Need more art

We haven't been doing much art, except for little craft projects that Audrey can do with us (does Play-Doh count as art education?) I liked the books I bought, but pulling all the resources together has been too time-consuming, and we haven't been making time to actually do any of the projects I've planned. So I went ahead and ordered the second Artistic Pursuits K-3 book. We enjoyed their lessons two years ago, and Mary looked forward to art every week. Now art can be a grab-and-go subject.

Drip by drip

Charlotte Mason advocated short, focused lessons, and that's what we're doing here, not on purpose, but because that's all the time Audrey allows us. We're not reading or writing as much as I think we should, but Greek, math and Spanish are touched on every day, or nearly so, and piano happens pretty regularly, even if it's only a playing one short piece a couple of times. When I think we're getting nothing done, I look ahead to the end of the book to see what all these little drips will add up to by the end of the year. Dripping water can drill a hole in rock or build stalactites and stalagmites, one drip at a time.

Greek Everywhere

Now that Mary and I are starting to learn Greek, we're discovering Greek words everywhere. The classical homeschoolers always point out how much English vocabulary comes from Latin, but there's much less mention of how much Greek we have. I would have guessed it was just all those -ology words, but there are so many more Greek-based words in our language. For example, the other day we went to the children's museum (museum comes from Greek). In the painting area, Mary wondered why there was only red paint set out. Another mom sitting next to her said, "I don't know, but do you know what it's called when you paint with shades of just one color? A monochrome."
"Hey," I thought, "I'll bet that's Greek!"
So when we got home we looked it up, and sure enough, mono (one) and chrome (color) are both Greek. We found lots more mono and chrome words in the dictionary. We've started a collection of Greek-based words we come across. Now that we're aware of them, we'll be noticing lots more.