On my agenda for this week back in May when I was writing and planning our plans for the school year I left this week entirely "Open" for anything we wanted to do. I am so glad I did this!
Monday was the shortest day of the year - the Winter Solstice. We celebrated it as we are studying it until Friday this week. We did so by making solstice cookies. We discovered in the one 24 hour period, there would be 10 hours of daylight and 14 hours of darkness. So we made 24 cookies. 9 were sunny yellow like the sunshine, 14 were dark with chocolate frosting for the night, and one cookie was half bright half dark to represent the sunset. This was also a great time for some counting. We baked the cookies, laid them out and iced them accordingly, then labeled them hourly and had a really great visual of what our 24 hour day would look like on the shortest day of the year. Ellie also made evergreen art. Evergreens were brought in the homes traditionally all over the world to bring in life and brighten the homes when it was oh so dark. We had a candlelit dinner to light the darkness and also to discuss how Jesus is our light in a dark and lost sinful world. We watched the sun go down as a family. It was very interesting as we saw the sun set in a far different location than we usually see. It was already so low in the sky as our Earth is so tilted away on it's axis from the sun. The sun went "down" quickly and far away from the normal sunset location in our backyard. Ellie observed and danced in the yard and ran and played while we enjoyed the sunset. Monday night was also the miraculous night of the "Bethlehem Christmas Star!" We remained outside a while to observe the star (planets aligned) and used my husband's binoculars to get a closer peek. It was incredible! It is such a sign of hope in a weary world. This hope will be lost on so many but I am so thankful my family knows the hope that Jesus gives us in seeing this star. The hope it gave so many years ago that a Messiah was born - a Savior was born. And seeing it last night reminds us that He is still coming back and He is our light in the dark. Following our candlelit dinner we proceeded with advent readings and prayer.
Also in studying the winter solstice, we learned that the tradition of bringing evergreen boughs indoors came from the idea of many cultures that this would lighten up a home and bring life into the house out of the darkness and bring hope of life. So we went on an evergreen nature walk and found many kinds and we labeled them and discussed their differences. We chose a few sprigs to brings home and Ellie made some art with one of her selections. She made a wintery scene on a black piece of paper. The black represented the dark of winter. She then painted it white and added silver glitter for a snowy wintery look. Then, she glued her evergreen bough to her paper and it was really very beautiful! And it smelled good!
Ellie also enjoyed playing with her new magnet board with magnetic letters and numbers. She liked grouping them and discussing them with me and we casually learned about them through play together. Then Ellie wanted to play with shapes and group them by shape and color. So I let her do that and she made pictures with them as well.
We cuddled and read some books as usual.
Ellie got a new puzzle. She has really loved looking at her maps this year and learning about our world and our own country casually. Her newest puzzle was a large USA map puzzle. She really enjoyed helping to put it together and she knew some of the states of course quite well like SC, GA, and MI.
Ellie loves to build and construct things all the time! Anything and everything all kinds of materials she will use to build with her great imagination. We have colorful smoothie straws we keep in the craft closet in the homeschool/ Africa room and she loves to insert them in one another to make a connection. She wanted to see how long we could make a "road" of straws. So, together, we constructed a great straw road that was very long, indeed. And once we finished working together on this, she asked if we could count how many straws it took to make the road. Absolutely, we can count all the things you want to count little Ellie! I love when learning is done through play and not forced. Counting is fun to her because I don't make her sit and do it in a desk or in a boring repetitive manner. She likes counting when it is something she is interested in or playing with. She even asked to count how many crayons she used to color her pictures. This is a great way to learn important things without being "in school" like settings. So, she had 48 straws used to construct her road.
The rest of the week was spent reading more of our Christmas books we had been reading from our book basket in the den, baking cookies with daddy, seeing Christmas lights and animals. a pony ride, and Christmas cheer!
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