Brilliant Star

Ross Farm Museum

2009-10-29T08:52:00.003-03:00

Geese on the Pond...
Rose Cottage where today they were baking biscuits and cookies and making butter. Wild Thing was afraid of the steep stairs and Nature Girl wants to move in!
Wild Thing of course spent loads of time with the chickens.
The pigs are our hands down favourite animals there though. They play like dogs, they like getting petted and tickled behind the eyes and scratched on the back. They answer you when you talk to them. Look at that face.

We had such a good time we got a year pass. Every weekend through the winter they fun events, and snowshoe and x country ski trails and no tourists clogging up the joint! They have special programs where kids get to go and in period dress learn everything about farming in the mid 1800's. Next year we'll sign Nature Girl up, she is so excited!

A little update...

2009-10-25T21:54:00.003-03:00

Picasa sits there spinning and spinning every time I try to post pictures. But life goes on even without photos.

Wild Thing is very involved in writing things right now. He is making comic books that combine Bionicles (he has none here, he just likes them and had us print out pictures of them which he coloured and cut out and carries around in a shoebox) with knights and pirates. He is making birthday cards (addressed to himself) and asking for letters every day.

Nature Girl is working on exercising her arm - which is still out of shape and inflexible but 70% healed. SHe visits the ortho in 3 more weeks but in the meantime I will be taking her to see the osteopath. It is CREEPY that she can't straighten her arm or bend it. It gets better each day, but still, it looks creepy and wrong.

She has been INITIATING lots of math stuff with the help of a library book that I believe to be worth its weight in gold - but I can't find even second hand right now! Called "Math for Fun Projects" The library will let me keep it til someone else puts a hold on it (Thank you lovely librarians who also homeschool!).

She spends most of her quiet time reading. She's rereading Sewell's Black Beauty right now.

We discovered the greatest series called "Our Canadian Girl" Twelve female protagonists, all 10-13 years old, from across Canada and spanning from the 16oo's to the 1950's. We read the first two books about a New England Planter girl who moves to our area following the Acadian expulsion and befriends an Acadian girl her age who remains a prisoner, though who's family is allowed to stay to work on maintaining the dykes.. We just finished the first in a series of four about a little girl from a south shore fishing village during WWII. She is loving these and they have opened up tons of discussions around the dinner table. Darkmirror studied the Acadian Expulsion in History class this fall as well (they're finishing up WWI right now). Our Canadian Girl has a website and we plan to visit it tomorrow.

Noggins Farm Corn Maze

2009-10-16T07:44:00.000-03:00

First you take your flag, in case you get lost in the maze and they need to "extract you". Wild Thing insisted on a red flag.

The map of the maze and the observation platform for those who want to watch.

Nature Girl mapping her way through the maze. She was ruthlessly efficient. Ruthless I say!

Papa Pan worrying we're going to be stuck feeding cranky napless Sprout cow corn for dinner. Never fear I found a huge crop of chickweed to tide him over.

Apple Picking at Noggins

2009-10-16T07:40:00.000-03:00

No horse drawn wagon this time, this is a big commercial orchard they have tractors!

No one minded the lack of horses (they do have miniature horses when we get back).

We're almost at the orchard!!!!

Taste testing the rare Kestral apple (unless you live in Nova Scotia you've probably never tried one - they are delicious but don't keep well for export. Apples straight from the orchard are completely unlike anything you've ever bought in the store).

Simple Machines - The Incline Plane

2009-10-16T07:27:00.000-03:00

The slide fanatics think these are wicked.

RAces - more mass means Nature Girl won every time.

Papa Pan was nervous about letting Sprout go on his own until I reminded him about that mass thing, and the fact that the leading cause of toddlers breaking their legs is silly adults taking them down the slide in their laps because "it is safer". He slide down SO slowly it was really funny.

There was a tantrum when it was time to leave, less napping, more sliding!

Simple Machines at Noggin's Farm

2009-10-16T07:20:00.000-03:00

The pumping game uses levers and an incline plane to make ... FUN!

More pumping less duckie hoarding!

Nothing better than starting an afternoon outside in really cold weather, than by getting really wet.

Okay you three, enough of these boring science demonstrations, lets go eat some apples!

Making Pan Pipes STEP TWO

2009-09-29T16:27:00.001-03:00

Papa Pan and Nature Girl learning about pitch and panpipes.

Make notes about the different notes you want to make and approximate lengths to cut pipes.

Papa Pan helps Nature Girl with cutting because she only has one arm.

Next they experimented with drying them in the oven.

GOLDENROD DOES NOT CAUSE HAYFEVER!

2009-09-29T08:14:00.001-03:00

I put a comment on this in the post on our goldenrod wildcrafting but I think it is important enough to give a whole post to.

This is taken from an About.com article on ragweed.

Ragweed Allergy:

As with so many plants considered baneful in the 21st century, giant ragweed was used medicinally by the denizens of tougher eras. But when one thinks of the plant nowadays, one thing comes to mind, and that is "ragweed allergy." Together, common ragweed and giant ragweed account for most of the hay fever experienced in North America in the fall. Symptoms of ragweed allergy are sneezing and runny nose, along with itchy eyes.

Goldenrod, another weed, is commonly blamed for causing this "hay fever." But goldenrod is merely a victim of circumstance: it just happens to bloom at the same time of year (late summer-early fall) as ragweed. Being by far the more conspicuous of the two, goldenrod has become the scapegoat for ragweed allergy. The fact is that goldenrod pollen is sticky and can be spread only by insects, not the wind. By contrast, ragweed pollen floats off easily on the gentlest of breezes -- much to the regret of your sinuses!

Making Panpipes STEP ONE

2009-09-28T09:20:00.000-03:00

Gather a local plant that offers a hollow pith. Papa Pan used the saw and we chose Japanes Knotweed because it's green in the fall still, in spring we'd pick sturdier willow.

Nature Girl with young growth. See how it looks like bamboo.

Nature Girl uses pruning shears to trim off little side branches and leaves. Watch you don't snip off your fingers!

A clean branch ready to come home.

Wildcrafting Lesson - Golden Rod

2009-09-28T09:11:00.000-03:00

Golden rod is really easy to identify. There are plenty of individual varieties of it, but they all work the same way. If you get autumn honey chances are it's goldenrod honey. Besides smelling sweet and looking pretty it's good for coughs and colds, and for urinary tract infections. It's a gentle herb and easy to put up.

First you snip it up with scissors.

You fill a jar with your snipped up pieces. To check to see if you have too little, too much, or just the right amount bounce your finger fairies on the bed of flowers. Too little, the finger fairy falls through. Too much and there's no bounce, just right it is soft and springy and you stay on top.

Then you fill it to the brim with apple cider vinegar. It's already turning yellow! Cover it, label it and put in a dark closet for about a month, then strain. You can add your goldenrod vinegar to meals and salad dressings or take it with honey!

Nature's flu shot!

If we had access to a school like the Lewes New School Homeschooling Wouldn't be Necessary

2009-09-22T09:11:00.000-03:00

Butternut

2009-09-21T14:28:00.001-03:00

Butternut leaves drying for tea

Butternuts drying out so we can crack them to get out the meat.

Our neighbour Summer, who owns Pumpkin Moon Herbals, http://www.pumpkinmoonherbals.com/ invited us over to harvest her butternuts (white walnuts). She explained that the leaves made a really nice tea and that medicinally an infusion was good for constipation. She needed to do a bit of pruning so we brought home whole branches to dry. The nutshells are good as a vermifuge (they expel WORMS) So we'll be using EVERYTHING we brought home.

The butternut is a native species and the Mi'kmaq used it medicinally, for food, and as a natural brown dye. We'll be dying a silk with nutshells.

The butternut is threatened by a non native blight and Summer explained to us that organic farmers and herbalists should make a point of planting butternut trees to ensure they aren't an endangered species. It really is a wonderful tree!

Open Farm Day Monty Python's Apple Orchard

2009-09-21T12:48:00.003-03:00

Richard Hennigar is absolutely passionate about organic sustainable orchards. His orchards produce the kid's favorite treat - Suprima (Shivers) popsicles. His other passion is Trancendental Meditation (http://www.tm.org) We visited his orchard and learned all about his farming practices. They're very different than the big commercial orchards that spray that surround Wolfville!

A big part of orchard management is taking the time to study what is going on in your orchard and the surrounding environment. Richard has these flypapers sprinkled through the orchard. They allow him to keep track of a single fly called the "Apple Maggot Fly" They have black zigzags on their wings. This one had caught one fly. We learned about the fly's life cycle and how they can devastate an orchard without proper management. Management here does not mean spraying. So Richard has worked very hard to get rid of neglected abandoned apple trees and hawthorne trees within a kilometre of his orchard. The province used to help out by giving apple tree owners an ultimatum - pick up your fallen apples, spray your trees, cut down your trees, or they'll cut them down for you. They don't anymore though. So Richard and other organic growers take it upon themselves to find and weed out the problem trees.

Because Richard doesn't mow his orchards (more on this!) he has HUGE anthills in the orchard. Ants are more important than worms to soil health, they aerate dry soils earthworms can't touch and they mine minerals to bring to the surface - like sulphur.

This video explains how Richard manages the grass in his orchard without any fossil fuels. It takes12 hours to flatten an acre, but it only needs to be done once a season and the grasses enrich the soil as a natural mulch.

Here are the kids helping Richard flatten his grasses. I can see why he doesn't hire children to roll out the grass, but they sure had fun!

We learned that the fallen apples get sold to big juice producers. The waste left over from pressing cider gets sold to an organic pig producer nearby. Nothing goes to waste in the orchard.

We got to try all sorts of apples and ended our visit with popsicles!

Open Farm Day - a few more favorites from Hidden Meadow Farm

2009-09-21T00:26:00.001-03:00

The dinosaur chicken runs with babies on her back..

The puffball is indeed another chicken!

Muscovy ducks look particularly strange when caught with a flash!

More of Wild Things absolute favorite chickens.

Open Farm Day- Hidden Meadow Departure

2009-09-21T00:03:00.002-03:00

On the way out we passed the flock of sheep again.

Curiously, they no longer ran from the sight of us.

Judging from the bold black faced ewe here ....

I think we smelled like her dad and she knew we were good people...baa ram ewe!

Open Farm Day - Hidden Meadow Chickens

2009-09-20T23:40:00.003-03:00

We spent the most time with the chickens. We all love chickens, but Wild Thing most of all!

Crazy chicken who looks like a dinosaur!

Pretty little chickens, just right!

Look at that face.

He's asking them if they miss their mommy and daddy and would they like to come home with him.

*SNIFF!*

I think I know what he's getting for his birthday next year!

