We are already making progress this year on Dallin's main lesson books. For the most part he's done careful and neat work and put good effort into his pages. This book has been fun because we can really vary the writing assignments. Instead of simple narrative summaries, we did some lists, some sets of instructions, etc. I also added photos of our field trips and projects, turning it almost into a scrapbook, which I let Dallin decorate.
This is Dallin's title page for the first section of the book, copied from my chalkboard drawing (with Dallin's own little twists, of course.) We are working on cursive writing this year, and writing short titles is the perfect way to practice--it's not as intimidating as writing an entire page in cursive. I usually identify which individual letters are going to be challenging and have him practice those letters over and over before writing the entire title. I've found that with Dallin, it works best to go online and create and print my own custom worksheets. I'm sure that's not very Waldorf... but he needs the practice that comes from tracing over dotted letters.
You can't see the writing very well, but these are Dallin's instructions for "How to Make Pickles". I'm working with him more carefully this year to teach him to do nice borders for his written work, which is why I included this example. Yes, virtually everything is turned into a work of art for a young Waldorf student!
Here is Dallin's page detailing our pickle-making adventures.
Again, the writing is hard to read because Dallin doesn't press very hard with pencils, but this is copywork--a poem about the farmer's role. We also used to poem to review naming words (nouns) and doing words (verbs).
"What can we do with apples?" --a list
Dallin's directions for how to make jam.
And Dallin's raspberry scrapbook page.
A wonderful book we read about a man who takes literally everything he and his family have produced on their rural farm to market many day's wagon ride away. Then, he sells literally everything, including the cart and the ox, and heads for home, where he, his wife, and his children start all over again to produce everything they will consume themselves and more to sell. A very informative book with great Caldecott-award-winning illustrations!
A sample page in Dallin's English notebook, where he puts grammar, spelling work, etc. Top is his exercise for exploring naming words (always in blue, to help associate the color with the word type and strengthen the learning), doing words (always written in red), and helper words (articles). We associated it with the farm by having him come up with as many farm animals as he could think of, then come up with a verb and article to match each noun. At the bottom is his synopsis of the four things every sentence needs: a doing word, a naming word, punctuation at the end, and a capital letter at the beginning. Then he had to make up his own sentences and underling the naming and doing words.
Spelling work on the top: every Tuesday we take the new words that he got the day before and he writes each on in a sentence. He comes up with some pretty good stuff: "You make a FIELD. You REAP the field. You go to battle with a SHIELD. You come back and HARVEST your OATS, your SQUASH, your GRAIN and RICE, and THRESH the PICKLES, sell some to the CHIEF, and he will cut them into PIECES. He also has a GARDEN that growes WHEAT. I BELIEVE he has more to in his GARDEN."
We were working on farming words, couples with "ie" words, since he had a hard time remembering how to spell field. I think he came up with quite an amusing little piece of writing!
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