One, the Sun! (part 2)

A couple of months ago I posted the first half of our Quality of Numbers main lesson.  I honestly didn't mean to leave off on posting the second half for so long, but life had other plans.  Apologies to anyone who was worried that those kids would never get out of the enchanted tunnel.  I hope it hasn't kept you up at night. ;)

If you find yourself wondering what the heck I'm talking about, please see part one of this story here: "One, the Sun!"

For those of you who wishing I would just get on with it, I will try to keep it short and sweet-- just like tunnel number six, which was....

6 - a drop down into a deep room filled with huge crystals... OR a beehive loaded down with honey (the sound of buzzing is a nice effect).  I did the crystal story with Sunburst, and her characters had to actually stack up the crystals to climb out.  Luckily, they were able to carry just one back to the dragon. With Moonshine and Kitty Bill, the treasure was a bit of honeycomb, and we were mesmerized by the perfect six-sided forms.

7 - this tunnel leads out to the afternoon sky where the rainstorm is ending.  And of course they see a the most glorious rainbow.

8 - a spider web with a spider.  This one landed on the prince's head!  My son laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.

9 - they meet a fox who had previously stolen the dragon's 3 golden scales.  If they can answer a riddle, he will return the golden scales.  If not, well... they must agree to lead him out of the cave and he keeps the scales.  I used "When I was going to St. Ives..." and changed the central number in the riddle from seven to nine. We drew three golden triangles (dragon scales) and noticed that there are not only nine points, but nine lines as well.

10 - they find fireflies, but this poses a problem, for without jars how will they catch ten?  Or do they need to catch ten?  ---With a bit of make believe firefly catching, we come to the stunning realization that it is the child's hands which holds the treasure of ten.



Now this is where the Quality of Numbers lesson gets a bit fuzzy, because not one of the resources I have ever encountered mentions any suggestions for the number eleven.  Like the last day of creation in the Grade 3 Creation study, the number eleven gets no mention.

11 - When I first tried teaching this block, I tried to stay in the natural world for number eleven.  I couldn't think of anything, so I settled in with a suggestion from my good friend Moxy Jane to use moonbeams.  That worked okay for Sunburst, but by the time I taught Moonshine, I had realized there wasn't a wrong answer for this number.  Eleven is simply ten plus one more, and it doesn't matter what you're counting.  So you might as well make it fun!

For Moonshine's story, at the end of the eleventh tunnel there was an eleven-piece matryoshka doll (for a girl who has a VERY soft spot for nesting dolls, this was a real treat).  And for Kitty Bill, who has been developing a new interest in all things dinosaur, there was a shovel and the boys dug up eleven dinosaur bone segments.  (Yes, segments, because as you and I know, eleven bones does not a skeleton make.)  He was thrilled, both by the story and by the drawing.

If you're still struggling with the number eleven, Eva of Untrodden Paths has contributed some wonderful suggestions:

"For number eleven: I used Joseph's dream of the eleven sheaves of corn bowing to him. You could also use the eleven stars bowing down to Joseph in his second dream.  For another, more grade one-like, idea: H.C. Andersen wrote a fairy-tale called "The Wild Swans," which is about eleven swans (eleven brothers). That would be perfect I think!"

And finally... 12.

There are a few different things people use for the number twelve-- a clock, a dozen eggs, the Twelve Dancing Princesses... They all felt like such an anti-climax for me.  I wanted to end the story with something marvelous, and in my exhaustive search I found a very strange video that spoke to me.  I called it further proof that inspired story ideas can come from anywhere, including marketing videos designed by internet marketing firms.  Who knew?!

http://web.twelvehorses.com/swf/legend.html

12 - this tunnel opened up directly upon a field of twelve horses all under an enchantment.  As this was the final tunnel, it was our most outrageous story.  The story characters had to figure out A. why aren't the horses responding?, and B. how to break the enchantment.  It was a favorite with both the girls and Kitty Bill, and it really spoke to them deeply.

