Welcome to our weekend feature! It’s all my favourite things in one giant end-of-the-week roundup: books, blog posts, homeschooling, nature and wonderful things from around the web. I hope you enjoy!

Have a wonderful weekend.

~Mary-Ann

This Week on the Blog

In case you missed it, here’s what’s been happening on the blog this week:

Need an Autumn-Themed Reading Activity? There’s a Printable for That!

Leaves in the Mist: Ordinary Extraordinary Expressions of a Savior’s Love

Charlotte Mason Inspired: Beautiful Collections of Poems and Short Stories for Poetry Tea Time

If you are an email subscriber, you may have noticed some posts from 2016 in your inbox. I sincerely apologise. I decided last year to merge my two blogs and have been slowly migrating content. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do so without an email push, so please bear with me.

This Week in Nature

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

~Robert Frost, “October”~

 

Autumn is here in all of its glory. We’ve had a lovely time crunching through the leaves and savouring the crisp air. We collected leaves for a craft and tried unsuccessfully to find salmon in the nearby river. We’ve enjoyed being out in the woods with friends and being out in the woods with family. Autumn is breath-taking.

This Week in Books

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Between the five of us, here’s what we’re reading this week:

Picture Books and Readers

• Autumn Leaves by Ken Robbins – This book can be found on our giant autumn-themed booklist, “100+ Autumn Themed Storybooks to Read to Your Child“.
• Leaves Fall Down by Lisa Bullard – This book can be found on our giant autumn-themed booklist, “100+ Autumn Themed Storybooks to Read to Your Child“.
• Selections from Best-Loved Children’s Stories

• Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson – My girls have loved immersing themselves in Emily Dickinson this week.

Chapter Books

• Dear Canada: A Trail of Broken Dreams – This book is part of our living history curriculum this year.
• Goldtown Adventure Series – These books are part of our living history curriculum this year.
• A Hero for WondLa by Tony DiTerlizzi – This is the second book in the series. My husband read this book first in order to screen it for my oldest daughter. He approved and she will be starting it next week.

Adult Reads

• The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell – My husband gave me this amazing book for my birthday back in June, and I’m just getting to it now. Biologist David Haskell visits one square metre of forest for a year, documenting the changes there. It’s sort of like the adult version of Donald M. Silver’s One Small Square series.

“Take all the words available in the human vocabulary and read them from the dictionary, and you have only a list of words. But with the creativity and imagination God has given human being, let these words flow together in the right order and they give wings to the spirit. … This is the magic of words—a touch of the supernatural, communication that ministers to the spirit, a true gift.”

~Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Child’s Heart, p. 18.

This Week in Homeschool

• We’ve been starting each day with devotions, storytime, poetry, math drills, Daily Grams, and spelling.
• We do a history lesson once or twice a week and a geography lesson once a week.
• Then the girls break off and do their independent math and language arts lessons while I work with my preschooler.
• My middle child reads me a chapter from her Elson Reader and I ask her the reading comprehension questions found in the teacher’s guide.
• My oldest is working through a stack of living history books about the Gold Rush in the Yukon and the Gold Rush in California.
• We “panned” for gold in the living room using fake gold nuggets purchased from Michaels.
• The girls made silly creatures using leaves we found on one of our hikes.
• Horses! My oldest has been researching horses, and we finished the week with a trip to a horse farm.

Snippets from Around the Web

Last but not least, here are some of my favourite things from around the web this week:

• New Study Confirms Growing Up in a Home Filled With Books Is Good for You – Spoiler alert: The magic number is 350.

• Guess what? It doesn’t even matter if you read them all! Here’s Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You’ll Ever Have Time to Read

• And on the homeschooling front, this is some great Advice for New Homeschoolers. This advice is excellent for seasoned homeschoolers as well.

• 100 Bible Verses for the Homeschool Heart – Need some extra encouragement? Check out this beautiful list of 100 Bible verses for the homeschool heart.
• My beautiful friend’s facebook post on scars.