Open Farm Day - Hidden Meadow Horses

2009-09-20T23:34:00.002-03:00

A team of Belgians took us on a ride through the woods to the hidden meadow the farm is named after.

They had a wonderful time, but Sprout and Wild Thing got into an altercation when Sprout hit him over the head with a rubber boot we forced him to wear.

The horses chilled everyone out though.

Nature Girl is petitioning me to sell the minivan and get a team of belgians and a haywagon instead.

Open Farm Day - Hidden Meadow Food

2009-09-20T23:25:00.002-03:00

Happy free range pigs. It might have been a mistake to let the kids watch Babe this week. We eat these guys.

Belted Galloway Cow. We eat these guys too, but they really don't have as much personality as the pigs.

Big freaky heritage breed turkey with little normal wild eastern turkeys. He and Wild Thing had words.

Wild Thing is singing a little song he titled "I'm not afraid of you turkey!" Note distance from turkey. Wild Thing doesn't mind at all that we might eat this guy.

Open Farm Day - Hidden Meadow - Arrival

2009-09-20T23:18:00.002-03:00

We got a late start to the day and only had time to visit two farms. We started at Hidden Meadow because they have heritage breeds of sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and cattle. Our first encounter was with a herd of Cotswold Sheep that ran away from us.

So I took a picture of them with a bunch of carrots, that were guaranteed not to run away. Don't they look thrilled?

Things picked up! In the barn Nature Girl and Wellington the Cotswold Ram became friends. He acted like our dog, after head rubs, he hadn't had enough and kicked his stall door and bleated for more. Nature Girl got more and more adventurous in petting Wellington. If she could have gone in the stall I would have had pictures of her rubbing his belly by the end! They LOVED each other!

These are the Scottish Highland Cattle. We eat these guys. They are about the size of St Bernards, wider though.

Notes from the Keji Trip

2009-09-10T15:01:00.000-03:00

Outdoor education is incredibly important. It combines all subject areas and it is perhaps the most relevant thing kids can study. In school it might mean a day program a couple of times throughout elementary school, a couple of days camping in jr high. The problem with it not be fully integrated into every day learning is that kids need TIME in Nature to really learn from it.

A lot of kids, like Nature Girl, burst out of any contained space and need to run around and test their bodies jumping off of 4 foot tall stumps for a few hours. This is important to them. They're learning while they blow through the forest like a storm, but you can't direct them any more than you can direct the wind.

Some kids like Wild Thing are quiet and easily led, but they need time in the woods to get past fears of bugs, and getting dirty before they can relax enough to appreciate the whole experience.

Once they've become accustomed to the environment and trust that there is time for movement and play, trust that it is familiar and safe, then that outdoor world opens up even further. They can observe much more, using all their senses. They need silence to hear how deafening the night can be, or the day. They need stillness to observe wildlife and not scare it away before they've even reached it. Once they're comfortable and calm you can give them a jeweller's ;oupe and they can get lost in the forest - get lost on a single tree.

Homeschooling lets them reach that point when they're ready, not on wednesday afternoon from 12:45 to 2:30.

Nature Girl's Keji Trip with Rock Hound and Wild Thing

2009-09-10T14:26:00.000-03:00

We found a really good climbing tree. It was an oak tree and two of the branches went right out over the water. Blue Jays were dropping acorns from the tree. The acorns fell into the water. They sunk slowly.

We are gnomes!

I am flying!

Tree frogs! Friskus is my tree frog. Little foot is Rock Hound's tree frog. Pirate is Wild Thing's. Friskus is the biggest and Little Foot is the smallest.

Wild Thing's Keji Trip

2009-09-10T11:42:00.000-03:00

Wild Thing learned not to be afraid of a little blood....

To hike through slimy terrain...

How much fun the dark can be...

That camping is the very best thing in the world!

At work in the studio

2009-09-06T13:34:00.000-03:00

While I get the reasons why they don't use markers in the Waldorf School. I'm perplexed as to why some waldorf inspired homeschoolers don't allow their kids to use them at all. My kids LOVE their markers and the precision they get using them.

Making Glooscap on the Beach at Blomidon

2009-08-31T20:47:00.000-03:00

Today we went to Blomidon at low tide to make a giant Glooscap on the beach. We brought along a friend, Rock Hound, because building a giant is a two person job. Also Nature Girl wanted his input on sand sculpting genetalia on a boy. In her words "I know what they look like basically, just not the details."

First Nature Girl used a compass to make sure Glooscap's head was facing east.

After roughing out the shape of a 22 foot tall man on the sand they started with the hands.

They worked for about an hour and a half. During which time Nature Girl brought Rock Hound up to speed on all the Glooscap stories she'd heard so far. He wants to join us for our homeschooling this autumn now.

Glooscap's hair getting sculpted. He was impressive and i couldn't get a single good shot of his whole body. He was just TOO big.

Patting Myself on the Back

2009-08-31T11:03:00.002-03:00

Okay really, this is a terribly inspired teaching mama moment!

Nature Girl writes while she plays but anything directed by me inspires a lot of anxiety. I really want her to do some reflective writing on the books she enjoys reading though. I suggested we try doing some fun book reports this year - arty ones - using the wonderful paper dolls and puppets she makes of book characters and she balked at the idea of any WRITING.

Then I thought, what about making a secret personal review bookmark to put in library books she loved but has to return? SHE WAS ALL OVER THE IDEA!

So on one side she'll do a picture from the book, and on the other side she'll do a review. We'll start a "Bookworm Club" blog and include the address on the bookmark and maybe some of the other readers will stop by and comment!

So, to start, all her writing will need to fit on a bookmark. I think we'll type them out! She is VERY EXCITED.

Stay tuned for the new blog!

More from our day at the Fisheries Museum

2009-08-30T08:55:00.001-03:00

One of the School Ships leaving dock.

The kids helped launch a new fishing ship. First it and the crew were blessed by the local priest.

Then the crew goes through an elaboarte system of knocking out various blocks and pins. The smallest crew member has to actually LIE UNDER THE BOAT while it grinds down the greased runners into the water. Wild Thing was very happy the little girl with the tiara was shorter than him.

The ship is launched! My crew was paid in museum buttons and ballots for a draw for 25 lobsters!

The best thing at the Fisheries Museum is the Touch Tank

2009-08-29T06:27:00.000-03:00

The Rules!

Touch Tankers

Nature Girl got to watch a sea star peel itself off the wall and drop back down into the tank. She stroked it's MOUTH and also actually was able to touch a fish swimming in the tank! My favorite things were the crabs. Wild Thing was afraid they'd pinch me, most of the crabs we find in tide pools on our own are MUCH smaller.

Outside the Chapel - a REAL captain's wheel.

Next time we go back we're going to see about a Bluenose Tour too.

Local History at the Fisheries Museum

2009-08-28T08:50:00.000-03:00

We saw beautiful models of inshore fishing villages

Wild Thing loved the model of the fisherman's shack.

They played at fishing from a dorry after seeing a big one fully outfitted inside.

All the hustle and bustle and livelihood making at the museum seemed far more exciting than the reality we saw at Three Fathoms Harbour (photo is of the "Fisherman's Reservation" - that is actually what it is called. This is where Papa Pan spent his childhood with his step dad, back when it hustled and bustled with livelihood making.)

Hurricane Bill and the Eastern Shore

2009-08-26T09:24:00.001-03:00

The next day we went to our favorite haunt Rainbow Haven Beach to see what the hurricane had brought up on the beach.

MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAINS OF SEAWEED!

Impressive! We wonder how they'll clean it up!

Across the way is Laurencetown Beach - during the hurricane they needed to close the road. The sea was pitching rocks and sand onto the road. This is where all the surfers hang out.

Hurricane Bill - Right Afterwards

2009-08-26T09:13:00.000-03:00

Hurricane Bill occupied a lot of our time during the past week. We tracked it's movement on several weather sites. We read forecasts. We read what the concerns were in the area where we live (ready for harvest orchards could be devestated by the high winds we could get. We read about the Saxby Gale - a hurricane in 1869 that came right up the Minas Basin during the highest tides of autumn and breached the dykes, and destroyed the new railway in Wolfville and Horton. I told a Mi'kmaq story about a child who gently tricks and tames a storm maker. Then on the day of the storm we watched the skies at home. We got rain and winds that raced up and then down our street. The only damage though was to a few flowering bushes that lost a lot of flowers.

The Annapolis Valley was spared and after the rain passed and we had checked wind conditions we went for a drive to see what the weather was like on our protected western shore. High tide at the Lookoff - cloudy skies and a cool wind.

High Tide at Scotts Bay. Rougher surf than usual and a cold wind.

Wild Thing was a little scared of the surf, he'd just woken up from a nap.

Nature girl took this picture. This is usually a tame little stream in August. It looked more like it does in March or April.

Yesterday we headed out to Blomidon to see where Glooscap was created

2009-08-23T11:27:00.000-03:00

I'd told the story of how Glooscap came to the Mi'kmaq world the day before.

We came at high tide because, well, we haven't visited at high tide before.

Hmmm the swell is about 3 feet higher than normal right now, and the park is closed because Hurricane Bill is on his way.

Nothing deters my mermaid Nature Girl, she goes in swimming with her pants on.

On Glooscap's Trail...

2009-08-21T09:40:00.004-03:00

40 foot tall sculpture of Glooscap and the kids for size reference.

We started our season on Mi'kmaq culture with a vist to the Glooscap Heritage Centre next to Millbrook. We had a guided tour of the museum and learned about precontact Mi'kmaq life all the way up to the present. We saw a short movie that was narrated in the Mi'kmaq language (with subtitles which I read to the kids) and I got leads on finding oral storytelling in Mi'kmaq

on the internet.

Our intrepeters both told us a bunch of legends.

We got to see a traditional birchbark canoe sealed with pine tar pitch that was made by a canoe builder from Bear River. We learned all about quillwork and got to try doing it on birchbark. One of the stories we heard was about porcepine got his quills.

We celebrated the wild blueberry harvest with blueberry preserves and Luski - a yummy kind of moist traditional shortbread.

We heard a lovely story about Mooin and the She Bear. In the version we were told the little boy was lost while blueberry picking and ends up being rescued and brought home to live with a she bear and her cubs (the story goes on to explain why the Mi'kmaq don't hunt she bears during winter - because their babies will be orphaned) It reminded me a little of Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Then yesterday we went out to visit a Mennonite farm where they have newly established blueberry fields. Those in the know can come and do picking for 1.50 a pound. We picked 15 lbs and I think Sprout and Wild Thing and Nature Girl ate that much too! Nature Girl has found her calling as a commercial blueberry picker - she's fast and efficient. Over the next few days we'll eat a whole bunch with buttermilk and a bunch just by themselves, we'll dry a lot for the winter, we'll freeze some, and we'll can some as blueberry jam and spiced blueberry-peach jam. Wild Thing's are stored in the fridge in a special contain because he wants his made into jam (in the picture his are in the jar with the yellow lid).

