This week’s lessons: houses

We moved further into our housebuilding block with shelters from the old testament stories. We learned about Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-Cain, descendants of Cain who made the first dwelling on Earth. This was a nice story, and a very good one that represented the archetypal first house. We used the story from Jakob  Streit’s “And There Was Light” which I purchased through Bob & Nancy’s bookstore. 

My dd put these stories in her old testament book even though they are lessons that are transitioning us into our houses block. She is making great strides in her writing, and illustrating. She is very careful, and makes very few mistakes. This is a huge improvement from the end of last year. Now, I just help her start the story summary, and she writes the body of it herself, in her words, with only a few suggestions from me.

 

I had planned on making, and painting hamsa hands for our own home, and reciting  Jubal’s song of consecration as we hung them up, but as usual we were running behind, and only got as far as tracing the template onto the wood. Hopefully we can make them soon, and if we do I will post it here.

The next old testament dwelling is the story of Noah and the Ark. I told her the story, and we started making animals from beeswax for a scene about the story. This is my incomplete chalkboard drawing. I plan on adding more animals over the weekend. I am not feeling this drawing much. We will finish up the Noah lesson on Monday.

I used “clouds of Glory” by Miriam Chaikin for the Noah story. I like her retellings better than any I have read. They are written in  an accessible way that makes them perfect for children. They are not dark, or dry like so many others, but full of life & color. Most libraries have her books, all of them are wonderful. I bought a copy on Ebay for $5.  

The story of Noah also gave way to a wonderful language lesson. This lesson was born from the notes in Eric Fairman’s Path of Discovery grade 3 book. In the Garden if Eden Adam named the animals & told what they did. With that we learned naming(nouns) & doing(verbs) words. In this lesson we learned color words (adjectives) & how words (adverbs). I began this lesson with a short little story about Noah & his wife Naamah needing to write down and create a record of the animals that made it off of the ark and onto the new earth . They began with the name, then the name & what the animal does, then what it looked like, how it does what it does, and  finally making a complete sentence about the animal by adding the helping word(article) and a period. We did 5 of these. One animal from each of the 5 groups…mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. We kept the theme of each type of word having a specific color so that our words would form rainbows of words when complete. We thought and acted these out together before she wrote and illustrated them on paper.  This exercise helped her to see that with words we breathe life, moods, and color into our writing.

We also worked on form drawing, and knitting a headband. I usually read to her while she knits. This week I read a beautiful book called “A Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah’s Wife”.   I highly recommend this book if you enjoy picture books. The pictures are done in a soft, but very vibrant watercolor. In the story Naamah is given the task by god to collect and save the seeds of all the plants on earth.

Next week we will continue the houses block, but will transition in dwellings of native peoples.

This weeks lessons:mostly water color painting

When we arrived home Monday after being on vacation for 5 days everyone was wiped out. Tuesday my daughter came down with a 102 fever, and was not up for “school work”.

When she was better on Wednesday we did some catching up in our main lesson book writing out Cain & Abels’ story and drawing illustrations. We also worked on our times tables, and started learning a new word family through our weekly silly sentence, which she copies, illustrates, and puts in her book of word families. We have been gearing up for learning cursive writing by doing running forms. First we begin with a warm up where she draws a lemniscate over & over for a couple of minutes with both her right & left hand, then she draws circles with both hands simultaneously going up & out from the center. After the warm up we begin with the forms. First she draws them in the air, then I let her trace mine on the board, then practice them on scratch paper, and finally put them in her form drawing book. I also have been writing things on the board in cursive to familiarize her with the script. I am not a cursive person, so it is a challenge for me as well to write neatly in cursive.

 

We officially began our block on houses on Friday. We started with a story which told of how the first house on earth was a human. It was a story from Live Ed’s 3rd grade curriculum, so I can not share it here. This lead to a discussion of how our body is the house of our soul, and the earth is the home to all of us. We learned (or I should say we are learning) a beautiful poem by master Waldorf teacher Clifford Monks that perfectly honors the idea. You can find it here http://www.waldorflibrary.org/Clearing%20House/Spring%201977a.pdf it is on page 6 of the PDF file which is all on 3rd grade.

After we recited the poem we did a painting which brought the poem, and story into the visual realm.

