up exactly with our Brown's The Story of Canada as well as the British Our Island Story. After reading the OIS passage that we read above, we read Jeremy and they were speaking about General Brock (from our Brown reading from a few days ago) as well as Napoleon. We are really enjoying history this year!

I found a neat biography of Robert Louis Stevenson through our province's educational library and we've been reading it. We pulled out our old copy of his A Child's Garden of Verses and read the poems that are alluded to in stories of his childhood. It is so interesting to see how much his poems were inspired by his actual life. He actually suffered from tuberculosis and spent a lot of time playing in bed, which inspired his poem "The Land of Counterpane." He also actually had a lamp on the street outside his window and the neighbourhood lamp lighter was actually named Leerie. This biography is a great read. She has written a bunch of other biographies that I hope to track down. They are 48 pages, with pictures and quite accessible for form 1 and 2, I think.

During her nature study today she was singing our hymn "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which she claims she doesn't really like. But it certainly is catchy!

It has been a good week. We are enjoying the feast. It isn't always easy, but it is delicious!

Back to school!

We started back to school last week!

"How do we make our nature walk and journalling time shorter?" asked nobody ever! We had our first nature walk this week, on Monday (I couldn't get myself organized enough to actually take Fina on a nature ramble last week. She got in hours and hours of outdoor play, but either with her friends or with me, but without any journalling).

We went down to the creek and I asked her to wander a bit to find something that would catch her fancy.  Fina found a tiny clam (she loves clams!) and painstaking painted one half of its shell, from the convex side and from the concave side. And look at what she had me write!

This first photo shows three 3 images - the first is Fina's painting of the outer side of the shell, the second shows the painting of the inside of it. The blue splotch was Fina trying to trace the clam with paint -- the paint ran, she worked furiously to try to contain it, and then to wash the paint out of the paper etc. She was a bit upset as this was her new journal, but she did not get frustrated (which completely surprised me. I expected her to cry!) and decided it would be a lovely colour for a background and traced her shell in pencil. She really wanted to depict the actual size of the shell. I told her that next time she could draw just the outline with a really fine brush (without tracing, but free hand.)

We were out for 2 hours that afternoon. We had a lovely ramble and a detailed observation time, with lots of discussion and enjoyment and gazing at God's splendour, focusing on a tiny clam shell that is only1cm in diameter.

And on Thursday, she did these brush drawings during our nature time, with ample written narrative as well. (It was freezing cold, windy with such a terribly cold northerly wind blowing on us. But Fina would not be deterred. Good thing, because I would not have chosen to stay out there to journal.)

We got a new sloyd book this year and we are really giving it a go!

I'll have to get a pic of Fina cutting her folds with an exact-o knife. She just loves it!

One of our poets for the term is William Wordsworth. We read his "There was a Boy" poem on Thursday.

I didn't really know what this poem was about, but after we read it she told me that she thought the boy was maybe actually the sun, or maybe even God. Because she figured the boy wasn't human. How on earth did she get that? But she did!!! Incredible. She said it was because how he had his hands held, with fingers interwoven, and shouting across the Vale, and being received into the Lake. The sun could do all of that! We had this interesting discussion about this poem.

A little group of us have started a mom's study group to read volume 1 of Charlotte Mason's Home Education series. There were 8 of us at our first meeting. Such a blessing to have an actual, in real life, local group. This is something we've been praying and hoping for for a long time!

I'll leave you with this cuteness: Fina and her little friend built this house at outdoor playgroup this week.

Our summer 2018

Over 5 months between blog posts. Hmm.

We've had a lovely extended summer, with lots of travelling (Florida, a TransAtlantic cruise with stops in the Azores, Lisbon, Càdiz, Malaga, Ibiza and Barcelona, time with family in Ontario, 6 weeks at home and then a quick time back to Ontario for my nonna's funeral.) The highlight of our trip? Seeing the incorrupt remains of St Victoria in a little crypt below sea level in Cádiz and visiting La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

At the port in Lisbon. Her first time putting her feet in that side of the Atlantic ocean!

We went through the Straight of Gibraltar! 

It was after midnight, so we saw the lights on the Rock. It was super exciting!

Fina's first time in the Mediterranean Sea (well, this is technically the Alboran Sea) in Málaga

Fina with the officers of the Disney Magic ship. She was chosen to be the "official pin trader."

This is the crypt of the Cathedral in Cádiz, with the incorrupt remains of S Victoria (a sort of unknown Roman saint). Read about this crypt here. It is in Spanish, but you can see some well-lit pics. Fina loved it!

And La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Incredible. We were speechless. If you ever get the chance, go!

We took a tour up the Nativity tower and this was one of our views of Barcelona.

Then we climbed down the spiral staircase in the tower, for 65 metres, back into the church

And, of course, fancy European gelato!

Back home we went to the annual Frog Follies Festival in our town. Here is Fina with Pierre and Jolys!

I'll finish up my "back to school" post asap!

Spring will come!

Spring will come, we know it! But not quite yet!

Over March, we finished up our second term and had our exams. Fina is doing really well with our Spanish lessons, our sol-fa, and our Bible lessons. She gave great narrations for everything. We will continue to monitor our history and geography lessons, which still didn't provide the best narrations.

We had a wonderful holy week and were able to participate in the awesome liturgies.

Here she is reorganizing flash cards from our Spanish story. She was able to retell the story to me wonderfully!

Enjoy some winter pics!

skating on the slushy creek

building with chunks of ice

building a fort with snowballs

the sugar water didn't run from the maple trees in time for our local maple sugaring off festival

built a snow chair at outdoor playgroup

and skating on the "thawed and then re-frozen" creek, on April 5 2018!!!