This morning we read Blueberries for Sal. Sal looks just like Wild Thing. He loved the story.

Nature Girl is reading Peter in Blueberry Land by Elsa Beskow to him right now. She loves the Elsa Beskow books right now.

Wild Thing's Registration

2009-08-18T12:07:00.002-03:00

Program details for Primary Year

We will be using Enki Education's Kindergarten Curriculum

Please read this overview,

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/holistic-education.htm

Curriculum table of contents are also available:

Early Childhood Guides

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/materials/tghs1-tghstgb-toc.pdf

Folk and Fairy Tales

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/materials/rsclib-rlstcoa-toc.pdf

Nature Stories

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/materials/rsclib-rlstcob-toc.pdf

Crafts

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/materials/rsclib-rlcrcra-toc.pdf

Circle

http://www.enkieducation.org/html/materials/rsclib-rlcrcra-toc.pdf

For Community and Festival Songs we use a number of resources, primarily:

Rise Up Singing: The Group Singing Songbook by Peter Blood

Sing Through the Day - 80 Songs for Children - Edited by Marlys Swinger

This Is the Way We Wash-a-Day by Mary Thienes-Schunemann

Every day Wild Thing will participate in a seasonal circle that incorporates sensory integration movement, fingerplays, nursery rhymes, singing and speech exercises.

We use the Enki resources listed above as well as:

Let Us Form a Ring - An Acorn Hill Anthology - Edited by Nancy Foster

A Child's Seasonal Treasury - Compiled by Betty Jones

Games Children Play - Kim Brooking Payne

Each week he will listen to multicultural folk and fairy tales, and seasonally appropriate nature stories. The stories will inform our choices for integrating activities throughout the week

In addition to the Enki resources listed above we use:

Sharing Nature with Children I by Joseph Cornell

Sharing Nature with Children II by Joseph Cornell

Earthways - Simple Environmental Activities for Young Children - by Carol Petrash

Roots Shoots Buckets and Boots - by Sharon Lovejoy

The Keepers Series by Joseph Bruchac and Michael J Caduto (details on series are in Maeve's resource list)

The Enki Kindergarten establishes a solid predictable rhythm for the week with each day devoted to different activities.

In our home it looks like this:

Monday - Nature Walk and guided activity in the environment

Tuesday - Painting activity with related story

Wednesday - Nature Craft

Thursday - Baking

Friday - Seasonal Cooking

Saturday - Farmer's Market and Library

Sunday - alternates between a Baha'i Children's Class and an outdoor adventure.

On Monday and Wednesday mornings he will be participating in a Waldorf inspired cooperative that brings together several families so that we can participate in more complex group games in circle and do group projects each season.

Creative play will remain the central activity of each day, Through play he has begun exploring counting, numbers, letters and writing. As preparation for more academic work in the years to come he will participate in the making of a "Good Book" where he can showcase his favourite artwork, stories, and document his activities through this year.

Wild Thing has been in speech therapy (problems with some initial sounds) and in September we will be meeting again with his Speech Language Pathologist to discuss continuing support.

Wild Thing will participate in the same cultural immersions, the same large projects (relating to food shelter and clothing) and the same outings as his sister Nature Girl, at a level that is developmentally appropriate.

Cringing at the expense of homeschooling? Do you take full advantage of your library?

2009-08-17T11:24:00.002-03:00

Most libraries (atleast in Canada) have an online system that allows you to request and hold books - and not just from your local branch - from the entire library system. If you want books from other library systems, other provinces even, they can often get them for you through interlibrary loans.

For Waldorf inspired homeschoolers check in with your local Waldorf School, they are usually very friendly to homeschoolers and will let you borrow from their parent lending library. Your local anthroposophical society will have a lending library too (and usually many copies of books used in study groups.

Here's a snapshot of our current hold list. They'll trickle in at a pace we can manage.

Holds
	Anno's mysterious multiplying jar	Anno, Mitsumasa, 1926-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Arithmetricks	World Book, Inc.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	People of the trail : how the Northern Forest Indians lived	Ridington, Robin, 1939-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The witch of Beaver Creek mine	Nervelle, Rosemarie.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Wabanaki, people of the dawn [videorecording (DVD)]	Nova Scotia. Office of Aboriginal Affairs.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Laurie Lacey's wild world of plants [videorecording] : Micmac medicine	Lacey, Laurie.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The voyage of Wood Duck = Ta'n teli kaqasimiliala'sis Malsikws	Trottier, Maxine.	Available pickup at:AWOL	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The Micmac : how their ancestors lived five hundred years ago	Whitehead, Ruth Holmes.	Available pickup at:AWOL	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The clock and how it changed the world	Pollard, Michael, 1931-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Clocks	Zubrowski, Bernie.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Time	Ziner, Feenie.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Time and clocks	Breiter, Herta S.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Time	Sullivan, Navin.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Anno's sundial	Anno, Mitsumasa, 1926-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The other side of Eden : hunters, farmers and the shaping of the world	Brody, Hugh.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	An Algonquian year : the year according to the full moon / Michael McCurdy	McCurdy, Michael.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Algonkian hunters of the Eastern Woodlands	Goller, Claudine, 1940-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Turtle Island ABC : a gathering of Native American symbols	Hausman, Gerald.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The native American book of life	White Deer of Autumn.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The spark in the stone : skills and projects from the Native American tradition	Goodchild, Peter.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Dolls & toys of Native America : a journey through childhood	McQuiston, Don.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Math for fun projects	King, Andrew, 1961-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Math in the real world of architecture : dimensions, quantities, shapes, and patterns	Cook, Shirley.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	The I hate mathematics! book	Burns, Marilyn, 1941-	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Six Micmac stories [sound recording]	Whitehead, Ruth Holmes.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL
	Kwa'Nu'Te' [videorecording] : Micmac and Maliseet artists	Martin, Catherine.	Your position in the holds queue: 1	Wolfville Branch - AVRL

ENKI/WALDORF INSPIRED CURRICULUM PLANNING - The Mudmama Way

2009-08-13T11:04:00.003-03:00

I don't worry about the baby, he always goes with the flow as long as I respect his need for rhythm.

I start by looking at what I want to bring to my 5 year old, Wild Thing, outside of our daily rhythm of mealtime blessings, outdoor play, daily chores, and bedtime ritual and prayers. These are the things that will give him some one on one so I can meet the needs of Nature Girl as well.

Nature Walk Day

Painting Day

Nature Craft Day

Baking Day

Cooking Day

Farmer's Market Day

Baha'i Children's Class every second Sunday

Seasonal Nature Stories/Fairy Tales

I take a big grid of paper (with 48 squares as it turned out) and I start by putting these down the side.

Then I put in everything I want to cover with my third grader in in the other squares.

This is our list (which is addressing our particular situation/life/requirements)

Hunting & Gathering

Farming & Gardening

Animal Husbandry

Fibre Animals - Sheep, Angora Rabbits, alpaca, llama, camel, goats

Shelter & Housebuilding across North America/the World

Clothing

Knitting

Sewing

Embroidery

Recorder

Choir

Music

4 processes review

time telling

place value

measurement - weight, volume, linear

Build a House

Daily Mental Math/math games

End of year introduction to Fractions

Native Creation Stories/Language Arts Block

Torah/Language Arts Block

Purim Play

Central Asian Creation - Mongolian/Tibet/Eastern Iran - Language Arts Block

River of Words Project

Eagle Fest/February Backyard Bird Count

Farmer's Market

Putting up Food - Traditional Techniques

Grains

Dairy - cheese and yogurt making - at home and visit cheese factory (local organic)

Fruit and Vegetables - Pickles and Jams, Cider and Apple Harvest

Meat - visits to farms - Organic and old breed farms - chickens, pigs, cattle

Theatre Class/Dance Classes (Morris)/Musical Theatre Class in spring with K R.

Library Day

Formdrawing

Painting

Private Eye Project

Daily Circle

Felting

French

Phys Ed - skating, swim, yaga, hiking, Adventure Girl's class as Gaspereau

Then the way I work is to cut out all the squares and start making connections between things.

I then build a weekly rhythm out of first FAMILY needs, second my 5 year old's needs, then the 3 day cycle and what I need to cover with my third grader.

I use index cards and I put together a weekly schedule and then a card for each month with special things to remember, a card for each season, and a card for each block. On the cards I keep notes about stories I'll work with, specific activities I want to do etc.

I believe that a grades child needs about an hour of your time a day devoted to their block lesson, everything else should comfortably fit into family life with preschoolers in the mix. My 5 year old loves to draw and cut and paste so while he's engaged in that during the 22 month old's nap I have a window for working one on one with my daughter every day.

(I need to recharge my battery before I can take photos, but I promise visuals soon)

Just a wee pet peeve of mine...

2009-08-09T17:46:00.002-03:00

A HUGE part of waldorf education, any holistic education is the level of involvement children have in MAKING. They make their recorder bags, they make their readers, they make their main lesson books, they pound nails into wood to make times table circles, they make rulers when they learn to use them, they make simple computers as preparation for using them. They make the tools they'll use in learning about life through practical activities and they give them a tangible reason to use those tools.

Holistic education promises an end to worksheets and learning simple fractions with plastic pieces of pizza pie. It promises that your child will learn about the cycle of life through growing plants and tending to animals rather than cut and paste sequencing activities or puzzles.

So it drives me nuts when I see people selling math gnomes or times tables circles on ETSY. I don't care if it is handmade. It isn't HOMEmade. You have stolen that experience from a child.

BLOWING DUST OFF THE BLOG

2009-08-08T11:16:00.003-03:00

I'm all ready to start the school year. Very excited and waiting for word from the school as to what we'll be using them for this year.
Here is what I sent in to the Ministry with my registration form

Since April Nature Girl has been home schooling part time on a trial basis. Our concern was dealing with her school anxiety and providing one on one remediation in a low stress environment to deal with her dyslexia and dyscalculia. At the end of the year she was reading above grade level, making great strides forward in her willingness to write, and with supports (a lot of manipulatives and talking through the work) she completed the grade 3 math curriculum satisfactorily. Her math anxiety is still very high and as she has sequencing difficulties, multiplication is not something she can understand without manipulatives.
In 4th grade we intend for her to continue attending school on a part time basis. What classes she will be in school for will be determined by her school schedule (won’t be determined till late August - September) so our home based curriculum choices may change. I am including a full program to cover the entire curriculum.
Maeve will be doing a combined 3-4 year at home so we can address the areas where she needs remediation and slowly move into the areas where we know she will have difficulty (like fractions)
Enki Education (used at the Shambhala School in Halifax) provides the philosophical framework for our home school year. As this is a holistic integrated cultural curriculum all subjects will be taught within the context of cultural immersion. The arts - music, dance, theatre, and visual arts are woven tightly into the cultural immersion.
Autumn – Algonquian Culture
Winter – Hebrew Culture
Spring – Central Asian Cultures (in particular Mongolian, Tibetan, and Eastern Iranian)
Our focus this year will be on universal basic needs – food, shelter, and clothing. These themes will be woven into all subjects as well. We will be examining our relationship with plants and animals in the natural world as well as though local agriculture and the history of agriculture.
We will be visiting the library weekly and Maeve will be encouraged to begin using the library for research purposes as well as for reading entertainment. This year we will concentrate some time on library and internet research skills. My resource list only reflects what I have at home; the library will provide more resources, particularly in the social studies section.