I borrowed the above "legend" and the horse constellation for our "twelve" picture, but in my version of the story the chariot belonged to the Sky Queen.  The adult in this story remembered the legend and shared it with the kids, who exclaimed, "These must be the horses!!"  But how do we break the enchantment and bring them back to the dragon?

The characters in the story tried many things-- as many things as my children could think of to "wake up" the horses... yelling, whispering, sitting on them, pinching them, tickling them, kicking them... it went on and on, until finally, they sat to ponder the problem over lunch.  The main character took out his handwork, and as he worked, he began to hum.  A horse twitched!  The other characters noticed, and after much guesswork, they began to put the clues together.  There was a lot of humming, but this only produced twitches from the horses... curious!  Finally, with much guesswork on behalf of both the characters and my child, our main character decided to sing from his heart.

"Ponies, now ponies, don't you worry.
I'm not here to steal your fire away.
I want to fly with you across the sunrise.
And remember what begins each shining day."
--the chorus from "Ponies" by Michael Martin Murphy.

As the character sang to each horse, it awoke from the enchantment.  Each time we sang, it was louder and bolder, until we were bursting with song.  The pure delight and joy on each of my children's faces, on the separate occasions they heard this story, was priceless.  It touched something deep in their hearts and souls that I can't even begin to put my finger on.  But these moments?  That's what homeschooling is about!

After the enchantment was broken, the dragon came soaring out of the cave to thank and congratulate them.  The Sky Queen, in all her radiance, appeared before the story characters.  She thanked them dearly, and presented the story child who first broke the enchantment with a special gift... a flute made from the magic pear tree.  This was the GREATEST GIFT (as the video legend says and thus interpreted by me) --giving them the means with which to communicate without words and with nature itself.  Music is its own kind of magic, after all.

At the end of this lesson, I presented my child his/her very own flute made from the magic pear tree --the quinta Choroi pentatonic flute.  It's with this flute that, at the end of the alphabet lesson, our characters can call an animal friend for a lift home-- for Sunburst and Kitty Bill it was the dragon itself, and for Moonshine it was a great white bird.

This was another one of these moments that no words can adequately describe, but I feel like presenting them with their very own flute in this way gave them a heightened reverence for it.  Music touches us so deeply, both man and beast, and I wanted them to start out on that footing.  This is a special way of communicating.  Guard it wisely.  Honor, revere, and develop it.  And know that music is a sacred gift.

Of course this was the end of our first mathematics story, which was really just a story inside another story.  Filled with joy and happiness, we then continued on with the original alphabet journey which culminates in a cheerful, happy ending.

Afterwards, the flute accompanies us as we work our way into another form drawing block and on into another maths lesson.

As for the last few drawings above, I left those completely up to my children to work on independently.  Funnily enough, they each chose to draw the horses, the Sky Queen, and the dragon.  These are all Kitty Bill's drawings and text.  I am completely charmed by his red dragon, golden scales and all.

Flying machines

Kitty Bill (7) made this all by himself.  This is the kind of thing that happens when mom and dad aren't looking.

The propeller is a curved piece of wood that he planed before attaching it to some electronic bits.  Then he taped the whole shebang to his bicycle and added a kite for wings.  Pretty clever, don't you think?

More fun with moving pictures

Spring is definitely here!  We have had full-on sunshine for several days in a row now, and I feel like I'm finally awake after that icy winter.  It hasn't even drizzled this week, which seems like a small miracle to me.  I hope it lasts!

This week has been incredibly busy, but Kitty Bill and I have carved out a bit of time to make several moving pictures together.  We adore making these pictures and telling stories to each other.  Kitty Bill, in particular, is drawn to anything that needs a bit of engineering to pull off, so these pictures are perfect for him.  And he's full of story ideas just bursting to get out.

Here are a few that we made this week. 

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

 The Night Gnome and His Cat

The Raindrop Gnome Goes Fishing in the Dead of Night

He's really starting to develop a bit of control with the beeswax block crayons.  It's a good way to get those sharp edges worn down before we start grade one stories this fall.