This was the first painting session we did with our new batch of 6 paints. Up until now we were only using the 3 circle colors. Now that we are into 3rd grade we will have the option to use 6 colors, prussian blue, ultramarine, vermillion, carmine, golden yellow, and lemon yellow. Theses are our “mother jars”.  I like to use “better than bouillon” for cooking broth, and the jars it comes in are perfect for mother jars. We paint from the smaller jars with the black lids that are in the bottom of the pic.

This is a big deal!! All new feelings & moods can be created with these new additions. Before we did our guided painting about the poem we just experimented & played with the new colors. Here are some my daughter did just for fun.

 A note about stockmar paints: These are concentrated pigments. You have to dilute them. It is best to dilute them into “mother jars”. These jars will not be painted from. Into your mother jars you will empty out the entire bottle of paint.  You will then pour small amounts of your already mixed paints from your mother jars into your little painting jars when it is painting time. Some people like to use baby food jars. Use what you like. Buying fancy jars will not make your paintings better, or worse.  Those little glass mise en place cups work nicely as well, but of course with those you have no lids. When you mix down the paint into your mother jars you should fill the paint bottles with water and shake them to loosen the remaining paint. It is precious gold, and you want every little bit of it to go into your mother jar, however I can not stress this enough… DO NOT OVER DILUTE YOUR PAINTS.  Just like when cooking , you can always add, but you can never take away. The goal is a rich color, not pastels. If you want pastels use a wetter brush, not over diluted paints. You will never be able to get a pure red, or vibrant blue if the paint is too diluted, even if you apply 10 layers. Remember, it dries lighter than it looks when it is wet. When you are done DO NOT POUR YOUR LEFTOVER PAINTS BACK INTO THE MOTHER JARS.  If you do you will possibly taint your entire jar. It only takes a tiny amount to alter the colors in your jars.  If you have paint leftover in your painting cups/jars, cover them, and use them later, but do not mix back into the mother jars. All paint should be refrigerated. If kept cool, it will stay good for months.

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.

Our lessons this week- In the garden

 This week we finished up the 7 days of creation, and wrote the pages for the book we will make from the paintings. On the sixth day we went outside to sculpt some animals that may have been made on the 6th day. My daughter made man & woman, and I made a little green anole lizard. We found several of those little guys outside. My daughter loves to catch them, and then hypnotize them. She can hypnotize just about any small creature. It’s a strange gift.

 

 

  On Monday & Tuesday we worked on learning a little bit about a multiplication square, and drew one in our math book. I was worried this would be too much for her, but she saw the patterns with out me telling her. After a short explanation about what a square number means she noticed on her own that the square numbers run diagonally down the middle of the square. At that moment I was a very proud mama. I’ve always loved numbers & their truthful beauty.  I am trying to instill a love of mathematics in her as well.

  For spelling we have been using a book called “Silly Sentences” by lively lessons. I believe it is out of print. Basically they take word families, and make silly sentences like the one in the pic above. We do a couple of them a week, and try to think of as many other  words as we can that are in the same family. We try to master any words she does not know how to spell, and she write the sentence, and word families in her silly sentence book along with a funny illustration of the sentence.

 On Wednesday we began the story of Eden and the fall. This was hard, and many questions arose from the story that I honestly had a hard time answering. Such as why was  the fruit so bad? Why did they have to leave just because they made a mistake? If they were innocent then they didn’t really understand what they were doing right Mom? Hard stuff…. But she wants to hear more about them, and I guess this is where the 3rd grade journey truly begins. Today we made a new main lesson book to put these stories in. My daughter likes to have very large books so that there is plenty of room to write & draw. I bought a very large pad of heavy watercolor paper to make main lesson book covers with  for about $14 at A.C Moore. They usually have watercolor paper at 40% off. I usually buy the 140lb weight.  She painted a nice cover for it. I like the water color paper as a cover because it is a bit heavier than drawing paper, but not as thick as poster board.

 When it dries we will stitch together the MLB, and she will write Adam & Eves story today before I go onto their life east of Eden.  Tomorrow we will be visiting an apple orchard to learn about growing an orchard and to pick apples to preserve for future eating.

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.

