October Old Testament Block

First of all, here's an idyllic homeschooling scene. I sure wish it looked like this every day! It doesn't.

We did two more weeks of Old Testament. It was very nice to have this more laidback and simple block after all the activities involved with our harvest block. This block was mostly writing and drawing, with a few other projects thrown in to provide interest. We did have our share of challenges and bad days, however. It has really been an intense year so far! I am extremely busy with my church duties and organ teaching in addition to homeschooling. We went for two weeks and were gone almost every afternoon in addition to our morning school. No down time makes mom stressed and tired, the kids then pick up on my stress and tiredness and react to it, plus they've each been going through their own "stuff" as well.

Dallin has been enjoying the stories. Using the Jakob Streit book Journey to the Promised Land: The Path of the People of Israel from Abrahan's Calling to David's Dream has been a good choice too. The retellings are just the right thing to keep Dallin from feeling like he's in church every day. He was an attentive listener during this block. Whatever other conflict we might be having, he did enjoy story time!

Dallin's painting of Abraham amidst the palm trees, against the moon. All in blue. Unfortunately, I ran out of my ultramarine blue, so we had only one color of blue to use instead of two. But I think it still turned out to be an interesting painting, and he still learned a bit about using different shades. This painting idea came from Marsha Johnson's free files on the Waldorf home educator's yahoo group.

I found it interesting that of all the stories we read about Abraham, it was the story of Lot and Sodom & Gomorrah that stuck most in Dallin's mind. That is the story he chose to summarize.

Dallin did a nice illustration of Abraham and Isaac. That's the ram hiding in the thicket over there on the left side. He's also been working on cursive--I make him write all the titles in cursive.

Illustration of the story of Rebekah at the Well.

Finally, some success with beeswax! This is our re-creation of Rebekah at the Well, an idea from the Christopherus Old Testament book by Donna Simmons. We had had a REALLY bad day the day we did this, and I almost bagged beeswax modelling. Usually there is frustration involved when the figures don't turn out the way he hopes, and I just wasn't sure we could deal with it that day, plus I was just DONE. Imagine my shock when Dallin was not only excited to do the beeswax, but actually had a really fun time and successfully created Eliezer and his staff. (I did most of the rest, though Dallin did a lot on the well.) Sariah had some beeswax she was playing with as well, and together we just had a really fun time. It was a great way to forget all the conflict and angst that had plagued us that entire day up until this point.

And then Dallin actually (again, much to my surprise!) jumped at the chance to act out the story with the figures. Of course, his re-telling took a few artistic licenses (and was probably just a tad more violent than the original story... which isn't hard to be, since the original story isn't violent at all, lol!)

As part of our block, we discussed foods the ancient Hebrews would have eaten. This is actually a Jewish recipe called Esau's Lentil Pottage Stew. I liked it, the kids... not so much. But at least Dallin now knows what lentils are.

We also discussed things like nomads and nomadic living, the tents they lived in (and learned a Hebrew letter that also stands for the word "home" and is shaped like the floorplan of a tent--pretty cool!). We talked about the kinds of animals the Hebrews would have owned (sheep, oxen, goats, donkeys, and camels) and what those animals were used for. We used our study of the animals to review nouns and verbs and to learn about adjectives and adverbs. We made a list of all the ancient Hebrew animals (nouns), then came up with verbs to describe what each animal would do. Then we added an adjective (picture word) for each noun and an adverb (how word) for each verb, and made some fun sentences.