This block had a theme, as do all our blocks. Since we are gearing up next week to tell the Creation story from the Bible, I wanted to preface that by featuring Native American creation myths. Some of the stories I told were The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, The Creation (Hopi), Old Man Makes the Land and the People, The Origin of Daylight, The Four Winds, and Grandmother Spider Steals the Fire. I also had a novel for Dallin to read, Children of the Longhouse by Joseph Bruchac.
We also read the book Brother Eagle, Sister Sky by Susan Jeffers.
I don't think I did a great job of tying in the Native American stories to the rest of our activities. In the future, I think I need to come up with some craft projects or something that relate. I just had certain skills and art activities that I wanted to do pedagogically, and didn't know quite how to make them fit the theme.
Sariah has a story each week too, that I try to tell every day. The story stays the same for a whole week. In most Waldorf kindergartens, it would be the same story for two weeks or an entire month, but I don't think I could get her to be interested for that long! The first week we told The Fairy Weaver, and this past week it was Elsie and the Seven Sheep, both from the summer Wynstones book.
This was my attempt to make a little table puppet show out of The Fairy Weaver, all from things we already had here at home. Sariah loved it!
That day while Dallin was doing another project, Sariah drew her own illustration of the story.
She really loved Elsie and the Seven Sheep, because all the sheep are transformed into little princesses at the end. (It's a fairy tale.) We made rice pudding just like Elsie had to make in the story. Sariah had great fun cooking it, but did not like eating it.
The next day, she made this drawing of the story:
Beeswax Modelling
I got the book Learning about the World Through Modelling by Arthur Auer. Auer was a teacher who did an extensive personal research project dealing with the benefits of sculpture for children. He presents pages and pages of his thoughts in this book.
We did just a couple of the activities in this book. We will do some more complex projects throughout the year, such as modelling some of the animals from Noah's ark, making pinch pots when studying again about Native Americans, and sculpting the Tower of Babel out of air-drying clay.
This complemented our form drawing--this was a mirroring activity. Dallin had to form any flat shape he wanted, and then form another one that was the mirror image of the first. Mine is on the left, his on the right.
We then made these simple birds.
The idea here was to form a small "house" of any shape desired, then hollow out the inside to make a little room.
Block-Crayon Drawing
We did the following activities from the book Coloring With Block Crayons by Sieglinde de Francesca. My main purpose here was to help Dallin practice some of the skills he never quite mastered last year that he will need this year to do really nice main lesson book illustrations.
One project was a "time of day" picture. This first one is mine and shows dawn, mid-day, sunset, and night.
This one is Dallin's, and he did a really nice job!
Then we practiced a nature scene of trees blowing in the wind:
Mine (which Sariah punched holes in. Yeah, that's my girl...):
And Dallin's:
I was so proud of him--this was EXCELLENT work, and he was very proud of it too. (True confessions, I did help him a wee bit to get the shape of the tree leaves...) These drawings are all done using only the colors red, yellow, and blue.
Painting
One of my goals this year is to get the hang of watercolor painting and to make it a bigger and more fulfilling/useful part of our art experience. I got a wonderful little painting guide by Rauld Russell through Marsha Johnson's yahoogroup. In addition to tons of ideas for working with children, it has about 15 painting exercise for adults to do, and I've started working through these in the mornings. (I've been getting up at 5:00 am every morning!) I don't think my painting are really interesting enough to post, since mostly the guide has you working through one color at a time, trying to understand and be able to "feel" each color. With the kids, I've tried doing little color stories and exercises each time we paint. These are really for Dallin, Sariah usually does her own thing, which is as it should be.
But today, Sariah insisted on joining in.
Today we did the "Blue has a birthday party" story from Brunhild Miller's book Painting With Children. This is an exercise in experiencing the primary colors and then mixing them. Basically "blue" has a birthday. The children start by painting what they want on the paper using the color blue. Then red and yellow show up to the party, bearing gifts--a cloak and a rug to wrap blue in. Suddenly blue realizes that orange, violet, and green have also come to the party.
Our three paintings, mine top left, Sariah's top right, and Dallin's bottom. You can tell that Dallin had his own ideas about how this color story was going to unfold--but he did get a few bits of purple, orange, and green here and there.
And just for cuteness:
Preston has been amazingly cooperative during our homeschooling venture so far this year. Mostly he has slept through the bulk of our school mornings. And when he's awakened, I've just been able to put him in his high chair with Cheerios, and he's good until we finish. Fingers crossed this can continue for awhile!
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