I don't know what it is about moving pictures that calls to me every spring, but it seems to have become a regular springtime activity around here.  You could almost set your clock to it. ;)

Our newest knitter

Introducing our newest knitter... Kitty Bill.

He announced around Christmastime that he was ready to knit.

As he watched his sisters and me busily planning and crafting presents for each other, he realized that he needed to come up with some presents, too.  And those presents, he decided, were going to be knit.  By him.  For us.

He's six.  And in all honesty, he's been around knitting his whole life.  Over the last three years, he's even made a few stitches with help here and there when he felt like trying it.  His interest never lasted for more than a few stitches on whatever project I was working on.  And I wouldn't say he really understood what he was doing, he was just testing the waters.

In September I gave him a huge, beautiful hank of handspun wool for his birthday and a very cool knitting tool, kind of like a knitting Nancy, but very simplistic.  I bought it from a cute little shop in Arlesheim, Switzerland called Ahornblume.

Well, the huge hank of wool lasted maybe two days.  After his initial bewilderment, he absolutely loved it! He quickly turned the entire hank into one unimaginably long knit "snake."

Fast forward to December.

He had a few ideas about what he wanted to make-- ideas that are completely out of reach for a new knitter.  I tried to gently steer him into the realm of things that can be made from a simple square or rectangle, but he wouldn't have it.  Instead, he pulled out our pattern books and started pouring through them.  He came back to me wanting to make Moonshine the elephant pattern from A First Book of Knitting for Children.  I took one look at the pattern and saw the determination in his eyes and said, "Are you sure?  It's going to require a lot of work and attention.  You'll have to knit every single day."  He didn't even blink.

So I pulled out some yarn and let him choose a color, and we sat down and worked on casting on and simple knit stitches.  He has a very mechanical mind-- he's always drawing complex factories for some reason, so he had no trouble figuring out the engineering of the stitches.  In fact, he paid quite little attention to what he was actually doing once he figured out the stitch.  He'd carelessly knit a few rows and put it down again, pick it back up hours later, and almost with his eyes closed, begin again.

It's no big deal.  It's just string.

This was a very different experience for me.  --Three different kids, three very different kinds of knitters.

His whole attitude about it made Sunburst completely crazy.  She couldn't watch him without cringing or trying to help him in some way.  "Your needles are backwards!"  "I think you slipped a stitch." "But you dropped a stitch, let me help you!"  Frankly, he didn't want her help.  He didn't want anyone's help.

He could care less about how many stitches he dropped or if he accidentally slipped a few stitches.  People in this house knit stuff all the time, and it doesn't look so hard.  What's the big deal?!  The more he knit in his careless way, the more panicked Sunburst became, and I finally had to separate the two of them.  The rule quickly became, "If your brother is knitting, you're not allowed to watch.  Period."

And that got us through December.  He knit every day.  I helped him with the shaping-- there was a lot of binding off and casting on involved to make the legs and trunk.  But in the end, it looked mostly like it was supposed to.  There were holes a'plenty, but together we closed them all up so the stuffing wouldn't fall out.  And then we sewed it up together, and it looked like an elephant!  It really did!

 

He was excited about it for a few minutes, but then it was no big deal. Really.  I mean, who doesn't knit in this house?!!

The excitement came back on Christmas morning when he presented his wrapped present to Moonshine.  He was bursting for her to open it.  And she loved it, of course.  There was no question about it.  She had already shed a few tears when she found out that his first piece of knitting ever was a present for her!

In January he starting knitting a dollhouse-sized doll for Sunburst's birthday using a pattern from the same book.  This required a doll's head made by mom, and more closing of holes and help with the shaping, but again he had the determination to see it through to the end.

He's a knitter now.  He has already started his third project-- a robot for himself.  Who knows what's next!

For the love of books!

I have to admit, I am really enjoying this Saints/Heroes unit study so much more this time than I did with Sunburst. I feel like last time we only scraped the surface, and this time it's as if Moonshine and I have gotten to the heart of it. The stories are breathing inside us both... even Sunburst is curious to hear what we're doing and asking to be included. Even Kitty Bill is taking note of the emergent enthusiasm and confidence in Moonshine, and he is eager to mimic her drawings.

