Saints and Heroes, the rest of the month

 It's been fabulous to have some occasional warmer weather!  (Occasional being the operative word.)  Dallin was even able to do his reading outside one day.  He read E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan this month, and finished it in record time.  Now we are starting Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, which is proving to be more of a collaborative venture.   (The books are long and have lots of harder words.)

 This Saints and Heroes block has been fabulous for Dallin, and I've had a great time studying and learning more about these people too.    I am really amazed how much I, as the mom/teacher, have learned!  I wanted to take a multicultural approach, so I selected a figure from Africa and one from Native America.

Our homeschooling works with a 3-day rhythm, and then a fourth day for "extra" things or catch-up.  On the first day, we do preliminary activities to set the stage for the story, and then the day culminates with telling the story of the week.  On the second day, we work with the story in an artistic way.  On the third day we work with the story in an academic way.  The 3-day rhythm promotes better retention and understanding of the material.  Yes, in Waldorf, sleep is considered to be an aid to learning!  We do things like spelling every day.

So our African story was the legend of Kintu and the Law of Love, a tale from Uganda.   I did a lot of prelimanary research about the Baganda people from Uganda.  They have a love of language, riddles, proverbs, etc.  We spent the first day of our 3-day cycle exploring some Baganda riddles.  Here is one below that Dallin chose to illustrate:  "I have a razor that I use to shave hills".  The answer is that the "razor" is the fires they set to burn the grass for planting in the spring.

Baganda children also love to do things like create secret codes with language.  For example, they may follow each syllable of a word with z and the vowel from that syllable.  So "My dog's name is Zoey" would be "My zy dog zah's name zay is zih Zo Zo ey zee."  We had fun playing around with this.

The second day we brought in the artistic element by painting pictures of Lake Uganda, the setting for the story.  The top one is mine, the bottom one is Dallin's.  This is wet-on-wet watercolor, done only using the colors yellow and blue (with a touch of red to get the brown for the tree trunks). 

The third day he wrote the summary and copied it in his main lesson book, decorating the page with some of the forms we've done recently.

It says, "Kintu taught his people to love!  Kintu left when his people fought!  King Manda taught the Law of Love but then he killed his servant!"  We had plenty of discussions about how exclamation points were not the appropriate punctuation marks for this narrative, but Dallin insisted on putting them in anyway (and had fun reading the text with the exclamations just to try and prove to me that it could be read that way).

This is a really cool story that actually has a lot of gospel parallels, and we had some good discussion about how it compared to Jesus' teaching that the greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor and "upon these hang all the law and the prophets".  I think it's so interesting that gospel elements can be found in legends from so many varied cultures.  It just goes to show that the entire truth was once upon the earth and influenced almost all peoples!

This week our story was Hiawatha the Unifier, orchestrator of the Iroquois Confederacy.  I personally got so much out of preparing for this week and learning about this amazing man!  I had heard of Hiawatha, of course, but knew virtually nothing about him.  He was a real person, even though the link I shared included many legendary elements to the story.

 

For this story, we began the first day of our 3-day rhythm playing Iroquois games.  One game involved throwing arrows through a moving hoop, which we simulated with plastic darts and a hula hoop.  Dallin, of course, was a natural.  Mom, of course, was not!  We also made this cool game called the Sacred Bowl Game.  They used wooden bowls and nuts or pits; we used baskets, contact paper, and gravel.

The second day Dallin illustrated his main lesson book page.  We attempted to do an Indian beading kit, but mom learned the lesson of needing to open the kit and make sure you have all the tools before the day you want to do it.  We needed an awl to pierce some of the leather strips.  I just assumed the kit was all-inclusive.  Oops!

 The third day, Dallin was sick.  I was actually so impressed with him!  Even though he was out for the count on the couch, he said he was bored and "Could we please do school?"  So he wrote probably his longest summary yet.  Instead of arguing with me for the shortest possible amount of writing, he kept adding things to the story.  I wrote it down for him, and then he underlined all the nouns as part of our study on nouns.  Today, since he was feeling a bit better, I had him copy it into his book. 

"Hiawatha wanted the tribes to work together instead of being five separate nations.  He rode in a white canoe.  A giant bird took Mnihaha, Hiawatha's daughter!  He had a council with all the tribes and they joined together.  They didn't get destroyed."

I just love this picture of Sariah covered with chalk after a stint at the chalkboard.  Dallin will not touch chalk; he detests the feel of it.  But Sariah could roll around in it and be perfectly happy!

And this day, I caught her going in and out the door with bowls of soapy water.  She was washing the car for me!

Preston is getting himself into more of a routine... some of the time.  We've had a few days when he's settled in for a nice long nap--in his own bed--for the duration of our school morning.  Then again, we've had other mornings when he won't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time.  But we're making progress!  I've been thinking about how they say that the first three months are like a third trimester, and I can definitely see the truth in that.  I've noticed such a change in him since he turned three months old, and life is getting easier.  Actually, having number three has been pretty easy all along, and if we weren't homeschooling, I'd go so far as to call it "a piece of cake".