The fall's unschooling began with a brief foray into "school at home" for fun a couple of days a week. Erin spent some time working on her printing, spelling and math. As usual, life devolved into busy-ness and our structure soon consisted of musical committments and serendipity.

"String's the Thing" Tutti Orchestra at the Performing Arts Centre in Vernon, BC. In case you have trouble picking Erin out of the crowd, you get a little help.

Erin sewed all the seams on her new skirt with just a little help.

Her piano studies have also been given a boost by our acquisition of a "real" piano upon trading up from our old Clavinova. She's working away at basic Sonatina repertoire as well as a variety of contemporary and romantic pieces at the Royal Conservatory Grade 4 level and handling it very well indeed. She's started working with a new teacher and is enjoying the fresh spin on things. Her piano playing has come a long way in the past year. She's practising about 2 hours a day on violin and piano combined.

"Night Rain Cityscape Through Windshield" wet-on-wet watercolour.

Erin's main area of factual interest this year has been things medieval. She's spent a lot of time with the "Age of Empires II" computer simulation, and knows a heck of a lot more about Mongols and Franks and Saladin and Joan of Arc than her parents. Her current favourite strategy on AoE is a missionary one. She trains battalions of monks who convert the enemy in impressive numbers. The difficulty seems to be in stopping the not-yet-converted heathen from building more seige towers whilst one's monks are busy with the new accolates. The medieval interest has spun off into lots of related fiction and non-fiction reading and research and hundreds of hours of imaginative play.

Sometimes we skate at the "big" rink in Kaslo with the area's homeschoolers.

Erin did the annual series of skating lessons locally again this winter and earned herself another Canskate badge or two. She's beginning work on basic jumps. She took a series of gymnastics classes with a bunch of other homeschooled kids, including her closest friend, Jaya, and she loved it.

Erin has continued to read like crazy. With her reading and comprehension ability having been so high for so long, it was kind of hard to sense how her language arts skills were evolving. But suddenly this spring we've discovered where all that reading has gone. It's been growing us a writer! Despite doing almost no writing for over a year, Erin's skills had clearly been growing all along. Compare last year's writing efforts to this year's recent output and I think you'll see the growth. Suddenly she's burst forth as a writer, just since summer began, putting in often hours of work a day. The rich vocabulary, descriptiveness, insight and use of clever plot devices are astounding.

Math work sort of grumbles along at various levels. She's working through Singapore Math's Level 3 materials from time to time, but has also decided to go back and fill some holes in the last two Miquon books (Yellow and Purple, Grade 3) that she never got around to before. At the same time she's quite enamoured of a manipulative-based algebra program, "Alge-Tiles", which has finally answered to her desire to have a visual/symbolic way of dealing with negative integers and unknowns in fairly complex equations. So she dabbles away at multi-digit multiplication and division, basic math facts, and algebra, more or less simultaneously!

Summer has taken hold here again, and I guess we'll soon start a new page. In the meantime, we're doing lots of music, lots of reading, lots of canoeing and just enjoying being with each other.