Our math lessons: the quality of 4, and form drawing

We did this a few weeks ago, but I finally got around to posting it. We usually focus on one number a week. This week it was 4. We skip count by 4, hop to 4, sing songs in the 4/4 rhythm. I liked the idea of working with nuts on a circle that I found in Active Arithmetic. We decided to do it on A’s little chalk board so that we could draw lines from nut to nut & make patterns. I would give her 4 nuts ans d have her carefully place them on the circle. She placed them evenly. I asked what shape do you see in the circle? She said a square. We did this with different quantities of nut, like 3, 5, 6, 8, and 16. I would ask her to remove every other nut, and this would show her the innate eveness or oddness of a number. We moved on from this to inscribing shapes within a circle & other forms around a circle. All of these forms were done with 4 dots on a circle, or a quantity of 4, like 8, again to get a feel of fourness. We wrapped up this math main lesson with drawing a square witin a circle on paper & seeing how far we could take it.  This was a fun lesson. When she was done with the nuts on the board ( I had pecans because walnuts were not available) she cracked them with a rock & took much pleasure in eating them. We will expand on this over the summer.

 

 

 

Our lessons: Honey bees

We did a very fun lesson block about bees. This was an interdisciplinary lesson. Included was math, language, nature study, art, form drawing, painting, cooking,and others. The lessons were based around The Story Of Hildy Honeybee, an original story I wrote for the lessons. It is a 4 part story which tells of the life stages of a honey bee from a tiny egg to adult. I did a huge amount of reading on the subject so that I would have a thorough understanding of the facts, and it was good that I did because the questions were many. I have included links to many of the pages I gleaned the information from. This block took almost 3 weeks for us. I used the standard Waldorf 3 day rhythm: Day 1 Story, day 2 artistic realm, then on the 3rd day academic realm. We learned a few new bee verses, and a couple of funny bee riddles ( youcan find them in the info links). We had a honey tasting. You can really taste the difference between the different flowers. We  made a no bake cookie called Honey Crispies, a type of rice crispy snack. Both of these activities were met with great enthusiasm. We worked on the number 6 all throughout this unit since the comb is hexagonal, and the bee has six legs. We skip counted, and tossed the ball to the 6 times table. In form drawing we drew freehand hexagons, six sided stars, and a form that mimics the bee’s waggle dance that we learned about in part 4 (see pic below).  Our spelling words came from our lessons. We do a spelling list each week. Our words were

Our Lessons this week: stars & dandelions

I had so many cool things planned for a week of stars, but some personal business really got in the way. I did however manage to get in one nice story that tied in the sun, moon, and stars while opening the door to spring with the inclusion of dandelions. I do love those glorious yellow weeds!! Our rabbit Ms. Bun loves them too!! 

  

 My daughter learned this poem when she was 5. It was her favorite, but her bigger girl self had forgotten what she had learned, and loved so very much when she was smaller. She re-learned it & put it in her book of poems, and songs. My illustration ties it into The Star Children story. If we can we will paint about the story later in the week.

She loves it just as much now as when she was 5, and took a great deal of joy in blowing the white puffy seeds froms the stems. They are really every where right now. I think they are truly the Ambassadors of Spring.

O DANDELION

O Dandelion, yellow as gold, what do you do all day?
“I just wait here in the tall, green grass, ’till the children come to play.”

O Dandelion, yellow as gold, what do you do all night?
“I wait and wait, while the cool dew falls, and my hair grows long and white.”

And what do you do when your hair grows white, and the children come to play?
“They take me in their dimpled hands, and blow my hair away!”

   Lastly, I shared with her information I learned from this article that I found through the Waldorf Online Library. It  was about how you can never really pick a dandelion.  It is a really beautiful article that is worth taking a moment to read. I hope all of you are having a wonderful time watching this spring unfold!

This week in lessons: the sun, and rabbits

My daughter has been asking tons of questions about the universe. She asks about the sun, moon, & other planets almost constantly. I decided we would learn a little bit about them in a 3 week block, and satisfy her curiosity. I know astronomy is not usually taught until later grades, but I felt since she was so receptive to learning about it,then I could not let an opportunity to teach a fully engaged child. That’s the nice thing about homeschooling. You can make it fit just for you.In keeping with the Waldorf 2nd grade ideals I am using animal legends to open the door to teaching about the sun,moon & stars. Since it is so close to spring, and rabbits are the consummate spring icon, I used the story “How Rabbit Saves the Sun”. I changed it a bit so that I could use the story as a basis for a painting lesson, and form drawing lesson. I am going to start posting stories, verses, and recipes separately to make the blog flow a bit more smoothly.  You will just have to click on them to be directed towards them if you would like to view.