A SAMPLE OF RESOURCES WE WILL BE USING
English Language Arts
Enki Education Teaching Guides Grades 3 and 4
A Path of Discovery – Grade 3 and 4 – Eric Fairman (Waldorf Teacher Grade Notes)
Writing Road to Reading - Romalda Spaulding
Games for Reading – Peggy Kaye
Games for Writing – Peggy Kaye
Making Words – Patricia Cunningham
Visual Tools - for differentiating reading and writing instruction – Roger Essley
The Festival of Stones – Autumn and Winter Tales of Tiptoes Lightly by Reg Down
Snip, Snap, Snout A Waldorf Reader for Extra Lesson Work by Arthur Pittis
Word Play Café by Michael Kline
Putting the Heart Back Into Teaching A Manual for Junior Primary Teachers by S Maher & Y Bleach
A Journey Through Time in Verse and Rhyme Collected by Heather Thomas
Phonic Rhyme Time – Mary Nash Wortham
Mathematics

Enki Education Teaching Guides Grades 3 and 4
A Path of Discovery – Grade 3 and 4 – Eric Fairman (Waldorf Teacher Grade Notes)
JUMP Math Teacher’s Guides Grades 3 and 4 – U of T Press
Active Arithmetic – Henning Anderson
Math Art – Carolyn Ford Brunetta
Games Children Play – Kim Payne Brooks
Teacher Mentor – Dr John Grant McLoughlin at UNB
Physical Education and Health (Preferably with school, but classes within local community if inaccessible)
Enki Education Teaching Guides Grade 3-4
A Path of Discovery – Grade 3 and 4 – Eric Fairman (Waldorf Teacher Grade Notes)
The Extra Lesson – Movement, Drawing and Painting Exercises to help children with difficulties in reading writing and arithmetic – Audrey McAllen
Take Time - Movement exercises for parents, teachers and therapists of children with difficulties in speaking, reading, writing and spelling. – Mary Nash Wortham
The Family Virtues Guide by Linda Kavelin Popov
Yoga
Swimming
Skating
X Country Skiing
Hiking
We are participating in the Wolfville Farmer’s Market’s Buy Local Challenge (Health and Nutrition tie in with Social Studies)
Music (Preferably with school, but in local community if inaccessible)
Continue with Recorder
Continue with Choir
Science
Enki Education Teaching Guides Grade 3 and 4
A Path of Discovery – Grade 3 and 4 – Eric Fairman (Waldorf Teacher Grade Notes)
The Private Eye: A Guide to Developing the Interdisciplinary Mind through hands on thinking skills, creativity, literacy, and scientific literacy - Kerry Ruef
Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World – sierra club books
Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants through Native Stories and Earth Activities for Children – J Caduto
Keepers of the Animals: Native American Stories and Wildlife Activities for Children – J Caduto
Keepers of the Earth – J Caduto
Native American Gardening – M Caduto
Native Dwellings Series by B. Shemie
Housebuilding for Children by Lester Walker
The Jumbo Book of Nature Science by Pamela Hickman
Art
Enki Education Teaching Guides Grade 3 and 4
A Path of Discovery – Grade 3 and 4 – Eric Fairman (Waldorf Teacher Grade Notes)
Learning about the World through Modelling: sculptural ideas for school and home - Arthur Auer
Global Art Mary Ann Kohl and Jean Potter
Discovering Great Artists Mary Ann Kohl and Kim Solga
Storybook Art Mary Ann Kohl and Jean Potter
Artist to Artist – Eric Carle
We will be working a lot this year with practical arts relating to food shelter and clothing – weaving, knitting, sewing, pottery, shelter building on human and model scale.
French (Preferably approached in school as well as at home)
Rather than follow a packaged curriculum we plan on introducing French in songs and games and books on tape with accompanying picture books.
Social Studies:
Keepers of Life: Discovering Plants through Native Stories and Earth Activities for Children by J Caduto
Keepers of the Animals: Native American Stories and Wildlife Activities for Children by J Caduto
Native American Gardening by M Caduto
Native Dwellings Series by B. Shemie
Turtle Island by Jane Louise Curry
Tales of Nanabozho by Dorothy M. Reid
Red Earth: Tales of the Mi’kmaq by Marion Robertson
Glooscap and His Magic by Kay Hill
The Earth Under Sky Bear’s Feet by Joseph Bruchac and Thomas Locker
Nanabosho Dances by Joe McLellan
Northwoods Cradle Song: From a Menominee Lullaby by Douglas Wood
When the Chenoo Howls – Native American Tales of Terror by Joseph and James Bruchac
Giving Thanks A Native American Good Morning Message by Chief Jake Swamp
Thirteen Moons on Turtles Back A Native American Year of Moons by Joseph Bruchac and J. London
http://www.native-languages.org/algonquin_culture.htm
Old Testament Stories: Manual and Storybook Christopherus Homeschool Resources (Waldorf Homeschool)
God’s People: Stories from the Old Testament – retold by Geraldine McCaughrean
Hurlburt’s Story of the Bible – Torah Section
Nattali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus – by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Winter Holidays Hanukkah, Tu B'Shevat, Purim by Paul Steinberg
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/12_home.html
http://www.torahtots.com/educmtrl.htm
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~semitic/HOAI/adultmain.cgi
Iran – Rebirth of a Timeless Empire – Rene Maheu and Jean Boissel
Shahnameh – translation by Dick Davis
http://www.art-arena.com/cotw.htm
Mountains of Tibet by Mordicai Gerstein
Explore Tibet by Kimberly Evers
http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/jataka_t.pdf
http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/jtwebv1p.pdf
The Country of Mongolia & Mongols – Zeev Rosen
Suho’s White Horse: A Mongolian Legend Suekichi Akaba
My Little Round House by Bolormaa Baasansuren
http://mongols.mrdonn.org/dailylife.html
http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-EPT/stuart1.htm
The Farmer’s Market Game – Family Pastimes
Geography for Fun Projects: With Hands On Experiments and Activities on Seas, Mountains, Ecosystems, and much, much more by Pam Robson
Hands on History: Homes by Rachel Halstead and Struan Reid
Song of the Earth – The Magic of earth, fire, water, air by Mary Hoffman
The Spirit of Canada: Canada’s Story in Legends, Fiction, Poems, and Songs by Barbara Hehner, editor

You know, this simply can't capture what we're up to here. It falls flat. My big deal right now is how will I capture this oh so busy year (really two years because we're doing a sort of combined grade 3-4 curriculum with the Enki grade three developmental thread as the warp thread (all the social studies goodness) and the grade 4 standards for math and english and math as the weft.

A better feel for things? Well I'm contacting all of our favorite vendors at the Farmer's Market and organizing 100 mile diet field trips to understand what it is they do exactly. We're going to be hand building a whole lot of structures this year - starting with a greenhouse and ending with a post and beam playhouse (or chickencoop if we ever sell this house and move to where we can get our chooks) We're looking at participating in RIVER OF WORDS too.
My goal is to work so holistically this year that it LOOKS like unschooling, and never ever gets Nature Girl's back up about not being able to DO IT. I'm not at all sure that is possible, but keeping the math off paper as long as possible MIGHT accomplish it. We will see.

Kindergarten

2009-07-16T19:31:00.002-03:00

The Alliance for Childhood has a very important paper on kindergarten available online right now.

If you are concerned about "kindergarten readiness" please read this paper.

http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/kindergarten_report.pdf

CHIRON EAST and the Grade 3/4 Curriculum

2009-07-03T15:08:00.002-03:00

I did all the 3-4 curriculum workshops (main lesson, math, formdrawing) as well as a Games workshop with a special math focus, eurythmy, singing, adult and child development, a workshop on Meda and children, and a workshop on Loving Authority.

My particular interest (why I spent the $$$ and pushed to get there arriving on no sleep from the trip from Ottawa!) was to attend John Grant McLouglin's math workshop. He is a prof in math education at UNB and he has a very special interest in math anxiety.

For me it boiled down to this: Keep it simple, go back to the stories and build it all from there. Keep the math as practical and in the body as possible, teach the written expression near the end of the year only if it is necessary for transitioning into public school.

He taught me a form of notation (area math) that is particularly good for children with dyslexia because rather than them getting the wrong answer you, as a teacher, and then they as students, can easily find where they got lost in a question and correct only that piece of the picture.

So I'm practicing my mental math leadership skills. We'll be using that daily and doing an awful lot of practical math activities this coming year in preparation for the following year's work with fractions.

Nature Girl made HUGE strides with her reading this year (which was my main focus) and is now reading a full grade ABOVE grade level. We're going to consciously begin deep work with spelling rules and grammar.

I'll be using the Grade 3 curriculum as it fits where she is developmentally.

I'm excited to see what the school schedule is like for next year, she's to begin french and I hope the schedule allows for her to be at school easily for french music and gym class.

Things are busy here!

2009-06-05T09:19:00.002-03:00

Nature Girl's psychologist is ASTOUNDED by how far she's come with her reading :-)

We had an informal chat about "what makes things stick" with her. Its all trial and error...and SUCCESS. When something shows as a disconnect her psych does detective work on where the misfire might be by looking at research done on adults who have had brain injuries. It doesn't fix things, but it might help us find more avenues for us to try in detouring around the problems.

Vowels are a real issue for her, we aren't at a point where we can do vowel combinations because Nature Girl can't even keep the 5 of them straight when she's writing - reading is another story. She's doing great there and as her anxiety wanes she's willing to take more risks - like reading aloud from unfamiliar text.

If I have her spell aloud I can see right away what words she's committed to memory and which are an issue. When she writes she has a tendency to either spell words using A for all vowels or not including a vowel at all. So I took out the writing issue completely and gave her letter stampers which make her scan the entire alphabet to find what she needs. I can say "This word does not have an A in it" and she will hunt for the correct vowel and get it right. The phoneme awareness is there. When I make her sight word cards I do the consonants in green and the vowels in red.

