Erin just turned seven and is in her second year of "official" homeschooling. We've registered with Nechacko E-bus this year. It's a program provided by BC's Ministry of Education through a school district in the northern part of the province. Bascially they loan us a computer and a bunch of software, and reimburse us some of our homeschooling costs, and in exchange we tell them three times a year "yep, she's learning!" This school year began with a cross-Canada trip in August to visit family and attend a music workshop. She already had terrific knowledge of the geography of Canada, but now definitely has a real sense of the landscape from BC to southern Ontario, and all points in between. Last summer we discovered a neat book called The Spirit of Canada, a collection of myth-retellings, fiction, poetry and song illustrating the cultural, geographical and historical variety of our country. Erin and I read from the book as we drove across the country, and she's continued to devour it in her independent reading since our return.

Recently Erin's violin work has taken off. After struggling at the end of Book 1 for the better part of six months, she's spurted her way through to the beginning of Book 3 in the past 11 months and is playing very well indeed. Her tone, intonation and left-hand posture have improved dramatically. And in the past three months she's become a skilled and confident sight-reader. Erin is also working hard in her second year of piano study. She's learning simple classical and baroque minuets and things of that ilk, at the Royal Conservatory Grade 1 or early Grade 2 level, and has made great strides in the past few months in terms of her facility with contrary rhythms and rapid hand shifts. Her note-reading on piano has also improved dramatically in the past few months. We recently had great fun recording and burning a CD of some of her piano and violin playing. We'll soon be accepting secure orders for copies at this site and hope to go platinum by year's end (just kidding!).

Erin continues to be an avid and precocious reader. She reads well ahead of "grade level". Last year her main focus was fantasy-based fiction like The Chronicles of Narnia, but this year she's reading much more non-fiction. This year her non-fiction reading has included lots about dinosaurs, philosophy, world religions, pirates and North American mammals. Still, of course, she has fiction on the go all the time. Having exhausted the Harry Potter series by last summer, she's continued to delve into fantasy, but also into a bit of historical and more contemporary, realistic fiction. She's organized a lending library of her favourite books for friends and family, complete with pockets and cards for sign-out. She's comfortable using a dictionary, index and table of contents, and alphabetizes accurately. She enjoys reading picture books aloud to her younger siblings and friends. She enjoys creative writing in fits and starts, and what she is producing is showing lots of increase in sophistication and the use of conventional spelling.

Her math work also continues. She's working in the Miquon Blue Book and Singapore 2B now, expanding on the conceptual basis the early Miquon books have helped her build. She really enjoys math puzzles and designing her own mental shortcuts to figure out multiplication and division problems and is now happily combining all four basic arithmetical operations. Of course much of her conceptual foundation comes from the fact that she uses math readily in her daily life, through board games, baking, role-playing games, helping with grocery shopping, studying music theory, dealing with money and general reading within the non-fiction genre.

Art, physical play, social opportunities and other exposures come to Erin "in the flow" if life as well. She contributed many of her favourite drawings for embroidered reproductions (by her mom) on a quilt top for her little sister. She's an avid bicyclist and ice skater, and this year has been able to take advantage of skating arenas of various sizes and descriptions, Canskate Level 2/3 lessons and our own outdoor rink. She plays with a multitude of kids every week, covering a broad range of ages. Her closest friends are aged 2, 4, 6, 10 and 13, and she has a number of special friendships with adults as well. She's learning to hand-sew and really enjoys weaving on her small heddle loom.

As for the rest, there's no way to predict where Erin's interests will lead her or what opportunities will arise. Every days opens up a world of possibilities, and that's as it should be.