I love how Waldorf methods integrate almost all subjects together. To me this synthesis makes it so much easier to teach. Instead of “lets put this away, and start that”, our day just flows together organically. In our circle time this week we started a new movement verse. I originally found it in “Looking Forward”, a wonderful movement & music book. It is called “Sally go round the Sun”. It is an old folk tune. It sounds very similar to “Here We Go LoobyLoo”. I changed it to go along with our story/lesson this week. Instead of Sally go round the sun, I substituted “rabbit”. Then I encouraged my daughter to choose other animals & act out what the animal would do, or how they would move. We also said her name, and my name along with the animals.  We sang the song, and did the movements in a circle around a yellow playsilk which was puddled in the middle of the floor to represent the sun. We changed the day of the week in the song to whatever day it was. I think this really helps in learning the order of the days of the week.

Rabbit go round the sun
Rabbit go round the Moon
Rabbit go round the chimney pot
on a Monday afternoon.
Whoopie!!! (hands meet over pot, and then fly into the air on “whoopie”)

then…

Horse…
rooster…
cat…
mommy….
elephant…..

Until you’ve had enough.

For sculpting this week we cooked some home made air dry clay.
It is a bit like salt dough, but it does not use as much salt. I think the salt dough makes your hands feel too dry, and to me that is really unpleasant.  This recipe made enough for me & her to make a sun, and we has a fist sized bit left over. We let ours airy dry for a few days, and then painted them with acrylics. I am going to put a topcoat of varnish on them to make them shine & preserve the finish. My daughters sun is tired. She said he was tired of burning so brightly, and wanted to rest. That is why he is frowning.

 

 

  

Our painting lesson involved our “Rabbit Saves the Sun” story.
This is my daughters painting.  We started our lesson with the sunlight painting verse, and then began the painting with a fiery red dot in the middle of the page. We circled out and made it bigger, and bigger. Then yellow came in from all four corners, and tried to get  as close to the red as possible. I think this helps to learn how to control the brush as well as the paint. As soon as yellow was as close as it could get we circle the yellow around the red, and then allowed them to meet.Then we painted rays extending out from the center like a sun..
We took a bit more red & made the center of the sun just a bit more hot.

You could just start with covering the whole page with yellow, and go from there if your child is younger.

We made sure to leave a part just yellow so there would be a nice yellow spot to put our rabbit. After our brushed were good & clean we too a bit of blue & made an oval at the bottom corner (this was his body)and a smaller oval on top of it ( the head). Lastly 2 small blue wisps created the ears. This made a cute, fuzzy, green rabbit. Green for spring, and green is a bit sneaky just like rabbit when he snuck in a stole the sun from the imps.

 

 

I always like to give some free painting time too to let her express herself. She made a little story for me to follow along to also. She said this is all of the children on a playground circling round playing a game. In the end, blue was a bully, so red came and made him be nice, which turned him into that soft lavender you see on the outermost part of the circles.

Our form drawing came from the part of the story when Rabbit kicked the sun into the sky, and it grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The second for we did was a mirrored form of the first when the animal council saw the sun & it’s reflection in the lake. It is rally like drawing an ever increasing figure eight or lemniscate. Steady in one fluid motion, always coming back & touching that center point.

  I always have a batch of 10 to 15 spelling words that come out of a lesson. This week they were….

Sun

Solar

Moon

Lunar

Star

Stellar

Constellation

Revolve

Revolution

Rotate

Rotation

orbit

The science comes in the form of discussion, movement, and observation. We talked about how the sun is a star. The closest star to us, and it is 150 kilometers away. We talked about how hot it musty be to warm our earth so gently, and pefectly from so far away.  We talkedabout how seasons are made by the earth revolving around the sun, and the earth rotating on it’s axis. We did 2 experiments to show this. First she was the sun, and I revolved around her while spinning. Then we traded places, with me being the center of the  universe. Then we did a similar experiment with a globe & a shadeless lamp. With this experiment you can clearly see why we have seasons.

We also went outside & traced our shadow onto brown craft paper. We did this  in the same spot at 9am, 12pm, & 3pm. That was a fun experiment. I let her color the tracings. Sorry, no pics.

I made up a poem about the solar system to teach the simple facts we were learning.

We also read the book “Sun Bread”, and then made sun bread. This is a really beautiful & fun book. I highly recommend it. It even has a nice bread recipe on the back, but I tend to use my basic no fail recipe for bread.

We continued the sun as a theme for a week. The next week we will focus on the moon.