We're playing with language a lot too. I found a great resource for games that is full of the history of English and games that get her deconstructing words and putting them back together again, and she has been playing with it with her friend Rock Hound. It's called WordPlay Cafe: Cool Codes, Priceless Punzles & Phantastic Phonetec Phun. We'll be sending it along in her "summer school" bag.

Math is still a challenge. She has so much anxiety in relation to what she thinks she can't do. It takes a lot of gentle coaxing to get her past that anxiety. It didn't help that she had the grade three standardized testing to do and while she got resource support for it, she had a tummy ache every morning about it. Everyone is so kind to her, she knew she could skip questions she didn't feel she could do, but she is so hard on herself.

We're playing lots of dice games right now and working on her skip counting. I'll be sending a fun book of dice games along too.

I'm thinking about how best to approach math next year. I'm looking at "Living Math" resources that use a lot of storytelling from the history of mathematics to convey information and we're going to use the grade three Waldorf math curriculum that is very practical and hands on (forms of measurement) as our core and then supplement with JUMP Math.

She is not ready to move onto the 4th grade material yet. We'll keep working with the third grade materials until she has some basic mastery. Things like adding columns still confounds her and we need to have things like carrying and borrowing, skip counting, and place value in place before she moves on. All of these can be approached physically as well - and BEFORE she faces them on paper.

Dandelion Bread Recipe

2009-05-21T17:43:00.002-03:00

2 cups whole grain flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 packed cup dandelion petals - no greens
1/4 cup nut oil (sunflower)
4 tbsp honey
1 egg
1 cup milk
1/2 cup fruit juice (for bread we use apple cider, for muffins lemon juice)

Combine the dry ingredients and the petals in one bowl - mix well
Mix wet ingredients in another bowl - mix really well
Fold them together - gently mix
Your batter should be quite lumpy - if you over mix you won't get the nice air pockets.
Pour into bread tin or muffin tin
Bake at 400 degrees - muffins 20 minutes, Bread 30 minutes. Check for doneness with a toothpick. If it needs more time turn off the oven and check every 5 minutes.

We've been studying dandelions and all their amazing properties

2009-05-14T13:19:00.002-03:00

Dandelion Flower Bread
Awesome with dandelion honey.

MAY CIRCLE

2009-05-05T09:49:00.002-03:00

Group forming (sing til everyone joins together and is in circle)

Round and round the earth is turning
Always turning round to morning
And from morning round to night

Speech - seasonally appropriate songs (all have movement involved too)

Sing a song of May days Hi dee ho dee hay!

Showers of flowers from breezy bowers Hi dee ho dee hay!

Dancers and prancers in the green green grass Hi dee ho dee hay

Joyfully skip each young lad and lass Hi dee ho dee hay!

Happy oh happy May days, May days!

Mother Earth, Mother Earth, take our seed and give it birth

Father Sun, gleam and glow until the root begins to grow

Sister Rain, Sister Rain, shed thy tears to swell the grain

Brother Wind, breathe and blow then the blade all green will grow

Earth and Sun and Wind and Rain turn to gold the living grain

ENKI action verse: Tall stand the Sailor Men

(ENKI materials are copyrighted, so I won't post the whole thing but this is a verse for Lateral midline crossing, and heavy on the Proprioceptive system work)

Looking glass EYE SPY - right now we're focussing on looking with the right eye for Nature Girl - she's the only one who gets that instruction. For now it's just looking - as we go on we'll combine this with out phoneme work.

Hear the birds sing their song

Now that spring has come along

Hear each voice sweetly singing

Joy and light to each heart bringing

Robin Redbreast, Sparrow, Lark

Thrush and hummingbird listen hark!

Other voices sing loud and clear

It’s the happy children – springtime’s here!

Rolly polly rolly polly up up up!
Rolly polly rolly polly down down down!
Rolly polly rolly polly out out out!
Rolly polly rolly polly in in in!

Rolling the hands round in a spiral following instructions - Proprioceptive system - naval radiation)

12345
Once I caught a fish alive
678910
But I let him go again
Why did you let him go?
Because he bit my finger so!
Which finger did he bite?
My little finger on the (?)

Act it out grasping up with 12345 and down with 678910 - helps with body awareness (lateral midline crossing and quickly identifying left or right)

EXTRA LESSON Body Geography Simon Says

In this exercise you give instructions to the child without acting anything out yourself. At 8 I have Nature Girl using the terms right and left, with a younger child you start with right, and then move on to left after a few months. Nature Girl is nearly 9 so we are crossing the midline and having her touch her left side with her right side and vice versa. You build up to a verbal sequence of three (Nature Girl can't handle more than one at a time right now) "take your right hand and touch your left ear, then touch your right knee, and your left big toe"

Nature Girl does not have a firmly developed right dominance yet. This usually happens between ages 6 and 7. Why is this important? Firmly developed dominance happens at the same time that there is a growth spurt in the left hemisphere of the brain and both hemispheres have developed localized and holistic functions. - as a result concentration span increases, language development is in sync with the imagination, and the individual has more control over visual perception - able to perceive the switch between 2 and 3 dimensions instantaneously. This is necessary for learning to be done at a subconscious - comfortable level.

Fairies funny five are we

Laughing happy as can be

HA HA HA

HEE HEE HEE

HO HO HO

WEE WEE WEE

And Away we go

(repeat with left hand)

hand and finger coordination fingerplay (necessary for handwriting) Nature Girl HATES these things so we're changing it to fairies from Dance Thumbkin Dance. She is a perfectionist and not being able to wriggle her ringfingers freely makes her quite upset!

Two little beaks went tap tap tap

Two little shells went crack crack crack

Two little chicks peeked out and Oh!

They liked the looks of the big world so

They left their homes without a fret

And two little shells are now for rent!

Tactile and auditory - this one involves tapping fingers and fists on the head or opposite hand

We often repeat these sorts because they are popular

Clap, Snap, Stomp sequence game

This is another sequencing game and Nature Girl has a hard time with following right now. It's an Extra Lesson game from Take Time. Make a rhythm sequence to follow clap clap snap stamp stamp (for instance) Nature Girl is more likely to engage if she gets to lead to. So go back and forth leading the sequence.

Verse for formdrawing forms

Little drops of water (vertical lines)
Little grains of sand (scoop a curved line)
Make the mighty ocean (curving running wave form)
And the pleasant land (smooth hillock running form)

Great A little a (body makes a large A quickly crouch to make little a)
Today is pancake day (clap with beat)
Toss the ball high (catch ball tossed)
Throw the ball low (throw the ball back)
Those that come after (salute)
Can sing heigh ho! (canter round circle while next child gets turn)

This is my right hand I'll raise it up high
This is my left hand I'll touch the sky
Right hand left hand
Roll them around
Left hand, right hand
Pound, pound, pound!

Bean bags or balls tossing games according to frustration level

The rainbow toss:

Bean bag in right hand toss in arc over head to catch in left - feet planted
Pass bag back to right across midline in front
Practice doing it without losing balance or looking up.
Switch sides (start with bag in left hand)

Crawling toss

Throw balls into basket
Crawl to retrieve

Relaxation exercises

Yoga - salute the sun
shaking out hands left hand then right hand
shoulder roll
Head drop
Deep relaxed belly breathing - remind child to pause!
Low sounding - MMMMMMMM
Sing vowels (short vowel sounds)

Listening game: listen intently to natural sounds and list (its nice to lie down for this, heads together making a spoked wheel - in our case a peace symbol)

Focusing verse

I am a star
From heaven I came - point above
To earth below - point down
My friends to meet - hands to sides
To be truthful in deed - right hand over heart
To love all I know - left hand crosses right
To walk with my angel - hands behind shoulders
To shine like a
STAR! - jump into star form

Closing verse (sing)

Birds in the air (hands link and fly through air)
Fish in the water (hands swim through ocean)
Stones on the land (fist on flattened hand)
I'm in God's hand (both hands cupped gently then together upright as to pray)

Namaste!

For those of you reading to get an idea about circle time - this is NOT your average circle! In a kindergarten you'd have a circle calling song (same all year) , a group forming action verse, one verse for balance and rhythm, 1 for midline crossing, 1 for music prep, one for spinning (proprioceptive) and one for closing (same all year) 7 verses - 2 you use all the time, 5 new ones to learn each season, and you'd work up to that!

Because Nature Girl is doing Extra Lesson therapy I have incorporated as much of that therapy as possible into circle so it stays playful and fun. She has anxiety issues and I need to keep this moving quickly so she doesn't get caught up in something she perceives as difficult - our circle has 22 parts! AND I've been doing these verses for a long time - I had 4 to learn new in this whole big thing. Learning 4 verses is a lot of work! It really is. I practice in the shower!

Finding our way through math

2009-05-04T20:39:00.002-03:00

I'm following the provincial math curriculum with Nature Girl and feeling my way through what works best for her. It appears to get past her strict adherence to external rules - regardless of whether they actually help her learn something or not - the best route is to find a real life way for her to use the information first, let her figure out her own way around managing the information, and then give her the workbook stuff on it after she's done the investigation herself.

We are working with data management and probability right now. The workbook exercises are all about venn diagrams, and different ways of visually representing data. She is getting excited about doing these things herself BEFORE they show up in the "book" and as a result we can discuss why they work - tally sheets with ticks, or visual representations of objects, or a venn diagram, whatever the case may be.

I think she's successfully making math meaningful.

This would be really difficult in a classroom setting. As soon as she "invents" a tally system I can go with it and find an example it works really well with and I can pull out the worksheets that relate to it while it is still fresh in her mind. I can then tweak my examples so that she needs to figure out a more substantial way of managing the data - for example - using division. I can monitor things very closely to make sure she never reaches her frustration threshold while still pulling her through the various examples the curriculum wants us to explore.

What to do when a jackhammer evicts you from your house:

2009-04-29T21:25:00.003-03:00

Go to the park and read.. inbetween racing about playing on the play structure - The Wise Enchanter and Paddle to the Sea.
Live the dream, pirate ship (actually its the Kipawo - the old ferry that used to run from here)

Then go visit the miniature horses at Noggin's Farm.

Working with the alphabet

2009-04-28T14:07:00.000-03:00

GREAT A

little a

This is pancake day! (formdrawing actually!)

FESTIVAL UPDATE

2009-04-26T08:55:00.003-03:00

Hooray for Nature Girl's School! Her choir won GOLD!

Now to focus on other spring things...swimming, growing things, the weather, reading, and probability!

Rain Pictures that Go with the Poetry below

2009-04-23T14:06:00.000-03:00

Can you guess who did each?

ADD and the aural learner

2009-04-23T10:21:00.002-03:00

Yesterday we visited Nature Girl's doctor at the ADD Clinic. Her EEG did not show any absence seizures so her diagnosis of ADD (inattentive type) stands.

