This weeks lessons: more apples

We are going to a music festival tomorrow , so this weeks lessons were very short & sweet. Last week we learned how to preserve apples by drying. This week we sauced 1/2 bushel, and learned that canning was another way to preserve the harvest.   I made up an apple running form & we used this for a form drawing lesson.  After she had practiced the form my daughter copied her version into her farming book along with the 3 ways of preserving we learned about.

She really liked the apple running form, and asked me if she could have some time to make up some on her own. This was her idea.

She put the poem we were learning into her poems book. This is what happened to my Eden drawing. I transformed it into a background for the poem.

 

2 stories I told during these lessons were

Why Apples Have Stars Within &

Johnny Appleseed- I really loved this version

Today we prepared for our trip. We like to take most of our food. Being vegetarian can be difficult when traveling, and you can end up “junking out”. My daughter and I made the most delicious energy balls from a recipe we found on Dr. Ben Kim’s blog. I have found his blog wonderful for healthy recipes & articles. These have only 3 ingredients, pecans, dates, & cocoa. I added some spirulina powder to ours. So yummy, healthy, and easy to make.

This weeks lessons:language & apples

This week we began with Adam naming the animals which was turned into a lesson on naming words & doing words (nouns & verbs). This was inspired by Dorothy Herrer”s “An English Manual”. We had been including  the poems about animals that we found in “Wee Sing & Pretend” by Susan Nipp into our circle time, along with the song “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” by Bob Dylan. The entire animals poem can be seen in the book preview on amazon. The link will take you there. I use this book & cd set for many circle time activities.  The Bob Dylan song can be heard on YouTube using the link.  For the lesson I named an anima & wrote it on the board & she acted out what the animal did. I then wrote it’s action on the board. We then talked about the helper words like “A” , “An” and “the”.  She put what we had written on the board in her English book.

 Tuesday kicked off Michaelmas, and we went to the beach with friends to fly kites. I posted about that in the previous post. I told the kids the story of  “Nkosnati & the Dragon”. This one is appropriate for mixed ages. I did change the story to suit the seasons here.

Wednesday we made our dragon bread.  He puffed up so big that I didn’t have a platter to fit him on. We had to cut him up on the bread board. We also collected some wild flowers that were growing by the roadside for our table.

 

We continued with Old Testament legends with Adam & Eve having to make their own way “by the sweat of their brow” on earth. This actually worked out perfect for this week of Michaelmas. In one of the books I am using for stories “Clouds of Glory”, Michael brings Adam & Eve seeds & teaches them how to break apart the ground, remove the stones, and plant the seeds so that they can grow their own garden & feed themselves.  I love  this book for stories.  In this book the author also presents Shekina, gods  earthly presence. Shekina is female. We continued the english lessons with our weekly silly sentence for spelling practice, and an exercise from the Dorothy Herrer book. I wrote several sentences on the board without capitalization or punctuation, and then had my daughter place periods, and capitals  in the right spots. After that she was to underline the naming words in purple & the doing words in red. Before this exercise we talked about 4 things every sentence must have.. A capital letter to begin, punctuation in the end, a naming word & a doing word. I had her put this into her english book along with 2 sentences that contained those 4 things.

 

 

After this we moved onto the stories about Cain & Abel. More really difficult stuff. Honestly, I did not feel good about telling these stories. What is the lesson to be had from it? I have mulled this over & over. Is it that when we do not control our anger, bad things can happen to us & others? Is it that Cain did something horrendous, and is punished severely, but still is given the love & protection of god as he wanders? I really don’t know if this translates to a 8 or 9 year old. I have long been a student of world mythologies, and I can understand what the general understanding of this myth is in academic circles, but what Steiner sees is different.  I can clearly see that this is a story made by a herding people (the Israelites) to denigrate an agrarian culture (the Canaanites) prior to invading them. They are prefered by god over the farmers they are trying to take over, and this myth would have lended some sort of justification of what they perceived to be their rightful destiny. It’s hard for me to present this story knowing what I know about the history & why these stories were really created.It’s hard to keep these truths from her, especially when the questions that arise from the telling just keep coming and coming.  For now I suppose I have to trust the waldorf curriculum as they have been right about just about everything else up to this point.  

Thursday we had our usual swim lessons, and then our weekly homeschool group playdate, and thank goodness because we needed a break. On Friday we took a break form the old testament legends, and took up our farming work again. We did this for 2 reasons. One is we have a bushel of apples that has to be preserved before they spoil, and this needs to be worked into our lessons, and another reason is we are leaving on Wednesday for a vacation. I do not want to start on the sons of Cain, and Noah until we get back. These stories are going to springboard us into our shelters block. I did not want them to be interrupted by or made to be less important because we are trying to prepare for our trip while these lessons are going on.

So, on Friday we worked on apples. I told a brief story about the farming family from our container story, and what they do in fall. We talked about ways to preserve apples. I told my daughter a story we tell every year that she loves called “The Little Red House”. We wrote a summary on the board, and I had her point out the naming words & doing words in the sentences. She put what we wrote on the board in her farming main lesson book.

