Sharing what I make - a giveaway

I am excited to participate in the Great Handmade Giveaway project hosted by sewmamasew. If you would like to win this hummingbird ornament, comment here and tell me what kind of hummingbird you think it is(you don't have to be right to win). On December 6 I will select a winner and ship it to you for free (in the U.S.)! If you want to check out the link to the bigger giveaway contest, please do: http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/?p=3314


As Rowan and I work away at school and fun and craftiness, I have also been working away (on the side) making little creatures for gifts and also to sell in my Etsy shop. This work has lead me to come up with fun new ways to present some old stories (bring back the fairytales!) and delve into the beauty of nature (I just love wild birds). Here are some of my creations:

Little Elf

Norther Flicker

Cardinal

Rhode Island Red Rooster and Hen Pair

Slowly but surely I am filling up a little Etsy shop called Henny Pennys Jumble. Clearly we like hens around here and are big fans of Beatrix Potter. Last year when I had a sixth grader still at home as well as my second grader we had some fun with Ginger and Pickles Economics and decided to make a shop. From that, our Etsy shop was born.

Winter Comes To Santa Cruz

I feel so blessed to live in a mild climate. We get warm sunny days and weeks every month of the year. But I love it when we get something close to real seasonal weather once in a while, just for the effect on our mood! This year, the weather has been cooperating with my schedule of activities so nicely. Today we have a fire in the wood stove and are feeling very crafty. Our family found the perfect tree at a local Christmas Tree farm last Sunday and I was so happy to hear even my teenagers proclaim what a nice tree we have this year! Our first Sunday of Advent was easygoing and perfect! That doesn't always happen, I am thankful that it did this year.
My family with our perfect tree

Cutting down the tree

Rowan working on the wreath

Of Course We are Feeling Thankful

We have had a very sweet week in life and in homeschooling. With Thanksgiving on our minds I wanted to try to pull us in toward our hearth and then Rowan got a fever! What better way is there to focus us in on being home, on being grateful for small blessings, on taking it easy and being gentle? While we nursed Rowan's illness, I found some very nice Native American tales and was able to bring us easily from the animal stories we had been working with into the human realm. We also felt like working with beeswax and I was lucky enough to stumble upon the blog Mountain Pulse with a very fine description of a great game of Native American dice. We made the dice out of walnut shells and melted beeswax and then, once Rowan felt better and we had a warm sunny day, we went to the beach and found some perfect driftwood sticks for the final part of the project.

As Thanksgiving came closer we decided to bake! Pumpkin pie, of course, but also an apple tart and a pear-walnut tart were on the menu. Pumpkin pie from scratch is great fun to make. It is also a bit of a science lesson the way you combine all these wet things and get a yummy solid pie in the end!

Jumping Mouse and Magic Frog

This week we had fun with some Native American animal stories. One fun story was about Jumping Mouse and Magic Frog. Jumping Mouse must go through many trials and find both courage and compassion on his journey to find the far-off land. I felt inspired to work with my general felt animal pattern a little bit and came up with a nice little felt mouse. Here is how I did it.

Felt Mouse How To

The Frog Prince

This week I was drawn to study the fairytale The Frog Prince for myself. Even though, with the third grade curriculum, we are not really "doing" fairytales anymore, I still find them very satisfying to read and study. In looking again at The Frog Prince, I came away with a much deeper interpretation of the story than I had when I first told the story to Rowan back in kindergarten.

It seems to be a perfect story of the nine year change, and any time of change, for that matter. The princess has this golden ball (gold is always symbolic of the higher spiritual power, right). She takes the ball out of the garden and into the woods throwing the ball higher and higher (here she is pushing the boundaries, going further than she perhaps should). She loses the ball in the spring and cannot get it out herself. She must rely on the help of a frog (who is ugly and represents change in the form of metamorphosis). She makes a promise but quickly tries to forget it. But change keeps knocking at the door. The king (representing the truth) insists that she face her fate. She resists (here we have that magic number three, letting the transformation meet her at all three levels: thinking, feeling willing) but ultimately she faces the change by fulfilling her promise to let the frog sit next to her and eat from her plate and sleep on her bed. In the end, of course, she is rewarded with the transformation of the frog into a prince (representing the bright future). I don't see this just as the girl getting the guy, but more like all the characters are within the being of the main character (or even the one hearing or reading the story). In a way, the essence of the golden ball is transferred to the Prince in his transformation. I think perhaps I am getting a little bit out there, but it all fits together well in my mind and that helps me get into telling the story.

