Two weeks left. Man, I can't believe it! But I am ready. What a great year, but boy am I ready for a bit of a rest.
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| My goal for the month of May has been to do as much school outside as possible. We've had a couple of rainy days, but other than that, we've been outdoors for almost all our work. We've worked in the garden prior to doing sit-down work. It has been going quite well until the little boy next door gets home from half-day kindergarten and sit in his bedroom window trying to converse with my kids. |
This month our block is about insects and gardening. This was another block from Marsha Johnson's Waldorf Home Educator files. Each week we focus on three different insects. Each week also has a theme. Week One: Common bugs, Week Two: Crawling bugs. The next two weeks are to come. The kids have LOVED this block (even though all three of us are BEYOND ready for summer vacation)!
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| So we started off with ants. We learned a poem (well, technically, we just read it through once...) and modelled ants out of beeswax. Finally, a beeswax project that turned out halfway decent! My ant is on top, and Dallin's below. |
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| The next bug (which is actually NOT an insect) was the sowbug/pill bug/roly poly/ potato bug/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. |
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| And nature cooperated by providing us our very own roly poly to observe. |
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| Dallin's main lesson book pages for the ant and the pillbug. This has been alot of writing for him--way more than he's used to, and in the very last month of the school year, no less. But he's been a trooper (most days)! |
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| For our lesson on bees, we painted bees with watercolors. Here is Dallin's. |
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| And his writings about the Queen Bee. Once again, nature cooperated and brought us a beautiful, big queen bee the very morning we did this lesson! |
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| I've been refining by coloring/drawing skills still! My squash bug. |
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| And my earwig. |
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| And Dallin's writing/drawings on those two insects. |
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| Modelling earwigs. Left to right: Dallin's, Sariah's, Mommy's. Technically, by Waldorf standards, Sariah probably shouldn't really be participating in these very directed projects; she should be sticking to her own free creative expression. But there's no way I can tell her she isn't allowed to do it, and lately she's been wanting to, so she does. |
And Dall
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| Dallin's painting and writing on centipedes. |
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| And the paintings of all three of us: Mom's on top, Dallin's at the left, and Sariah's at the right. I was very impressed with Dallin's painting and think it's one of his best yet! (It's done using only red, yellow, and blue--he learned to make brown.) |
As part of this block, I ordered one of those butterfly garden kits that are so often advertised on TV. We got five live caterpillars in the mail, and have been watching them grow. I thought I handled bugs pretty well, but I have to admit, these things are CREEPY to watch for very long.
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| This is how they looked a day or so after we got them. |
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| Two days later they were this big! |
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| And almost a week later, they are this big and hanging from the ceiling, which means they are just about to make their chrysalises. (What exactly is the plural of chrysalis anyway?) |
This has been such a great project! I'm so glad I spent the money on it! Though it is pretty funny to watch a kid who's being distracted from his work by the dang caterpillars. I guess there could be worse distractions, huh?
Our last project has been our garden. I wasn't even going to plant vegetables this year, we were just doing to do a theme flower garden. But I decided in this awful economy, I really should do a garden. So now with four garden boxes and trying to prepare a bed for flowers, it's kept us busier than I hoped to be. Today we FINALLY got to plant our veggies... the flower bed still has lots of work to do. Dang rocky soil I get to deal with!
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| Breaking apart the peat pots. Most of our garden is from seed, however. I am attempting organic and heirloom again--hopefully it will do better this year! |
Dallin and did another garden-related project from Marsha Johnson's files. I had him copy a list of common and not-so-common vegetables in cursive handwriting into his English notebook. This took four days because he is still so new to cursive and there were 28 veggies on the list. After that, we spent two days alphabetizing them and thus reviewing how to put things in alphabetical order. Then, I took him to the grocery store where we priced each vegetable according to the price per pound. This was a fun project because not all vegetable are sold according to weight, so we had to figure that out. Then, I had him make a list according to price. Well, by that time he was pretty burnt out on copying this list for the third time, so I just had him make a list of the five most expensive, five least expensive, and three middle-priced vegetables. Then we discussed why some veggies are more expensive than others. We talked about seasonal availability, how hard some things are to grow, etc. We talked about how, yes, corn on the cob is the cheapest, but for one pound of corn, how much do you actually get to eat (since you throw away the cob)? And yes, chives are $32 a pound, but who buys a whole pound? And the chives are all snipped up nicely for you. It was very interesting, and I think Dallin learned a lot!
And we did more painting:
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| This girl loves her some painting! She'd do it every day if Mommy could stand it! |
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| A painting story that Dallin and I did; this came from Marsha Johnson's email list. The story described the light of the sun shining over all the earth (yellow paint), then the heat of the sun warming the earth (red paint), then the cool, wet rain (blue painted over the red/yellow to make brown). Then we painted a bulb and it's roots in the ground, then took blue over the yellow to make a green plant coming from the bulb. It was a great story to illustrate the interplay of sun, rain, and earth needed for plants to grow. It's the end of the year, and I'm almost out of paint, so instead of having a pure red and a lemon yellow, it was a cinnamon red and a gold-yellow, hence the paintings have a browner hue than they're supposed to. Dallin's is on the left, mine on the right. I was going for a purple flower, but the wrong paint made it more of a deep brown flower. |
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