 We learned one way to preserve apples is by drying them. We peeled & sliced apples and put then on dowel rods to dry.  We strung the rods together & made an old fashioned apple ladder. Monday we are going to continue this and make applesauce. We save all cores & peels & juice them. You get about a cup of juice for every 3 or 4 apples worth of peels & cores. The pulp from the juice we feed to our chickens so that not one bit of our apples are wasted.

 

We also made some white wool balls with stones in the center for weight. We are going to dye them this weekend with the dye bath we made from goldenrod. I will post more on that later.

Picking apples, and Mini German Caramel Apple Pancakes

We went on a field trip  a few hours north to a u-pick apple grove to see how apples were grown and pick a bushel for preserving. The whole picking process was fast. I wish it had been a longer experience, but at least my daughter did get the experience of pulling the apples from the tree with her own hands, apples she will process this week into dried apples, apple sauce, and fruit leather during next week’s lessons. At the orchard a mother pig had just had 5 babies a few days before. Baby pigs are pretty close to the cutest things on earth. You really have to see them in action. CUTE OVERLOAD!!! 

This morning I made everyone mini german apple pancakes from a few of the apples we picked. The recipe is below.

 

 

 

 

This week in lessons

We officially started our 3rd grade lessons on September 1st. We started with a math review. We did math stories, and movement in order to help solidify our knowledge of the multiplication tables.  My daughter began a multiplication main lesson book. This week we began our first complete week with farming. I introduced the lesson with a story I made up about a family who live on and operate an organic farm. I used Mellissa Neilsens idea of using a container story for your lessons. The family is of mixed heritage with the father being Jewish, and the mother Cherokee. The lessons we do on farming will be about the family and the work they do on their farm throughout the year. The old testament stories will be told by the jewish grandma when she visits, and the native american stories which we will use for weaving, pottery & houses, will come from the mother. Here is the blackboard drawing I did of the family farmhouse for the first lesson.

The next part of their story was about the work they had to do in the late summer/early fall. They have to cut & bring in the hay & straw to feed the animals in winter. The wheat should be nearly ready. They have to plant some root crops & winter greens for their market garden. We also talked about chickens & my daughter sculpted some from beeswax. I added the father & the oldest son loading hay into the cart to the blackboard drawing, and she put these lessons into her farming main lesson book.

 Each moring we started our day with circle time. An opening verse, and some singing & movement. We worked on one multiplication table each day through hand clapping, stepping, jumping, and rhymes. My daughter then worked out the table on her multiplication board, and then put the tables shape into the book along with the actual table & an illustration that represents the number.

 This week we included several of the activities of farming family did into our own life. We prepared a raised bed for planting turnips for our fall turnip lanterns. Turnips are fast growers, only taking 50 days. Hopefully ours will be ready in time. If not we will buy some locally, and eat ours.  We harvested a bushel of  field peas, and dug up peanuts at my Dad’s house.  The field peas were much harder to shell than they were to pick, but they are beautiful, nutritious, and easy to dry & store to use in winter.

 

 

 On Friday our farm family prepared for their jewish grandmother’s visit. When their grandmas arrived they baked challah for Friday’s Shabbat dinner. She told the children a story from her sacred book. This was the opener to the old testament stories. I told my daughter the story of how lucifer and his angels were cast out of heaven in preparation for starting the story of the days of creation next week. I used the version in Jakob Streit’s book “And There Was Light”.  This story came exactly when it was needed. Last week my daughter started being sarcastic, and back talking us. It seemed as though she thought she was our equal. In the story, Lucifer thought his garment was a bright as God Father’s, and that he could be a god too, just like God Father. He got together a band of lesser angels who forged him a throne, and he became their little god. God Father offered him a chance to see the error of his ways, but he did not want to change, and was cast out of the heavens by Michael into the cold depths below. When I told her this story, I could see on her face that she “got it”.  I haven’t had any back talk today. We will see if it sticks. We also made some challah for what was our very first Shabbat we will celebrate in 3rd grade. I used this recipe. I did add an extra egg, and another 1/2 cup sugar, but it was still not very sweet. It was excellent, probably the best bread I had ever made, and my daughter loved rolling out the dough snakes, and braiding them into the loaf. We made 2 loaves. I will use the leftovers to make a bread pudding.  

This morning we went to our little local farmers market in downtown Conway. We were able to pick up some wonderful locally grown produce. My daughter was attracted to a table that has baskets of huge, red, shiny apples. Next to them was a nice lady who had some equally large, but kind of ugly apples. I took my daughter over to talk to her. Her apples were organic, and grown only a few miles form our house. They did not have the pesticides, and fungicides that the beautiful apples grown who knows where) did. We bought the ugly apples. They were unbelievably good. This lead to a discussion of what sustainability means. It was also a good lesson in that not every thing is what it seems on the outside. We also were able to buy some locally grown, and processed peanut butter, locally grown & milled corn meal, and some aromatic rice that was grown only 60 miles away. South Carolina is one of the few places in North America where rice can be grown successfully. Rice plantations are enjoying a huge resurgence here. I couldn’t ne happier about that. A rice field is a thing of beauty.

We went home and had some left over challah with our local peanut butter. It was heaven.

We had a very fruitful week in lessons. I will be back soon with pictures of main lesson books.