Blessings

A year and a half ago, I joined Waldorf Essentials Thinking Feeling Willing program, and wrote about it here. Since then, Melisa, TFW, and the TFW community have been amazing, especially as we worked on getting E sorted out last spring/summer.

This picture perfectly embodies our school life right now. E's pill box, with all the gut-healing supplements that have enabled him to sit and focus. Sunglasses, which he now frequently uses even indoors because of Irlen. A return to cursive, which for 6 months was too much to handle. Shading, that he never had the will to do before. Best of all, my E willingly completing seatwork. I have no doubt this year will have ups and downs, but right now I am going to enjoy the blessings of peace.

 

Then last week, I had the honor of seeing my first guest post published here! So exciting.

 

First Week, Almost Complete!

We began slowly, with main lesson only. Botony for E, weather for e.

Bulbs: fleshy layers of leaves ready to spring up at the first warmth.

Some plants place their scent in the flower, while others keep it deep inside the bulb. We had an extra sixth grader with us for the first lesson. Two boys, onions, and knives...

 

The wonderful part of this is that the boy attends a school for the gifted, but didn't know parallel vs reticulate leaves, that onions and tulips were both bulbs, or what rhizomes might be. He was truly impressed, declared me an artist for my chalkboard drawing, and told E this is the best school ever. E came to a quiet conclusion that I may have been right when I told him every form of education leaves gaps of some kind.

Tulips are based on a six-point star.

What happens when one sautés onions? The sugars caramelize. There are sugars?

The parallel quality of the leaf extends down into the bulb. Bulbs are made up of layers of colorless leaves, right? So this makes sense. Shown is a rhizome leaf alongside the onion skin. We have an amazing number of rhizome plants in our yard....

e has spent much of her time listening to wind stories. Her favorite is Gluskabi and the Wind Eagle. We even watched a third grade class production of it on YouTube. This is the start of her Beaufort Scale, a visual method of estimating wind speed.

Then on to roses, based on a five-point star. Briar roses have five petals. A long time ago, Persians created the garden rose from the briar rose, and today still all roses have petals in multiples of five. We learned about grafting, again with YouTube. And accents. One of the videos was a man from Alabama, and E was fascinated by his accent!

E has now completed an entire summer of 28-hours-a-week of gymnastics with the big boys, and his grips showed his efforts! Falling to pieces, they were. These are his new high bar grips, prior to breaking-in. He's the proud owner of buckles this time around!

 

We have just a few tasks left to pick up this weekend: comparing roses to apple blossoms, a main lesson book page, completing the Beaufort Scale for the wall, and flying a kite. I love Waldorf more every year!

 

 

On Mark, Get Set....

One week left! One week to pull this house together and be ready to start lessons. This has been a fast and beautiful summer, and my children have gained quite a few new skills. E, training with the big boys, has pretty much lived at the gym; he trains 28 hours a week! He is ready to compete as a level 7 gymnast this winter. e earned Most Valuable Swimmer in the 8 and under category for summer swim team, and can't wait to get back in the pool this fall. They've both gained handwork and painting skills....but shhhh...don't tell E that! I'm not sure he realized what he was doing. ;)

So, onward! Weather and botony are up first. e has her weather vane ready, and her weather journal arrived yesterday. E has been looking closer at our garden, and I found a few torn-apart flowers last week. Here we go!

 

The end.

Last week was our last week of main lessons. I had scheduled another month, but we are done. Botany can wait until August, and Stories of Wonder can be enjoyed anytime. I downloaded Jim Wiess audio stories onto the kids' devices that they haven't heard since our drive from Alaska two years ago. E's been listening to Treasure Island and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in addition to his usual Sparkle Stories. e is enjoying Good Luck Duck and Tom Sawyer. It's been a bit quieter than usual around here!

This is the first time in 8 years that our tangrams have been played with! I'm just a little excited.

e's penguin, standing on an ice block, nose in the air...

 

A volcano to go with our ancient studies. It led to quite a bit of experimenting.

I might have mentioned to the kids that I took all my notes in high school backwards....

Math review, because testing is a-comin'....

I'll be back with final pictures of main lesson books. Testing awaits....as does the beautiful sunshine!

 

Ancients, Geometry, Botony, oh my!

E's blocks are flying by! This month is Ancients, which means practice at drawing maps and taking notes.

