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.

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

Rabbit & the sky box: a story, form drawing, & handwork

The Rabbit &  the Sky Box is a short legend from South Asia that I used as a bridge into form drawing & handwork.  It explains the phases of the moon. It goes something like this……

 Up in the shimmering sky there is box. Inside the box lives a silvery white rabbit. Rabbit slowly opens the lid, and as he opens it a sliver of light escapes. He opens a bit more, and that sliver of light gets bigger. He opens it a bit more & it gets bigger still. Until he opens it all the way, and hops out. The light is the full, round moon. He grazes a bit on the field of  glittery flowers in the sky, and then hops back in, and slowly closes the lid of the box.

You can easily elaborate on it & make the story longer. We decided upon a ribbon motif for the box, and practiced it on the chalkboard. First straight lines, then curves, then a combo of the 2, and finally a mirror of our final running form.

 

 We then took the ribbon motif & painted it on a round paper mache’ box which we had painted a deep blue. We made a white rabbit to go inside.  A pom pom rabbit would be nice for little hands to make, or a knitted one from a single square  would be nice too.  Here are some pics.

 

 

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.