Never again will I wait till the end of the block to post--this has taken me forever! I'm sure some of my readers are bored stiff by all the details of our homeschooling lessons, but I want to have some permanent record of what we've done, and I figure maybe somebody, somewhere is interested. Who knows, maybe I'll convert somebody to Waldorf homeschooling some day?
Anyway, we had projects galore with this block. Probably too many.
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| Dallin's shield with crest, which he designed himself. I wanted to collaborate on a family one, but he said absolutely NOT! (Yeah, I know his sword looks like a Bowie knife. He made it that way on purpose...) |
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| I arranged to add some value to the shield assignment by requiring him to have a positive reason for the inlusion of each symbol. (In other words, he couldn't just put it on because it looked scary or tough.) Then I had him, on the back, write the symbol and what it represents. |
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| Our next project was an embroidery project--stitching his initial. We made it into a pillow. Both kids loved this, as you can see. Sariah's stitching didn't really turn out to be anything, and I spent most of my time untangling her thread. |
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| The pillow, which he keeps on his bed and has now bequeathed to the dog. |
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| We painted Excalibur--mine in front, Dallin's behind. |
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| And crowns. (You cannot even begin to imagine the amount of angst that went into painting this particular crown. Sigh.) |
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| Oh, we had fun with spelling this month! I must say, grasping spelling has been one of the hardest things I've dealt with. Waldorf favors a whole language approach, pulling words out of the stories. But next year I might just go with the traditional, progressively harder lists of words. Such a nightmare, trying to figure out what words will be too hard or too easy! Anyway, we finally got into a rhythm with spelling: writing the words three times each the first day, doing something creative with them the second day, a spelling game the third day, review/quiz the fourth day. For games I'm just recycling the same old faves: Hangman, Spelling Bingo, and Tic Tac Toe. (If he spells the word right, he gets a turn, if he spells it wrong, I get the turn.) The creative part is some kind of writing activity. I wrote a fill-in-the-blank story, and he had to put the right spelling words in the right blanks. But the words were scrambled. That was a bit too hard! Next time I will do either/or, but not both in the same exercise. Another thing he really loved was writing a sentence using each word. Actually, he was not too happy about doing that until I told him he could write a really boring sentence, such as "The people lived in the village." or he could write something really dramatic, like "The hungry dragon ate all the people in the village!" After that bit of instruction, he loved it! The funniest sentence? For the word wrong: "My mom is always wrong". He was mad about having spell that word, he claimed he already knew it. But the reason I put it on the list was because a few days earlier, in a note, he had written it: rong. So we had quite the battle about whether or not he knew this word, and then I had to laugh a few days later when, one again, he spelled it "rong". |
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| A little word family exercise, using the ending -cious, after he had trouble spelling gracious. We hadn't done any word families since last fall. Since it was King Arthur, the -cious family lived in a castle. |
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| Fun with grammar too! We've been learning basic sentence structure, combining a noun and a verb. So I had Dallin make a tiny book, each page having a simple sentence. Nouns in blue, verbs in red. He had a blast with this, especially with the knight theme! |
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| And we did just a bit with verb tenses too. |
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| There were a few games that I got either from the Waldorf Home Educators' files or from the Homeschooling Waldorf blog that I linked in my first post. This one was just shooting a "spear" through a hoop. The kids had the most fun ever playing "Arthur, May I" which was found on the Homeschooling Waldorf blog. They had to answer an etiquette question in order to progress in the game. After we ran out of prepared questions on the quiz, they made up their own questions. One of Sariah's was: "If you see a flower next to the sidewalk, is it good manners to pick off the petals?" |
One of our final activities was a tea party. Yeah, I know it's not exactly "period", but it was still fun, and came from the ideas in the files. Interestingly, the person most excited about it was Dallin, and I couldn't figure out why, since he usually eschews anything that might possibly be even remotely girly. But then it became obvious. Duh! He wanted the sweets! He actually thought I was going to serve licorice.
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| Our menu included: egg salad sandwhiches, cut up small (both kids loved!), English scones with jam and homemade clotted cream (kids didn't care for, but Mom thought was to die for! So good!), and eclairs (Dallin loved them but Sariah didn't). Being good Mormons, we served juice instead of tea. |
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| The scones. Mmmm, mmmm, good! |
We ended the block with a field trip. Preston's birth family are members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and they invited us to one of their events. In spite of the sullen look on Dallin's face in the below picture, he LOVED it. Absolutely loved it! I got to watch a lady wet-felt a hat, and learned some great tricks for the next time we try felting.
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| Our family with a little friend. |
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| Dallin sporting a very fake smile. He had a blast watching the fencing and sword-fighting. |
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