Mid-winter has passed (Week 25)

. . and we can see hints of Spring's arrival. The kids have been noticing the appearance of buds on the cherry trees on our street. Leif has switched to a bigger paper route (64 papers vs. 33) in response to the lure of more cash. Now we deliver to our own street and the two parallel. It's a nice route and we've been blessed so far with gorgeous weather for our deliveries. And Hannah and Ivy have found a good way to travel along with us.



Leif and Hannah have been taking a new handwork class with Anna, our friend and former teacher from our Waldorf homeschoolers classes. They're doing a seasonal unit on Eskimos (the Inuit in the North) and building igloos, sewing seals and knitting an Eskimo. They're also learning some songs and acting out hunting scenarios. I can take some pics once they are finished. For now, all this hunting talk has inspired a new theme for dress-up at home. Leif the First Nations Boy hunting the Sister Cheetah to save the Princess. Yeah, we're staring our own unit of First Nations Studies next month, just to get a handle on the finer points.








I've introduced Hannah to the concept of skip counting. I drew a field of paired flowers and we counted them all one at a time. Then I pointed out how, since they were all paired, we could also count them another way. She had to think on it for a bit, but then she got it and after a few seconds of silence, she counted up to 38 by two's. Woohoo!

Leif is working on his times tables. I don't *want* to just make him memorise them, but I do see the value in knowing them. Sarah, any tips on how to do/teach this? For now, we look at the patterns in the numbers, how they repeat each other and what you can see when you wrte them out in paralell rows (2,4,6,8 with 3,6,9,12 etc).

Hannah has had fun giving me rhyming words for any word I start with. Goat, moat, boat. I sometimes write them down as she says them and point out how the ending spelling matches up.

Leif and I have been talking about Obama's visit to Canada. Why he's here, who he's meeting with and why the security is so high. Leif was surprised to learn he didn't fly on a plane with other people, that he had his own plane and transportation fleet. We listened to the Obama and Harper question and answer period on CBC and I tried to explain what they'd discussed, while still listening to the next bit. A tough exercise.


This month we celebrated Candlemas, a mid-winter party to keep the cold at bay and invite the warmth of spring. We gathered at the ever-lovely Saxe Point Park with friends and food, and were entertained with songs and stories.






Then we form a circle and walk around dipping stations, making our own beeswax candles and singing about the quiet of snow and candlemaking. It's a wonderfully relaxed, fun time, and we look forward to it each year. We meet new families, see old friends and the kids climb rocks by the ocean all morning.








We have begun reading Harriet the Spy together. I read it about a hundred times as a kid. I'd forgotten all the nasty stuff Harriet says in her journal (the woman was so fat her face looked like puffy bread dough. Nice.) but they love it, especially the wierd descriptions Harriet writes about her classmates and people on the street.


I leave you with a snapshot of Ivy, playing with her dollhouse (which was originally mine!) and her most reserved yet willing playmate.




Spring is coming. A few more weeks.