First Day - finding our groove

I met Nature Girl at the top of the hill and we walked the second half of her walk home together. Through the Acadia University Woods. We made a mental list of things we wanted to remember to write down when we got home.

But as soon as we got home we did circle, outside under the cloudy sky. Wild Thing joined in exuberantly. Sprout played around us and joined in for a few finger rhymes he found interesting.

Thoughts on circle?

There's some real skill work in our circle on sequencing, repeating patterns, and quickly moving back and forth between two patterns and she got quite agitated if she felt she couldn't do it. I was very mellow and simply repeated the pattern if she needed and dropped the activity and moved on if she was too frustrated. It was a good 45 minutes of activity followed by 15 minutes of skipping and donkey kicks. By the end she was physically spent.

That's when we went inside, lit our candle, said our opening verse and started our work for the day. First we updated the calendar. Then we made our list of remembered things from the walk home. I only intended to write down the list but Nature Girl's poem sprang out of that list. She insisted on working on it until "everything made sense". She was deeply engaged and articulate and mellow.

After the poem was as she wanted it (I transcribed her notes, and she read it to give approval) we read a poem on April from Elsa Beskow's book Around the Year.

I like Nature Girl's poem better. Elsa Beskow's poems don't necessarily translate well but the illustrations and her feeling for each month match our weather perfectly - April is BROWN, and full of dead leaves with little sparks of green. That's what she captures.

We did some formdrawing - straight lines and curves, an infinity symbol which became a butterfly and she did some of her own symetrical forms. She was really relaxed and didn't get at all upset when things weren't perfect.

Then we did the Snail's Path from the Extra Lesson.

I printed up her final poem and she illustrated it.

We put out the candle and called it a day.

Then she plunked herself down with some picture books are read while we made dinner!

The pie is in the oven for dessert right now.