This year we've been learning about how mankind has learned to live on the earth and provide for himself. We've covered how humans find food and shelter. This block was all about how humans have clothed themselves throughout history, particularly using things found naturally in the world around them.
My main source for this block was Marsha Johnson's wonderful block "Shelters--for my soul and myself", which you can access if you join the Waldorf Home Educators yahoo group. We used the shelters portion of the unit back in January, and the clothing portion this past month.
When my oldest was in third grade, we were running out of time and were behind at this point in the year. I also didn't think he'd really get into this topic. So I opted not to do this block. But with my daughter, I just knew it would be perfect for her, and it was.
First of all, this is my kindergartener's March nature table. The gnome is his story was learning about and working with stones, so that's why our table is full of rocks.
Second of all, one of my kids took this, so I thought I should show you all what a tired homeschool mom looks like.
We first learned about furs, skins, and the making of leather.
Sariah put the designs in this small leather bracelet, which was literally the only even remotely affordable leather project I could find for us to do, particularly since I had to purchase so many other hands-on things this month.
Next, we moved on to wool, which was really fun. To bring the lesson home, I actually ordered a raw fleece so that we could go through the entire process of preparing it to make clothing.
This is how it looked after two washings and two rinsings. It still needs to be carded.
We decided to use roving that we already had for our first try at spinning with the drop spindle--and we did this together on the very first try!
We got a bit distracted from carding and spinning at this point, but our next main lesson block will leave plenty of time to do more.
Our next fiber was cotton. I ordered a sample of cotton still on the boll. Sariah was thrilled with how soft it was. We were able to see how much work it would take to make cotton useful, as the seeds were still trapped among the fiber.
Sariah's favorite fiber was flax. I have to put a shout out to this website. I was able to order a complete educational sample kit, and we had so much fun with it. At first I wondered if it would be overkill, but it really was helpful to see the product at every stage and really be able to understand what had to be done. Sariah was very impressed with flax because it is such a process to make it useful. We told Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, The Flax.
The complete kit, showing flax at different stages of processing. The kit also came with a detailed description of each stage of the the process.
Here you can see how the fibers are there in the original plant, but not readily accessible without doing many steps to get to them.
This is after the flax plants have been soaked.
She loved the feel of it!
Ready to be spun. Sariah thought it felt like horsehair.
I had her do some embroidery on linen to put in her main lesson book.
Last, we learned about silk. This came at the very end of our block, just before spring break, so we didn't do as much with it. We did do some painting on silk, which was an idea I got from the Homeschooling Waldorf blog.
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