these days ...

Lately there has been all kinds of activities to keep us going.

Last weekend, I made my way into Whitehorse to hold my Fall Mini Sessions. It was a busy, jam packed and successful weekend, and now I am playing catch up in all sorts of ways.

Community commitments, have us cooking and serving up lunches on Mondays, and leading playgroups on Wednesdays. It's a busy time, but it feels good to be involved in our little community, and it also feels good for me to keep at my creative endeavours.

Fall is here, or rather is on it's way out already. The leaves have all since fallen off the trees, and we are well into bellow zero nights and mornings.

The cold has brought on a hankering for warm foods, like pumpkin baked everything (muffins, loaves!) and comfort foods. We had garlic roasted chicken for dinner the other night (which ended up giving us one chicken dinner, 3 mini pot pies and chicken soup) . It feels good to be back in the kitchen, making yummy food for my family and for friends.

In homeschooling news, we've been slowly  finding our rhythm with our homeschooling days, which feels good.

I know that our homeschooling adventures will be an ever evolving concept, but for now, I have found a nice balance for us, that seems to be working.

We start each morning with lighting a candle. Sometimes we then say a prayer or sing a song. I like how this kind of brings us together, and sets the mood/tone for the morning.

After our opening meeting time, we then do our calendar and weather dial. I made the weather dial and the kids quite like it.

After the calendar, it is story time. Down the road, Noah will start reading to me (when we do sight word books), but for now, we are enjoying seasonal books and what ever else strikes our fancy that morning.

After story time, we usually do a bit of Writing or Math. Our writing activities include journal entries, writing letters to people, printing, letter recognition games ect. Math includes, counting games, sorting games, patterns, and more. I am trying to make the activities fairly short (5-10 mins.) and have a few up my sleeve. So for example, we may play 2-3 games in the span of 15-20 mins.

 Right now I am noticing that Noah's attention span is getting a bit longer. A week ago, I was lucky if he would sit through one 5-10 min activity.

To me, what is most important is that we enjoy our time together.

If I am or the kids are feeling stressed out, or rushed, or just plain cranky, then it's not going to work for us. Same goes for a lot of "busy work" or "sheet work". I truly believe in experiential learning, and that being creative and learning to problem solve are really important learning skills to foster, so that is where my heart lies in homeschooling.

And finally, we are all starting to get excited for our upcoming trip to Ontario and PEI in October.

It has been over a year that we have all been back to ON together, and we are looking forward to having family and friend visits. We are also taking a quick side trip to PEI to visit my mom and our family there. It's been nearly 3 years since I've been to PEI and I am so excited for it.

It will be short, but I am looking forward to having a belated Thanksgiving dinner with our PEI family :) I'm also hoping that the leaves are still displaying their beautiful Autumn colours when we get there, as our are all gone now!

And that's how our days have been rolling along. Steadily, busy, and happily content.

xox

some of our Autumn books