We dyed silkworm cacoons and unwound them...unfortunately our attention didn't hold up to the mile of silk thread in each cacoon, so I used scissors to find the larvae and its final shed hiding inside. Fascinating.

We also read about Ancient Chinese gods and goddesses. Very different from the Greek and Norse.

We attended a concert of the African Children's Choir, which was perfectly timed right in the middle of the week E studied Africa! So much energy and dance and beauty. E was angry about going, anxious he'd catch Ebola, and unsettled by the change in routine, which made for a difficult week....but I am still glad we went. Totally worth it.

 

We also watched a documentary about the history of the Sahara. Ocean-life fossils in the blocks that make up the Great Pyramid? Whale fossils in the dessert? Piqued his interest.

Then back to Egypt. Amenhotep caught E's attention- that was the pharoah from the book Casting the Gods Adrift! Awesome.

This was the first map I insisted he trace. I wanted him to recognize the land shapes around the Mediteranean: Italy's boot, round (future) Spain, curvy Greece. He grumbled about tracing but noticed the shapes right away. He especially likes Italy's shape, and was surprised to see Greece so close to the Nile. Next side-reading will be D'Aulairs Book of Greek Myths!

Phoenicians produced a purple dye from boiling salt, lemon juice, and snails, so we thought we'd try our hand at blueberry dye. It turned out more pink than purple...

We just can't let geometry rest. It is far too interesting!

 

And here are the Botony pages I did not share for the end of March:

 

 

Gardening has given him many opportunities to demonstrate his knowledge and power of observation, like yesterday he pointed out that taproot leaves all funnel water to the center, while fibrous root leaves scatter the rain. Hmm....

This. I took e to the doctor this morning, leaving big E alone. When we returned, he had finished his entire school and chore list and had made plans to build a paralette! I took him to Home Depot for supples, and he created this, a mini high bar, all before lunch.

 

So proud of my boy. :)

 

Tricksters, a Saint, and a Few Forms

After a month mostly off from writing and drawing, e is back into it! She has even begun writing her own summaries. I ask her what scene she wishes to draw, and what story elements are necessary for a reader to understand the picture. She is proud of her new independent skill, as am I. :)

Anansi and his strange, moss-covered rock sitting on e's form.

Coyote's Rain Song from Enki kindergarten. One of our all-time favorites!

Zomo the Rabbit is by the same author as our beloved Raven.

Another favorite from Enki that we can't let go of: The Bojabi Tree.

Now we are working our way through Christopherus' trickster tales. e has decided she should read them herself, so each night while I am making dinner, she pulls out the binder and reads to me!

The trickster tales, combined with her ability to read them herself and write her own summaries, have met e exactly where she is at this moment in time.

The mirrored forms also catch her attention. It is harder than it looks to produce these!

Columba was the tale end of our Irish studies in March. She learned Einini, a sweet lullaby in Irish Gaelic, as well as an Irish step dance to Irish Washerwoman and (part of) a Scottish sword dance. We learned that Irish Gaelic does NOT sound like it looks. We looked at pictures of Ireland, memorized poems about Ireland, and found out that there is evidence that the Celts visited the shores of North America long before Columbus. We did not ever finish The King of Ireland's Son, though. Maybe this summer, if she asks.

She is still doing Teaching Textbooks four days a week, and squirrel number practice with me.

 

We are doing nature paintings this week, a few more trickster tales next week... A friend recommended Love and Roast Chicken. I can't wait to read it!

 

A Season With a Happy Ending

By the teeny little hairs of our chinny-chin-chins, we survived the few weeks between states and regionals.

And it was well worth it. E had some new experiences, like figuring out how to put on a singlet and competing with a cold after being up all night coughing. When all was complete, he had his highest ever all-around score and a fifth place award. My child, who used to perform worse under pressure of competition, had competed against the best level six athletes from seven states, with a cold, and came in fifth. Pretty freakin awesome. He had finally proven to himself that there were no excuses, no reason to worry...just give it your best and have fun.

This season, nearly everything that E worried about came true. He was injured and thus forced to scratch events, but the world didn't end. He was perfectly healthy but performed only okay, and his coach was not angry. He caught a cold right before a meet, and performed fine. He competed under pressure, and did better than ever. He nearly missed his moi support on parallel bars, but still earned his best ever all-around score.

 

This has been a fantastic season.