First, a bit of second grade form drawing for your viewing pleasure:
In second grade, one of the overarching themes is the duality of mankind. We show the side of humanity that makes mistakes and poor choices through animal stories, such as Aesop's fables and the trickster tales of Anansi the Spider or Coyote. We show the good, loving side of humans through stories of saints and heroes from days of old. These stories are stories of people, real and mythical, throughout history, who have spent their lives striving for closeness with God and who have sought to bring goodness and peace to the rest of humanity.
I chose Sariah's stories very carefully. First, I wanted a good representation of females. Second, I wanted a good representation of cultures and peoples. Third, several of these stories were chosen because of the significance of the name of the main character to Sariah herself. I knew she would relate well to that particular character because of the name. Last, there were just some stories that I felt were not to be missed. Donna Simmons' Saints and Heroes book was a great resource for this block.
Our first saint was Rabia, a Muslim saint from hundreds of years ago:
I'm pretty sure we also did some modeling of Rabia and her cave in clay, but I didn't have a working camera at the time, and I don't know what happened to the figures Sariah made.
Second came Elizabeth of the Roses from Hungary:
Third was Saint Francis of Assisi. This was in the "not to be missed" category. We spent almost two weeks on Francis because there were so many stories. Sariah loved him too, and now every time we sing All Creatures of our God and King at church, we talk about how that is the hymn that Francis wrote. I had her copy that poem into her book. We also had several beautiful books that we shared: The Hymn of the Sun illustrated by Tony Wright and Saint Francis and the Wolf by Jane Langton.
(At this point we were finding that Sariah still needs lines on her pages to guide her writing.)
Modeling of St. Francis and the wolf of Gubbio in clay. Sariah would much rather work with clay than beeswax! (It's messier!)
A drawing of St. Brigid.
Next, we branched out and did the story of Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederacy. We did not get historical; this was kept in the mythical realm. We used Donna Simmons' retelling, and it was a magical story--I really loved her version.
We used Donna's suggestion of making a diorama of a Native American village to go along with the Hiawatha story. Sariah and I both collaborated on this. She loves projects of this sort and worked on it for several days.
Next, we included one of my favorite stories--Kintu and the Law of Love. This is the story of an African tribal holy man, one which I also used with Dallin. I didn't include a photo of her work because this one she did not illustrate--it was one of those short weeks. We did this block in February. Dallin was getting braces, and we had orthodontist appointments almost every single week along with a number of other appointments for Sariah. It was crazy!
And last, we turned to Celtic lore for inspiration with the story of Finn MacCool:
Paintings: the first one is of mountains--it is the mountains and lake where Kintu lived. Second is the boat in which Brigid and her father sailed to the island of Iona. Third is Finn MacCool catching Fintan the salmon.
These were language arts blocks, and along with the writing, drawing, and other artistic endeavors, we worked faithfully on word families (phonics) and reading. Reading is coming slowly but steadily. Sariah has ADHD and that presents certain challenges. I don't think she has any learning disabilities, though she does still reverse the letters "b" and "d", she is improving. She also fairly frequently will read some of the shorter words backwards, for example "no" instead of "on" or "was" rather than "saw". The biggest challenge is that she struggles to have the attention span for extensive reading. For a long time we could only get through 1/3 to 1/2 of a typical easy reader book in a sitting. I could tell a significant difference once she got to the point in the book where she was "done", because even if she tried to keep going, the level of reading mistakes increased exponentially. I read a fabulous book called The Right Side of Normal: Understanding and Honoring the Natural Learning Path for Right-Brained Children by Cindy Gaddis. My Sariah is a right-brained learner for sure. I think my other two children have right-brained traits as well. This book explained why she reads some of those small words backwards--because her brain processes the entire word at once, not the individual letters. Cindy is a homeschooling mom of a large family and the book has alot to offer, even though the author is an unschooler, which I am not. I found that Sariah does much better when she can read books with a high visual content; the pictures keep her engaged. We have especially enjoyed Cynthia Rylant's Mr. Putter and Tabby series, which our library has in abundance. Another resource I just discovered which has proved to be popular and effective in our household are some Waldorf phonics-based chapter book readers by Shelley Davidow. The first one that Sariah is reading is called The Secret Pet. Each chapter highlights a different phonics concept, so the book builds on itself. Cindy Gaddis' book says that right-brained learners more typically
learn to read between the ages of 8 and 10, which is right where we're at.
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