So I have not yet told the story to Rowan this week. I have been making character dolls (it all started with me wanting to make a frog out of felt) and showing them to him for advice. I am waiting until I have all the dolls finished just right to put on a little performance with him. It does seem to me that just in my contemplating the story and its possible meanings, there has been an effect on Rowan's ability to meet his current challenges. Perhaps this is just my perception, perhaps there really is magic in fairytales.

Autumn Monday

I love Mondays and home schooling. Every Monday is a new beginning. Monday contains the most uninterrupted schooling hours in the week in our house. We always paint on Mondays and start on new stories, poems and songs. Often, I even have time to bake on Mondays. Today has been another fabulous Monday!

Today I began a new block, one focused on Animal tales and Native American stories. I plan to focus in on language arts - reading, writing, spelling, grammar. We had a Squirrel poem and an Autumn animal story both from the Wynstones Autumn book. As Rowan grapples with his 9 year change I sense a need in him to feel protected, sheltered, well-clothed. I would like to meditate on a sense of nourishing hibernation as we move into the winter days. We will study animal homes, habits and habitats and hear stories of animal characters. I think that for Rowan, he will be comforted to leave the somewhat heavy Old Testament themes for a while and go a little back to something familiar. We experienced many animal stories in the 2nd grade blocks. Now in 3rd grade, I would like to take those familiar animal characters and allow them to be the material for a more serious effort at composition, both written and artistic. Painting and drawing animals requires a new level of attention and technique and will challenge Rowan to stay focused. Handwork is always fun in the colder days, and gifts are good to make at this time of year. My skills lie mostly in fiber arts, so that is what Rowan gets more than woodwork. Oh well, you can't do everything.

Today in math, I took some time to review some well known shape names and learn a few new ones. Square, Rectangle, Triangle and Circle are all easy ones. New ones included the parallelogram, trapezoid and hexagon. This was a very low-key conversation with manipulatives and drawing. It was a good opportunity to practice observation skills and descriptinve language.

Halloween

Well weeks have gone by without a post. I knew that would happen. Homeschooling has a way of pulling me into a vortex that is very creative, but allows little time for documentation.

In these past weeks, we finished the story of creation and bound a beautiful book of painting, drawings and writings. We continued on for some time with Old Testament Stories, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the Tower of Babel. I need to take some time to write about all of that in more detail, but the most exciting thing going on right now is Halloween!

This week has been devoted entirely to Halloween. Rowan loves to decorate and we came up with some great ideas for a little party that will take place here tonight! Of course, I threw in a little learning here and there. We learned Halloween tunes for the violin, wrote out labels for potions and signs for the spooky walk. We drew and walked spirals, then created spider web forms in many places, finally hanging up a rope spider web and creating a creepy spider kingdom in a burnt out redwood stump in the yard. We also did some baking - full of measuring and technique. We made cookies in the shapes of pumpkins, bats and autumn leaves and we made doughnuts from scratch. Tonight we will hand fresh made donuts from a tree and have a "doughnut bobbing" contest.

Rowan very much wanted to create a graveyard in our yard and hang up skeletons and ghosts. He sees this sort of decoration all around town. We recently spent some time in Southern California, visiting the mausoleum where my recently deceased grandmothers ashes rest. That was certainly a good opportunity to discuss death and burial with my kids. It was an odd experience in many ways, but healthy, I think. Earlier this year, we lost a dear old pet and we held a beautiful and sad funeral in our garden. Now, when Rowan wanted to create a "spooky" graveyard, I felt compelled to take a little time to talk about the sacredness of death and the memory of those we love. We created markers for pets and wild animals (mostly birds that hit our window) that we have known. With Rowan right in the midst of his "nine year change", I felt it was a ripe moment to take with him and speak openly about loss, death, the spirit and the body.

Paper mache was a big part of our decorating this year. Trying to save money, not spending it on overpriced, low-quality junk from the party store, we came up with creative ideas for making giant toadstools, ghosts, bones and costume pieces. We did these things in paper mache, clay and cloth. I even slipped in a little fiber arts, having Rowan needlefelt green stems and leaves onto little wool balls to use as pumpkins in our fairy house display.

It is such a pleasure to work with Rowan on all of this. He is so enthusiastic and innocent. He is nine this year and I know that he will begin to change rapidly in the coming years. This is most likely the last time we will throw this kind of "magical" kid-focused party. I am trying to savor it as much as I can. At the same time I get exasperated with some of Rowan's behavior. Nine year old boys are full of some sort of mischeivious juice that jangles my nerves sometimes. I find myself chanting "Patience" to myself several times each day. I definitely feel that I am most able to do this when I have things in balance, not too much to do, minimal distraction. Unfortunately, this is not always possible to orchestrate.

Off to create a little more magic and try to have fun!

Happy Halloween!