A big part of Waldorf education is celebration, which takes place through various festivals held over the course of the year. Festivals are like holidays, only they usually also have a spiritual basis with something to teach the child. We are familiar with festivals such as Christmas and Easter. Waldorf schools incorporate a fews other festivals as well. They are considered to be very important in the life of a child and of a family. Families can choose festivals from their own religious traditions. I've thought that for LDS people, general conference fits that bill! Especially when we combine it with family get-togethers, special foods served, and special family traditions.
We are observing general conference weekend this weekend, but this past week we also incorporated one of the traditional Waldorf festivals that I felt would fit our family's beliefs and that I knew Dallin would enjoy. That is the festival called Michaelmas. Go to the book of Revelation to read the account of Michael defeating the dragon in heaven to learn about the concept of good overcoming evil. It's a story any self-respecting young boy would love! While we did read this story in our scripture study earlier this week, this holiday was mostly fun. We told several other dragon legends and incorporated them into our school work. Michaelmas, as I understand it, is about courage and doing hard things, taking inspiration from great heroes who have also overcome very hard things and defeated "dragons". Occuring in the fall around the equinox, it is also about light, receiving light (and strength) and carrying that into the dark winter months.
On Monday our plan was to go on a hike, something fun and yet hard for the kids to accomplish. Unfortunately, due to Mom's poor planning, our hike didn't exactly turn out as expected. We planned to go up Little Cottonwood Canyon to Cecret Lake, past Alta, which was supposed to be a great, short, fun hike perfect for kids. Well, Mom found out the hard way that cars use a lot more gas when you're going up steep mountain roads, and it's a really good idea to make sure that you have more than enough gas to get where you want to go. Not only did we not have enough gas to make it to the trailhead, but we soon realized there wouldn't even be enough gas to get back down the canyon. Not a good place to be in! Luckily, a kind conceirge at a ski resort hotel, and a very helpful public safety officer at the same resort made it so we could get some gas from their maintenance garage and get home. So the planned hike was abandoned, but we still walked on the nature trail at Snowbird.
This is my chalkboard drawing for the story of "St. George and the Dragon", an English legend. It is copied from a similar picture from the Our Little Nature Nest blog, which I have linked in my sidebar. I'm not confident enough to make my own drawings from scratch yet!
While dyeing scarves was fun, getting the actual capes was not quite so exciting. Dallin refused to wear his, and I don't know why Sariah was so underwhelmed. I thought she at least would like it. The capes are, of course, for courage too, representing the knight in our story.
And now for schoolwork: Dallin's rendition of "George and the Dragon". This was some of his best work yet, although he changed the word "princess" to "girl" because he didn't want to use the word "princess". He and I collaborated on the drawing.
Our second story of the week was an African legend called "Nkosnati and the Dragon". This has to be Dallin's absolute best work yet! He worked really hard on this page, and I was very proud of him! In this story, the dragon's teeth were planted and they grew into sunflowers, hence the sunflower connection.
Finally, our last project was to make dragon bread and serve it for a special dinner on Friday night. We ate it by candlelight with beef stew.
We had a big dragon and a little one.
And the big dragon got even bigger when he baked!
All in all, it was a very fun week, one of our best yet. And now we're on to math for the month of October!
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