Here's Saint Columba, from Moonshine (8) and then Kitty Bill (4):





The love of books is something we can all really identify with, including Moonshine. After our study of Saint Columba she was seen at most hours of the day doing just this:





Prior to this she had read her way through the entire Cobblestone Cousins series, a few Magic Treehouse books, and at least one Secrets of Droon. But this... this tattered, old copy of Charlotte's Web? The size and heft of it made her feel quite mature, as if she had finally arrived at the wonderful world of book-reading. She finished it in about a week! And straight-away she put it back on the bookshelf and picked out another, just as big, and grinned like mad.

Gearing-up for Easter

Yesterday Kitty Bill and I cooked up a little bit of pre-Easter fun with a magical, moving picture. We had a great time telling stories with it-- about bunnies that run and hide, find eggs hidden in the grass, and meet little gnomes. We even made some songs.



For inspiration, I used the very cute book: Making Picture Books with Moveable Figures by Brunhild Muller. I've been eyeing this one for a long time at the German bookstore, and I was so pleased to discover it in English. The author gives plenty of indications by Rudolf Steiner why this sort of thing is recommended for little children. The smile on my four-year-old's face was indication enough for me.

Kitty Bill was so enamored with our bunny scene he decided to make his own moving picture. It's called, "The Magic Moving Boat" complete with a plane, castle, and motorboat. The captain of the magic boat happens to be smoking a cigarette. Odd? No. That's living in Europe for you, and further proof that these little ones notice positively everything they encounter out in the world, including random smokers on the street.

Luckily he's taking in the positive images, too.



What are you doing to gear-up for Easter?

Worms, math, and treehouses

Busy week! This week I presented the earthworm, straight out of Klocek's book, Drawing from the Book of Nature. It's still much too cold to go digging for actual worms here, but as avid gardeners, we're no strangers to the amazing, little creatures.



Worms segued very easily into a lesson on fractions when we read that if you cut them in half, they die. But if you only cut off the the hind third, they don't die. Sunburst has been hungry for new math problems, and instead of waiting to present this as a block, I just jumped right in with some ideas from Dorothy Harrar's math book.

Sunburst told me she hated fractions, so we started out with some sentences about fractions being good things and a story illustrating the truth of those sentences: Sunburst gets on the bus with an apple. Her hungry friends get on the bus, and the apple gets shared and cut each turn, until eventually there are sixteen slices - one for each child. Last to get on the bus is an old man who is starving. The kids all decide to share their slices with this old man, so that in the end, he has the entire apple.



And then we did some very simple fraction work to build the foundation.





I also backtracked through Dorothy Harrar's math book and brought forth a lesson from the second grade section-- it seemed more like a fractions story than a multiplication story.




Moonshine did a little math herself, sort of. While Sunburst was busy at work on her fractions tree, Moonshine wanted to draw a little tree of her own. This tree multiplied itself into a dozen treehouses, each one designed with specific friends in mind. When Moonshine gets an idea there is no stopping her.



And what of Kitty Bill? He got in on the drawing fun, too. Sometimes he likes to do that. Other times, like today, he just steals off with a pair of scissors and cuts everything in sight. Of course we prefer it when he draws pictures instead.

Language acquisition

How do you tell your three-year-old is picking up some foreign language skills? Oh, he'll tell you.

Kitty Bill threw a wild tantrum out in a public park the other day. He's been amping up the tantrums over the last few months, so that wasn't news-- he's been seriously displaced by this move. What struck me is that he chose to throw this tantrum in German.

It was time to leave, and he plainly didn't want to go. So he threw himself down on the ground and screamed at us with all his might, "NEIN! NEIIIIIN! NEIN, BITTE! BITTE, NEIIIN!"

After I stopped laughing (I know, but it was too cute) I scooted down on the ground next to him and asked him what he was so upset about. Did he even know what he was saying? He said, "No, please, I don't want to go."