Nature Girl's learning style is aural - her ability to retain information this way is beyond phenomenal actually. Because she is so aural though, noise distraction is a HUGE issue for her, given her inattentiveness. She needs to learn in a quiet environment - no ambient sound distractions. At home, no television, no radio. Soft instrumental music or open windows that let in the sounds of nature are not an issue - they serve to help focus attention apparently. Her doctor wants Nature Girl to try muffling noise distractions in the classroom by wearing headphones in class. So this weekend we're going to go look for earbuds so they don't stand out.

I need to find her an MP3 player for audiobooks so that'll be part of the search too.

The Water Cycle and Poetry Month

2009-04-21T11:09:00.002-03:00

We've been studying the water cycle. We live in a fabulous place for it because within a thirty minute drive we can experience EVERYTHING from a mountain stream to lakes, to winding rivers, to waterfalls, to the ocean, and the world's strongest highest tides. It's very concrete.

Thomas Locker has written some of the most beautiful poetic books that combine science with art. Nature Girl has been POURING over, BATHING in the beauty of his book - WATER DANCE (and CLOUD DANCE).

Yesterday she and Wild Thing wrote and illustrated rain poems.

Wild Thing's poem:

RAIN TOYS!

bow and arrows
water guns
swords
puddles
my yellow booties
rain in my mouth
rain in my bucket
MUD!

Nature Girl's poem:

Rainy days in the city are boring:

You fight
You cry
You snarl
You're bored

You can't go outside:

It's wet
People can't see you on the street
The deck is slippery
There are no puddles you can play in
You might splash someone

I wish it was sunny.

Once I upload them I'll post their drawings.

It's Festival Season!

2009-04-16T04:41:00.003-03:00

Life suddenly gets interesting and full of concerts to attend and white shirts to keep clean and Mary Janes to "please don't scuff the toes right through like last year!" and a schedule to not lose, and lots of musical theatre this year as the competition pieces are from Annie and The Sound of Music. And we start swimming lessons on Sunday too. And this weekend is the gardening workshop at the farmer's market. But this weekend we're still going to make time to rent out Annie and The Sound of Music and West Side Story for good measure. Fill the bucket with the things she loves!

Reading Aloud and the Magic of Poetry

2009-04-15T08:44:00.004-03:00

Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, Edward Lear, AA Milne, Dennis Lee .... who can read good poetry and NOT want to read it aloud?

Right now Nature Girl and I are doing an "I'll Read, You Read" walk through Where The Sidewalk Ends (and she'll be firm on pointing out it is the anniversary edition with the poem "The Truth about Turtles")

If anyone ever doubts the power and benefit of social stories or curative storytelling with inattentive children have them present that child with Shel Silverstein's poem THE LOSER

The Loser

Mama said I'd lose my head
If it wasn't fastened on.
Today I guess it wasn't
'Cause while playing with my cousin
It fell off and rolled away
And now it's gone.
And I can't look for it,
'cause my eyes are in it
And I can't call to it
Cause my mouth is on it
(Couldn't hear me anyway
'Cause my ears are on it),
Can't even think about it
'Cause my brain is in it.
So I guess I'll sit down
On this rock
And rest for just a minute....

I got to this poem and was affronted by the title and wasn't going to
read it but Nature Girl grabbed the book and said
"I love this one! I'M going to read it!"

Wild Thing Island

2009-04-14T20:30:00.000-03:00

An issue here is how to involve Wild Thing in the homeschooling groove without making him feel he has to DO anything.

So far he takes part in a few circle games that involve the sea, he paints with us and he LOVED making a Wild Thing tracing. His contains no vital organs, lots of pirates, and dinosaurs and buried treasure though. He's always up for drawing cutting and pasting so handwork is an inclusive activity. He's taking an interest in letters and numbers and he has made attempts to write "pirate". The more academic stuff we cover in circle doesn't interest him at all and he'd rather play with the Sprout then.

Body Geography - Nature Girl Land

2009-04-14T20:29:00.000-03:00

Nature Girl Land

One of our body geography lessons is to do tracings of yourself and then itemize your parts and identify them. This was a tough job for Nature Girl. She avoided getting down to it by making an elaborate game of Nature Girl Land and all those crosses? Those are airplanes. She flitted from part to part. Finally I said " start by identifying your left and right side." (and while it looks reversed - she was right - she was identifying HER parts as we traced them onto the paper.

It took two days of gently prodding for her to label things. We'll return to this one in a couple of months time and I think we'll do it in a less permanent medium - sidewalk chalk!

The rationale behind this exercise is like playing simon says - it helps you identify any issues with left and right, and you also get a clear idea of how in touch they are with their body.

Working with Modelling Beeswax

2009-04-14T10:10:00.004-03:00

Beeswax is a great modelling material for children 5 and up.

Before the age of five it is not really pliable enough for very young children. Before age 5 I fully endorse the use of MANY different play dough recipes (Maryann Kohl's book Mudworks is constantly being pulled out to find something new to try), real clay (dig it up yourself if you can!) and nice smelling plastercine.

At 5 a child is settled enough and has the finger strength necessary to use the beeswax.

If you buy a box of it you, and your child, will be frustrated by the slabs. I prepare my beeswax for the kids by tearing it into small pieces (1 inch by 2 inch pieces and making discs, I warm the torn pieces on a ricebag, then roll it into balls and squish the balls flat. We keep our beeswax basket on a table in the sun.

When you give it to a child tell them to warm it in their hand until they can roll it into a ball again. Once it is warmed enough to roll into a ball they can start pulling out shapes from the ball. It is great for delicate natural items like sprouts and leaves. As you pull it out it transforms in your hands from a fiddlehead, to a fern, or a bean to a beansprout, to a young bean plant.

I've planned lessons on the alphabet sounds to do with Nature Girl and I want to make sure she is fully engaged in them and not at all self conscious about this return to first grade work. So while I tell our alphabet stories I will create icons from the stories out of beeswax then transform them into the letter. She can watch, she can copy me if she wants, but it is far enough away from "This is the letter A. Lets start the alphabet all over again" that I know she'll be interested.

We'll be using modelling materials a lot to work with letters and letter formation. The beeswax letters will be sturdy enough to put aside to use again (unlike the plastercine)

Natural Science Class meets the Nature Walk

2009-04-14T08:53:00.002-03:00

A commenter on my family blog, Wild Culture, gave me a link to The Woodland Trust for printable activity booklets for nature walks. I made the kids Nature Bags and these are great additions!

The best one I've found so far is the Woodland Log which is a great starter for nature journalling.

The PLAY booklets give seasonally appropriate activities you can include on your walks (things like making storytelling devices, bringing home a fallen twig with leaf buds to put in water to watch it burst into leaf).

I've also printed up their weather diary and found a little weather station to put up in the backyard it has a thermometer, a wind gauge, and a rain gauge.

Slowly but surely we will get our outdoor classroom set up.

What exactly does dyslexia look like?

2009-04-13T12:30:00.000-03:00

Nature Girl engrossed in a book

It does not mean a child can't decode the alphabet. It does not mean a child can't decode words.

It means reading is at times painstakingly slow. It means words are missed and text is jumped around in. It means decoding the same little words over and over again no matter how many times you've seen them. It means things that need to be decoded quickly are often missed. It means when text is out of context it can't be easily understood.

The side effect of this does not have to mean a child who doesn't read for pleasure.

Nature Girl reads to gather information and she reads for entertainment, but not if she feels under pressure. When her anxiety about reading mounts her ability to read drops even further. In the classroom she always feels under pressure. At home she doesn't have that pressure and there is a stack of about 20 books in her bed.

Remedial lessons are going to be a big part of our homeschooling, but providing that pressure free environment is the most important thing we can do for her.

She's reading a book on natural science above. I know her comprehension was excellent because she explained several animal behaviours to me afterwards. Yesterday she asked me what M-A-T spelt because it was seen out of context to her. We were at the carwash and a clip for mats was on the wall. I expect that my explanation of what the clip was for will provide enough context for her to remember the sign as well.

Our first set of sight words is "survival" words - things like EXIT, DANGER, HOT, WASHROOM. We have flashwords of them and are playing a kind of word bingo where she gets points for finding them in the environment. I think we'll photograph them in the environment next, so she recognizes the most common signs for them (like lighted EXIT signs).

Another big project is writing her name. She can spell her first name (actually her middle name) but not her last name, or her actual first name. She's quite resistant to this, no one at school has ever asked her to.

I considered asking her to write letters to people but she balks at it because the task seems so big every time I've tried. Maybe I'll transcribe the letter and she can JUST copy the address information on the envelopes.

SUCCESS - We have the days of the week down!

2009-04-13T12:19:00.003-03:00

It only took 13 days.

We made up a game of doing the sequence of days as a round, "Sunday, Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday STOP" then "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday STOP" through until we got to Saturday as the start day again.

We traced the words with our fingers each day too.

Today I took down the days of the week and shuffled them and asked her to turn over a card and put it in it's place (so she couldn't simply rely on putting them in order in her hand, she needed to read each card and actually understand where in the week on the calendar it belonged.) Friday went up , then Monday, then Sunday, then she paused holding Thursday and after about 4 seconds she put it up in the correct place and looked at me over her shoulder with a big smile. I gave her a big thumbs up then she quickly put up Saturday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

I asked her how she had remembered where Thursday went and she said "I knew there were two T days and I knew the first T day had a u after the T So when I saw the H I knew this card was the second word and that meant it was Thursday and Thursday was right before Friday."

Why Nature Girl is called Nature Girl

2009-04-11T09:28:00.003-03:00

I firmly believe that we need to honour our children's interests. I'll admit I'm glad no one so far has been into hockey because I would be an awful hockey mom, it would really be feigned interest.

Since Nature Girl was a wee mite she has absolutely loved the forest. She has been able to identify plants since before she could talk. At four she would lose herself completely in digging in the undergrowth exploring fungi below the surface of mushrooms.

Nature Girl is learning to read with small chunks of writing. Field Guides, both those for children and those for adults, have been a God send for her.

While we make tons of time for free exploration in the woods, I'm happy to hang back while they splash through streams and turn over logs, she is at the age now where information gathering is important too.

For this The Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens and KC Irving Environmental Science Centre is an awesome resource. Luckily for us, it's a 5 minute walk through the woods from our house. It also helps that the woman who runs programming there, Melanie Priesnitz, was unschooled throughout her childhood, so has a soft spot for homeschoolers!

One of the resources we'll be using for cross curricular activities is The Private Eye. It really is a great resource for anyone looking for inclusive multi- sensory curricula. This works for a preschooler like Wild Thing all the way to an inquisitive adult like myself. And, ahem, if you ever have to deal with a lice infestation the jewellers loupes are great!

