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!

Week Three

Last week was week three for us with third grade. It feels slow to do one day of creation each day, but this slowness also gives each thought a grand weight that seems appropriate to the topic. We are learning the stories, painting, working with clay and writing parts of the story in cursive. To help with the cursive, we are doing lots of form drawing. The wonderful thing about working with the Old Testament creation stories is that it gives me a chance to delve into the archetypes that lie within each day of creation and try to bring the essence of the archetype in a way that meets Rowan in his imagination.

In the nature journal, Rowan is grasping the details of writing the full date and is developing the habit of checking the temperature each morning. We found a bee hive box on craig's list and are now learning about bees. The idea is to get bees in the spring and to spend time now learning about them. We have two books out from the library, one all about honeybees and another that is an easy reader about the bumblebee. This second book is helping Rowan to work on his reading fluency. Something in this book also led us to stop and focus on b d reversals, with lots of made up stories using the letter b. The nature journal has also become a place for Rowan to work on writing his own ideas and learning about proper paragraph construction.

Math has been easy and this is giving Rowan confidence. We are working to increase recall speed with some timed tests. Word problems are still time consuming, but once Rowan gets through the reading part, he can usually gather the information needed to solve the problems.

Week Two

It rained a little on Sunday and Monday and so our poem included the rain (The silver rain, the shining sun, the fields where scarlet poppies run...). After saying it together for a couple of days, Rowan had it memorized and I had him write it into his Garden and Nature Journal along with the date and temperature each day.

We began form drawing by moving forms (with our arms, feet, fingers in the air) and later drawing them. This warmed Rowan up to start cursive. He has really taken to cursive writing. He enjoys it and asks for more. I found a nice verse to say to get us ready to start our forms at. It starts out "Dip, dip, dip, my blue ship".

For our stories this week I began with a story of Lucifer and Michael. It worked well to move from the Native American creation stories last week with their dream-like quality into a story about a battle between angels. I felt that it was right to premise the Old Testament creation story with the idea that creation and destruction are both needed for balance in the universe. Lucifer falls from grace, but he is not eliminated altogether. This story introduces archetypes that will return again and again in other cultural tales and in modern literature as well.

Over the following two days we reviewed the Lucifer story and Rowan began writing a synopsis and I added to it with the first and second days of creation. Smaller pieces of writing came from those two days. We did paint each of these three scenes with wet-on-wet watercolors, one painting each day.

Our big field trip this week was to the county fair. Rowan had a couple of things entered and so it was great fun to show up and find out if his entries won (they did - one first place and one second place ribbon). We spent more time than ever before looking at all the entries in many categories (collections, photos, paintings, sculpture, vegetables, crafts, and, of course, legos). We ate a mediocre lunch and later had some delicious ice cream. On the way out we were sure to pick up some kettle corn, some saltwater taffy and some fudge to bring home and share. We did visit the petting animal barn and one larger barn with goats and cows, but everyone pooped out before we got to the pigs or the poultry. This was a sacrifice for me because I have a real fondness for chickens and I love to see the little bantam roosters crow!

Math right now is coming right out of the Saxon Homeschool Curriculum. Rowan is still working so much with reading that it is good to have easy math concepts for him to review while he struggles with reading the instructions on the worksheets. The math is also having him review the days of the week and months of the year, giving him lots of practice with writing the date and spelling those words. So far this year we have reviewed number patterns (counting by 10's and 100's forward and back), adding on 1 and 0, chart and graph formatting and reading and measurement in inches of both straight lines and rectangles. I am pleasantly surprised to find that Rowan's slow but steady progress with the violin (both playing and learning to read music) is helping him with math.


Finally after a full and fun week, we had our Friday group. This is a wonderful group of homeschool families each with one, two or three children, mixed ages who get together every friday for art projects, festival celebrations and play productions. This past week we celebrated Rosh Hashanah with a story, a trip to the creek with breadcrumbs in our pockets and a snack of apples and honey. This group is always a highlight of the week for everyone who is a part of it.

And so now I go off to prepare for week three.