We finished our Creation block by talking about the Fall of Adam and Cain & Abel. We are going to switch to harvest/farming for a couple of weeks while it's still that season of the year, and then we'll skip to Abraham and his descendents.
It's been interesting to figure out how to approach this. Dallin has heard all these Old Testament stories dozens of times. I was worried that he would see this as "church" and tune out. I was initially planning to use The Story Bible by Pearl S. Buck as my resource for telling the stories, but when I had a consultation with Melisa Nielsen, a Waldorf homeschool consultant who happens to also be LDS, she suggested using a series of books by Jakob Streit, which are very "Waldorf" in flavor and take quite a few liberties with the stories. I had initially been unsure about using these precisely because they did take liberties. But I also knew that Dallin would not stand to hear the same-old, same-old either. I am really glad I decided to use these books.
The first one, which I've used this week, is called And There Was Light. I did not use it for the Creation story itself. It was just far too "out there" for me on that one, and plus, I wanted to use the scriptural language and read the actual verses prior to painting each day. But I used it for the garden/fall and Cain & Abel stories this week. I did leave out some portions. Dallin and I had some really great discussions precisely because the stories expanded on what are really very short and cursory scriptural versions. I explained to him up front that these stories were NOT the scriptures, but that some of the material was taken from legends and stories that had been handed down about those people (apocryphal texts). For instance, the story about Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden talked about Adam cutting his foot on a thorn and bleeding for the first time ever. Dallin immediately asked, "Did that really happen in the scriptures?" I replied that the scriptures don't say anything about it happening, but we can assume it did. I mean, certainly there had to be a first time for Adam or Eve to get cut and bleed, right? This presentation of the story really brought some of those types of things to life, gave a good picture of what it must have actually been like to be out of Paradise and into the "real world".
The Cain and Abel story was interesting because it gave the characters some real personality. Cain is portrayed as a very fiery, passionate character who loved his brother, but had a temper combined with extreme physical strength. In this version, his murder of Abel is not premeditated,but the result of getting mad and going too far without thinking of the consequences of his actions ahead of time. I loved experiencing Cain as a more well-rounded and "human" character, I thought it was touching (kind of more like we think of King David and his sins). This story spent a lot of time leading up to the actual killing of Abel and really developed both characters and gave them a history together. Honestly, the Cain character portrayed in the story reminded me a lot of Dallin--fiery, intense, passionate. This was a great story for him to see what can happen if we don't learn to bridle our passions and moderate ourselves. Of course it was very extreme, I'm certainly not worried about Dallin killing anybody, lol! But sometimes really extreme stories get the point across, don't they? Dallin actually felt very sorry for Cain and had a hard time writing the summary because he didn't like what happened in the story. We did spend a lot of time discussing the fact that no, we really don't know what the real Cain was like because in the actual scriptures, it doesn't say. This was just one person's idea of how it might have happened. (This was initiated by Dallin.)
As far as academic work, we've been hitting punctuation very heavily. This year, when we co-write the summaries, I've been copying them with no punctuation or capitalization whatsoever. Then, he has to go through and add it all in, and we talk about things. "Yes, we always capitalize the name of God..." "When we write a title, we capitalize all the important words..." I am determined that he will master this! We also started working on learning how to write a letter, and Dallin chose to write a letter to our dog Zoey asking her to please stop hogging the bed at night. It was pretty funny! For spelling we did part words from the stories and part words from his Top 500 Words that he had struggled with. For math, we've been reviewing the times tables and are now up to the 8's. In Waldorf education, they really stress working on the tables with rhythm and movement, such as clapping patterns. Dallin REALLY hates this. So my goal is just to get him to do SOME kind of movement. He will do things like throw a ball or beanbag back and forth while reciting them, or sometimes we do jumping jacks or just ANYTHING active. But no fancy clapping.
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