One of the things that belongs on our wish list is a pond box and a few of these specimen boxes with magnifier lids - so they don't need to hold bugs and other crawlers to look at them.

The Extra Lesson Painting Lesson "Yellow sun Blue sky"

2009-04-09T19:14:00.000-03:00

Yellow Sun in Blue Sky

This is a wet on wet watercolour painting exercise so you start by soaking your watercolour paper, lay it on a painting board and use a clean sponge to press it town to the board pushing out any air bubbles and taking off any pools of water on the paper.

The child starts by painting a ball of golden yellow in the centre of the page. They should have the centre be deep yellow and have it lighten as it reaches the edge of the ball.

Then they use ultramarine blue and starting on the edges of the paper draw the blue into the centre without touching the yellow. They should have a deep blue at the edge and gradually becoming lighter as it reaches the yellow sun.

The next painting lesson you have them reverse the order - blue sky reaching in first, then paint the sun.

You repeat this lesson until the child can create that balanced colour graded image. After they can do that you move onto using a cool and warm yellow and a cool and warm blue, then they can add another motif along with the sun, then create a whole composition.

Now this is their Extra Lesson work - by all means let them just paint at other times!

This painting exercise is about balance - it is therapy for anxiety. "It allows the child to let go and draw themselves together" There is a lot in The Extra Lesson, and all sensory integration work about expansion and contraction.

Nature Girl LOVES doing this.

The dominance form AKA The Snail Trail

2009-04-08T20:26:00.005-03:00

It has come to my attention that I am getting a number of curious visitors to this particular entry. I want to say that I do not advertise this blog, it was set up to keep in touch with far flung family with regards to our homeschooling journey. My regular readers include my children's father, their stepmother, their aunts, uncle, and grandparents. Looking at the traffic on my site, there are 12-19 visits a month to this blog. My family accounts for just about all of that. You'd have to be hunting pretty hard to find this blog in a search engine, it simply doesn't get enough traffic to warrant it. The discussion in the comments up until this "controversy" started, was entirely with family members. I have no intention of making my homeschool blog a private by invitation only blog because frankly, there are family members who would not ask for a permission and I still want them to read here even if they wouldn't feel comfortable asking. I asked KP if I should take down my posts about the work we are doing using The Extra Lesson and offered to do so. However, this is the simplest and most direct way for me to communicate with family regarding our homeschool journey and this kind of therapy is part of what we do. It is important that I share it with my family.

This is the dominance form

How this works...I kinda feel funny explaining this, if you've watched Mystery Men you know when the guy who can bend spoons has them all doing exercises to hone their skills and Roy is balancing a hammer on his head while wearing watermelons on his feet? I kinda think people look at this and think it's equally bizarre. So I'll explain it, but please reserve judgement until you try to DO this exercise.

It's like that with all Extra Lesson work - especially the rod exercises and bean bag exercises. If you don't understand where the difficulty is in coordinating these actions, the level of thought and body awareness necessary to do them without actively thinking - TRY THEM YOURSELF.

Okay, the dominance form....

First YOU draw the dominance form on bristol board or heavy cardstock. It is supposed to be 20x30 inches If I remember correctly. The Extra Lesson specifies that you do it in RED.

You place this form (drawn on a large piece of bristol board) against the wall at floor level (tape it in place) then have the child sit in front of the form close enough that they can reach it with bent legs.

The child draws/traces the form WITH THE BODY PART INDICATED - NOT WITH CRAYONS! working left to right in a sequence (right handed children work with the right and left handed children with the left)

You work up to repeating the sequence with each form 3 times with a settled rest between each time drawing

1. both feet together

2. right foot

3. right foot and hand together

4. right foot, right eye together (cup left eye or close it if possible)

5. right foot, right eye, right hand together

6. both hands held together

7. right hand

8. right hand right eye

9. right eye

10. your choice of body part - we go for laughs - a nose, a tongue, a bum

Don't let the child collapse backwards during the exercise, they can lean back on hands only for things like two feet, or foot and hand, but stop them if they try to lie down, or lean back on elbows.

This is part diagnostic and part curative - it readily shows poor body geography - confusion with directions. It points to memory blocks - difficulty following the motion despite repetition. Doing the exercise helps with body geography by reinforcing their dominant side with the constant repetiton of that side in the exercise, they must cross the midline frequently in executing the motions. They must train their eyes to follow the form with the hand and foot motions which helps with tracking ability. It helps with memory by it's very routine and rhythm.

I'm sure there's a whole lot of anthroposophical information on moving from the physical to the etheric body...but I'm not well read on the subject.

What I know is that Nature Girl rolls her eyes at this exercise but really gets into it. She finds it physically challenging, and really has to think when she working with hand and foot. She's been doing this exercise a few times a week since November and I've seen a huge improvement in that time with this exercise and her ability to track text.

Nature Walk: Every Single Day

2009-04-08T18:03:00.001-03:00

This should be written on a prescription pad from our doctor. It is the key to healthy children.

"Our woods aren't frozened up anymore!" - Wild Thing

Stone steps...

Inside the forest hut....

Getting reacquainted with an old tree friend.

APRIL Circle

2009-04-06T20:49:00.004-03:00

Group forming (sing til everyone joins together and is in circle)

Round and round the earth is turning
Always turning round to morning
And from morning round to night

Speech - seasonally appropriate songs (all have movement involved too)

Drip drip drop
Little April showers
We're getting wet
And we don't care at all
Drip, drop, drip drip drop

Use fingers to tap drops on head and arms, whole body! - this develops tactile sense)

It rains on Sprout
It rains on Wild Thing
It rains and rains on Mummy!
But it didn't rain on Nature Girl
She has a HUGE UMBRELLA!

(repeat so everyone gets a chance to make the big umbrella - a big body X or Y stretch)

Its raining its pouring (hands drum on head)
The roots are getting wet (touch your toes)
The rain will help the flowers grow (grow back upright)
It quickly melts away the snow (sink back down)
Its raining, its pouring (stand up while fingers drum on head)
My boots are getting wet (touch your toes again!)

March in circle with the classic for silly kids:

It's raining, its pouring
The old man is snoring
He went to bed with a bump on his head
And didn't get up til morning.

ENKI action verse: Tall stand the Sailor Men

(ENKI materials are copyrighted, so I won't post the whole thing but this is a verse for Lateral midline crossing, and heavy on the Proprioceptive system work)

Looking glass EYE SPY - right now we're focussing on looking with the right eye for Nature Girl - she's the only one who gets that instruction. For now it's just looking - as we go on we'll combine this with out phoneme work.

ENKI action verse: Waters

(Crossing the midline repeatedly in different ways - right/left, horizontally, and forward and back)

Rolly polly rolly polly up up up!
Rolly polly rolly polly down down down!
Rolly polly rolly polly out out out!
Rolly polly rolly polly in in in!

Rolling the hands round in a spiral following instructions - Proprioceptive system - naval radiation)

12345
Once I caught a fish alive
678910
But I let him go again
Why did you let him go?
Because he bit my finger so!
Which finger did he bite?
My little finger on the (?)

Act it out grasping up with 12345 and down with 678910 - helps with body awareness (lateral midline crossing and quickly identifying left or right)

EXTRA LESSON Body Geography Simon Says

In this exercise you give instructions to the child without acting anything out yourself. At 8 I have Nature Girl using the terms right and left, with a younger child you start with right, and then move on to left after a few months. Nature Girl is nearly 9 so we are crossing the midline and having her touch her left side with her right side and vice versa. You build up to a verbal sequence of three (Nature Girl can't handle more than one at a time right now) "take your right hand and touch your left ear, then touch your right knee, and your left big toe"

Nature Girl does not have a firmly developed right dominance yet. This usually happens between ages 6 and 7. Why is this important? Firmly developed dominance happens at the same time that there is a growth spurt in the left hemisphere of the brain and both hemispheres have developed localized and holistic functions. - as a result concentration span increases, language development is in sync with the imagination, and the individual has more control over visual perception - able to perceive the switch between 2 and 3 dimensions instantaneously. This is necessary for learning to be done at a subconscious - comfortable level.

Dance thumbkin dance
Dance ye merrymen everyone
Thumbkin can dance alone, thumbkin can dance alone
Dance merrymen dance
Dance ye merrymen everyone

Dance foreman dance
Dance longman dance
Dance ringman dance (ringman cannot dance alone)
Dance little man dance

hand and finger coordination fingerplay (necessary for handwriting)

ENKI Action Verse: RAIN

Tactile and auditory - this one involves running the fingers over the entire body tapping, pounding, dancing lightly and in big washing rubdown movements head to toe.

Clap, Snap, Stomp sequence game

This is another sequencing game and Nature Girl has a hard time with following right now. It's an Extra Lesson game from Take Time. Make a rhythm sequence to follow clap clap snap stamp stamp (for instance) Nature Girl is more likely to engage if she gets to lead to. So go back and forth leading the sequence.

Verse for formdrawing forms

Little drops of water (vertical lines)
Little grains of sand (scoop a curved line)
Make the mighty ocean (curving running wave form)
And the pleasant land (smooth hillock running form)

Great A little a (body makes a large A quickly crouch to make little a)
Today is pancake day (clap with beat)
Toss the ball high (catch ball tossed)
Throw the ball low (throw the ball back)
Those that come after (salute)
Can sing heigh ho! (canter round circle while next child gets turn)

This is my right hand I'll raise it up high
This is my left hand I'll touch the sky
Right hand left hand
Roll them around
Left hand, right hand
Pound, pound, pound!

Bean bags or balls tossing games according to frustration level

The rainbow toss:

Bean bag in right hand toss in arc over head to catch in left - feet planted
Pass bag back to right across midline in front
Practice doing it without losing balance or looking up.
Switch sides (start with bag in left hand)

Crawling toss

Throw balls into basket
Crawl to retrieve

Relaxation exercises

Yoga - salute the sun
shaking out hands left hand then right hand
shoulder roll
Head drop
Deep relaxed belly breathing - remind child to pause!
Low sounding - MMMMMMMM
Sing vowels (short vowel sounds)

Listening game: listen intently to natural sounds and list (its nice to lie down for this, heads together making a spoked wheel - in our case a peace symbol)

Focusing verse

I am a star
From heaven I came - point above
To earth below - point down
My friends to meet - hands to sides
To be truthful in deed - right hand over heart
To love all I know - left hand crosses right
To walk with my angel - hands behind shoulders
To shine like a
STAR! - jump into star form

Closing verse (sing)

Birds in the air (hands link and fly through air)
Fish in the water (hands swim through ocean)
Stones on the land (fist on flattened hand)
I'm in God's hand (both hands cupped gently then together upright as to pray)

Namaste!