________

We're currently living above a restaurant staffed by a large Italian family, or several small families, it's hard to tell. They have convinced Kitty Bill that his name is Mimi, because that's what they squeal to him whenever they see him. "Mimi, mimi." And he says it right back to them, and they do this touchy, touchy thing and give him a fresh bread roll. Every time, sometimes several times a day. The kid is up to his ears in bread rolls. And then when they part he says "Ciao, bello" right back to them.

________

Tonight he asked me to read a board book in German, that was actually IN German, then he moved on to our worn copy of Maisy Drives the Bus, in English, which he wanted read in German. "You read it to me," I said.

"Maisy drives the bus, German. Schlack and kluck and nacknock bus German." It's definitely weird. He sort of spits when he says it, so he has the basic idea.

Blog? What blog?

This year is really going by awfully fast. Since mid-January we have been plagued by just about every cold and flu out there-- some of them more than once. That's not a bonus when it comes to gastrointestinal stuff. But I suppose that's what we get from dragging our kids around the country for Christmas.

We have seen some interesting developments as a result of the sicknesses though. Moonshine emerged from one bout of illness with the ability to both whistle and read. She woke up one morning in February and things just started clicking for her. She went from not reading to reading in the blink of an eye.

Just as Sunburst did, Moonshine has really taken a fond affection to the McGuffey Primer Reader. Every few days she brings it to me and asks Einstein or me to help her work on the next lesson, and so we do. If she's amped enough about reading to want to work on it, how can we say no to that?

Other things that have clicked for Moonshine in the past few months include ice skating and roller blading.

Sunburst has been mostly reading. We're still trucking along with lessons, but her reading has just taken on a life of its own. She's reading about 200 pages a day now, sometimes more. She would rather be reading than anything else. If we had a horse, this would be a different story. She spends a lot of time reading horse-care manuals. Just yesterday she was reading a manual on robotics-- so you never can tell.

Einstein and I have taken a different approach to homeschooling this past month. While we are still heavily driven by Waldorf, my concerns about how she measures up in a foreign country have gotten the better of my unschooling leanings. I imagine it will pass eventually, but in the meantime we have amped up our expectations. Rather than nag, we have asked Sunburst to take some responsibility for her own schooling. She and I sat down and decided together how much work she could be accomplishing each week in each subject area. We then made a list with check boxes and stuck it on the fridge in a sheet protector. When she finishes a task, she can check it off her list, and in a glance, she (and we) can know what she has left to accomplish.

This plan is working out great so far. With one month left before we move overseas, you can imagine my brain is a bit frazzled. It's really hard for me to stay focused and be the end-all homeschooling mom. We are still doing main lesson, but at nine years old, there are some things that Sunburst can do by herself now. And I think she likes it that way.

Kitty Bill is still trying to play the Alpha Male card on his sisters. He spends a lot of time being the destructive, high-energy, two year old. He has learned to ride a small bicycle with training wheels-- and he can even steer! Which is something. I need to remember that as long as he has something to be in control of he may let the rest of us live to see another day. Large motor activities are a huge plus in his case. He's a busy little guy!

How many?

How many babies does it take

...to fall out of a grocery cart?
...to run off in the store?
...to disappear at the library?
...to break into a glass cabinet?
...to empty every cupboard in the kitchen?
...to run in the street?
...to thoroughly flood a bathroom and part of a hallway?
...to break a thick, wooden safety gate?
...to climb on a bar stool?
...to pull everything off the counter?
...to sneak into the paints?
...to build forts on the couch?
...to climb partway into the fish tank?
...to fall out of the bed?
...to topple out of the swing?
...to scale the bunkbed?
...to throw ear-shattering tantrums all week long?


Yeah, just one.

Einstein has been gone this week at a conference, and it's been all-mama-all-the-time. Unfortunately, Kitty Bill chose this week to catch a cold and simultaneously make some huge developmental leaps. I'm all for leaps, just not from anything higher than his knees. A little back-up here would be nice. Sleep, too, for that matter.

He's running me ragged.

Einstein, come home soon!