For those of you reading to get an idea about circle time - this is NOT your average circle! In a kindergarten you'd have a circle calling song (same all year) , a group forming action verse, one verse for balance and rhythm, 1 for midline crossing, 1 for music prep, one for spinning (proprioceptive) and one for closing (same all year) 7 verses - 2 you use all the time, 5 new ones to learn each season, and you'd work up to that!

Because Nature Girl is doing Extra Lesson therapy I have incorporated as much of that therapy as possible into circle so it stays playful and fun. She has anxiety issues and I need to keep this moving quickly so she doesn't get caught up in something she perceives as difficult - our circle has 22 parts! AND I've been doing these verses for a long time - I had 5 to learn new in this whole big thing. Learning 5 verses is a lot of work! It really is. I practice in the shower!

First Day - finding our groove

2009-04-06T17:49:00.004-03:00

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.

The Walk Home - a poem by Nature Girl

2009-04-06T15:36:00.003-03:00

The Walk Home

I hear white rushing waterfall

And see red stream bubbling and giggling

A mountain view and snowy secret path

I feel a mossy spot and see a fairy mound

Songbirds peep and crows caw

Caterpillar crawls and ants go marching one by one

Yellow and purple crocuses bloom in gardens

Tides in, black boat on the sea

I think I found a great solution to the audiobook issue!

2009-04-05T08:21:00.001-03:00

I've set up an account for Naturegirl at Kids Audible.com. I'm going to get her an MP3 player and big headphones (that are safer for her hearing than ear buds) for her birthday.

Then, instead of Scholastic (which is NOT what it was when we were kids, it's now full of crappy toy mass marketing tie ins, and a battle every time the catalogues come home), I'll put her book allowance into audio books. People can also get her gift certificates.

It looks to be about half the price of buying cd's for large novels and there are a ton of less expensive books available too (all those classics that aren't under an author's copyright any more).

She can make a list of books she wants and organize it by priority too.

Sensory Integration - Weeding through the Lingo and Finding Good Resources

2009-04-02T09:50:00.000-03:00

There's so many BRANDS of programs that deal with the importance of sensory integration in addressing learning disabilities.

Brain Gym
The Extra Lesson
Enki Education's Sensory Integration Program
Ayres
Therapeutic Movement
The SAVE Program (Sensory-motor Auditory Visual Education)

What they all have in common is a belief in the need to look at the whole child and address them as individuals first and then to look at what we all need to have hardwired in to make learning...a comfortable experience.

I have always been drawn to the holistic vision that Waldorf Education is based on. They have almost a hundred years of experience in addressing the needs of children, all children, and their goal is a WHOLE person. Their approach and attitudes towards learning difficulties and differently abled people is amazing.

Over the past 15 years that I've been researching Waldorf Education I've watched the movement become more and more approachable. However when people start digging in to the underlying anthroposophy they're often confounded by the "spiritual science" that is tightly woven into the fabric of their belief in human and planetary potential. I'm finally at a point where I can read Steiner without rolling my eyes in frustration or having an inner voice mocking things as I read along. I understand those that do hear that mocking voice though.

So I was really happy when I found the book Take Time, which is an approachable "accepted" mainstream look at Extra Lesson work. The book was written for parents as well as therapists and there isn't any spiritual science to wade through while you absorb all the practical advise. It's too bad it's so hard to find! It started out as a book by a non-waldorf speech and language pathologist. A few years after it was published she did a revised edition with a curative eurythmist (Waldorf Movement Therapy). Educational books don't often cross international borders and this is a British book. I had to get my copy from the United States! Bob and Nancy's is a great bookstore to deal with though.

Enki Education is, well, simply amazing and if they had packaged curricula for third grade I'd buy it in a heartbeat. They address sensory integration throughout the day. I'm utilizing what I have - their kindergarten materials - and I'll be purchasing their grade 1&2 materials when I can afford to. I find it difficult to take all the technical stuff I've learned regarding movement and turn it into activities we actually want to do without being self conscious about it being "therapy". It is one thing for the curative teacher to get Nature Girl to do exercises for her in an evaluation, it's another thing to seamlessly integrate those movements into our daily life. Enki's materials are just chock full of those exact activities - and they write above every finger rhyme. verse, or game what kind of sensory integration activity it is so you can look at the things you are grouping together and check off that you're hitting all your pointers - tactile, vestibular, balance system, and proprioceptive.

If you find other resources make sure to pass them along!

The Calendar

2009-04-01T15:09:00.000-03:00

Just what are we looking at here? How much do we need to cover in the next few months? How much do we need to cover in the next year?

We started today by making a perpetual calendar. Nature Girl and I made season and month and day of the week cards. We made a disc for each day of the month. We made illustrated weather cards and season cards. She could read all the weather cards and the months and the days of the week. She could count confidently from 1 to 31.

She could not put the days of the week in order except for Friday - Saturday - Sunday.

She could not say that the year started with January and ended with December. She couldn't group the months by season. She couldn't sequence the months at all, suggesting that December followed July. She did know that June followed May and July followed June.

She has looked at and worked with a perpetual calendar in the classroom for four years now. I wonder what standards I'm going to be held to. If she still mixes up the months a year from now will I be a failure as a teacher? Does it matter that four elementary teachers have already failed to teach her the order of the days of the week?

I had fantasies of having her reading at grade level in a year's time. But really, that isn't fair to either of us.

On Monday we start at the beginning. We're going to go back to fill in the gaps. Starting with crawling, the most basic set of whole body sequencing movements we ever need to coordinate. Nature Girl skipped crawling and went right to running.

Pray for decent weather because I'd like to spend as much time outside as possible. Rain or shine, I'd like to avoid BLIZZARD like conditions though.

An excellent article on the importance of crawling.

Because he's home, and hovering over my shoulder now, Darkmirror was quick to point out he still can't sequence the months of the year! In fact he still doesn't have his birthday committed to memory. He stumbled over the days of the week. He'll be 16 in 16 days - YOU do the math there. This has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with learning differences. He's got the self confidence to accept that, Nature Girl needs to develop it...and hopefully get the sequence down and stored to long term memory!

A list of things we always need more of...

2009-03-31T22:41:00.000-03:00

Puzzles: 100 piece - 250 piece puzzles in Nature Girl themes.

Threading beads: ones that are big enough for the focus to be on sequencing not on threading. Melissa and Doug make all sorts and she loves novelty but we need to be able to do repeating patterns so kits need lots of basics in multiple colours/shapes.

Plastercine: Seemed ubiquitous as a child, but is hard to find brands that don't smell like vomit!!!

Board Games and Active Memory Games: Cranium puts out a bunch that are great. She doesn't do that well with competitive games, but theirs are too much fun to worry about who is winning. They combine memory and sequencing and active movement, theatre etc. I wish we still had our "Simon" game.

Outdoor toys: sidewalk chalk, alternatives to a plain old skipping rope (she needs to skip every day), wobble boards, those stilt blocks you walk on, moon boots (do they still make those things???) Not that we have a place for it yet, but man oh man could she use a zipline. The one in the Acadia Woods is too high for her.

Good alphabet books: We just got Neil Gaiman's Dangerous Alphabet book. We need alphabet books that don't insult the intelligence of a brilliant 8 yr old, but will help her with the sequence of the alphabet and letter sounds.

Beginner friendly knitting and crochet supplies: super bulky yarn, large wooden needles and crochet hooks. We're going to learn crochet together and simple patterns for toys would be appreciated - there are all sorts of amigurumi she would love to do!
To be honest DARKMIRROR would love it if she took up crocheting toys! Go check out this book: Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More!

Craft project kits that involve following directions - Klutz puts out great ones and she just outgrew the Chicken Socks junior version they have.

BOOKS ON TAPE: This is a huge one! She needs GOOD LITERATURE - UNABRIDGED on tape/cd. The kinds of books you'd love to see her able to read right now. Movie versions don't cut it. She needs to hear the vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammar being used, even if she isn't ready to read it. This is vital to maintaining and growing her vocabulary right now and frankly, expensive. All that quiet time you'd like to see her with her nose in a good book? well she can spend that LISTENING and get the same value from it.

We are thinking about getting a membership with the organization that provides books on tape to the blind and dyslexic. The problem is that while libraries have audiobooks, very few are geared towards children who are past early readers but not ready for teen content. We can get Harry Potter, but very little CLASSIC literature. The reason we've been advised to get her listening to quality audiobooks is that her comprehension is at a 7th grade level but her reading ability is at the beginning of 2nd grade. Without being exposed to the content of good books - the sentence structure, the vocabulary, the advanced grammar, she won't keep developing and growing in her comprehension level. Her reading deficit will stunt her intellectual growth. The readers sold by the blind/dyslexic audio book organization are EXPENSIVE (they guard against copyright infringement) and it is out of our budget right now.

Using Movement and Music to Address Learning Difficulties

2009-03-31T22:38:00.000-03:00

For the first while in our homeschool we're going to lay off the academics and focus on finding our feet. Well, not just our feet, our whole body and all 12 (yes 12!) senses.

Touch
Life
Self-Movement
Balance
Smell
Taste
Sight
Temperature/Warmth
Hearing
Language
Concept
Ego

We're going to do an intensive two week long "Extra Lesson" with lots of movement exercises, relaxation techniques, making sounds (which handily enough happens when you sing!) and curative drawing, painting, and modelling.

I'm working on a circle time that can address all of Nature Girl's needs while being unselfconscious enough to involve Wild Thing and Sprout if they want to be involved.

Circle was a disaster with Darkmirror. As a preschooler he was so disruptive in playgroup circle time that we were often asked to leave. His kindergarten teachers pulled out their hair and started going grey dealing with his outbursts. When it came to homeschooling there was no way he was going to be subjected to more circle time work! So I had to sneak in these things in different ways. It was a constantly evolving process, sometimes successful, sometimes not.

Nature Girl is so very different, and the dynamic in our house is different. She loves group activities and gentle cooperative games. She loves helping Wild Thing and Sprout learn to do things, and her unselfconscious patient teaching personality will bve a great help in what we need to do.

We need to go back and give her the experiences she missed in kindergarten and grade one. Things she missed in an academic program that kept a pace she couldn't follow.

There are 5 books living on my bedside table right now

The Extra Lesson: Movement, Drawing and Painting Exercises to Help Children with Difficulties in Writing, Reading and Arithmetic by Audrey McAllen

Take Time: Movement Exercises for Parents, Teachers and Therapists of Children with Difficulties in Speaking, Reading, Writing and Spelling by Mary Nash Wortham & Jean Hunt

Putting the Heart back into Teaching by Stanford Maher & Yvonne Bleach

Enki Education's Kindergarten Circle Materials (sensory integration in game form)

and my childhood tome of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes