Updates and some knitting

We've been hiding from the rain and the chill the last few days, so I've actually gotten some work done this week.  It feels so good to get things accomplished!  We're preparing for a little journey in a couple of weeks, and my plate has been so full that things have been slopping off of it.  I'm ticking things off the list one by one.  It's all I can do.

I've been getting a bit of knitting done at night when it's just too cold to sit at the computer.  I wanted to share this particular piece with you because I had a bit of fun with the buttons.  This little sweater is going to a working mom who is so very dear to me.  She has no time for hand-washing knits, so no wooden buttons!  These are in fact hand-drawn onto shrinkles paper.  I found the very simple and wonderful tutorial at Scissors Paper Wok.

Here are the buttons before going into the oven.

 
And here they are afterwards.  So cute!

The sweater pattern is the 7-hour Toddler Girl's Sweater, and I love how it knitted up.  I hope the recipient loves it, too.


Now for the updates!

First up, I've finally managed to update my resource list for Grades 1-3.  Wow, what a lot of work that was!  But I hope it's much more helpful now.  You'll find a lot of new resources there-- books that have come out in the last few years that I absolutely love, as well as a few amazing websites I've had bookmarked.  I plan to update the lists for Grades 4-8 soon...

Second, I've mucked around with the sidebar a bit.  There is now a picture of me for those of you who have been wondering for ages how many heads, eyes, or antennae I have, now you will know.  I have resisted putting up a picture of myself for ages because I really dislike being photographed.  I tend to make really goofy faces no matter how hard I try to look normal.  And I've been told that my smile is so big it could swallow nations.  I'm not sure if that was intended as a compliment or not, but I can't argue with the truth.

Other things you'll see on the sidebar-- more labels!  I don't know why only a few labels were showing before, but now they are all visible, even some weird ones.  I've even gone back and added labels to almost my entire first year of posts... you know, the ones I wrote way back before labels existed.  Have I really been blogging for almost seven years?!  And because sometimes labels just don't cut it, I've added a search bar as well.

The last new sidebar addition is a list of our patterns and tutorials.  It's not a complete list, but it's a start.  The list includes patterns both shared on the blog and in other publications, including two lovely farm pieces that were featured in Living Crafts magazine a few years ago.  I have a new knitting pattern to share on the blog (tomorrow!), an upcoming woodworking tutorial, and another knitting pattern coming soon from Sunburst, so please watch this space.

Now if I could only figure out how to set up a virtual cafe in my sidebar, we could all sit and chat together in real time... ah, to dream!
 

Weekly planning sheets

Now that I've got a yearly planning page that works for me, it was a natural progression that I needed to make a weekly one as well. I wanted simple. Seriously simple. One sheet. Nuts and bolts.

I came up with this one. It's my weekly macro list. This is the one that hangs on the wall so that everyone knows what to expect. I colored it up with pencils to make it easier to read and prettier to look at.



After I did this, I needed a micro list-- one for my eyes only. It has a little more space so I can write what I intend to do. It's still simplified enough to fit on one page, but it gives me enough room to put just enough information that I know what's going on at a glance. I can really feel the week out this way.




Here are the master sheets. If you click on the images below, they should open up large enough for you to save and print out. (They fit fine on my European paper size... hopefully they will translate well enough onto standard letter size, too.)

Grade 6 Resources

As always, this is a work in progress. We'll, see how many of these we actually use. It's in no way a complete list... but a good start nonetheless.

Booklist

General
Eugene Schwartz - Grade 6 download
Path of Discovery: Grade 6 - Eric Fairman
Spiritual Syllabus Grades 5-6 - Alan Whitehead
Waldorf Curriculum Overview - Christopherus
Grade Six files at waldorfhomeeducators - M. Johnson

Math
Math Lessons for Elementary Grades - Dorothy Harrer
String, Straightedge and Shadow
Beginner's Guide to Reconstructing the Universe
The Joy of Mathematics - Pappas
Drawing Geometry - Jon Allen
Geometry Lessons in the Waldorf School, Ernst Schuberth
Mathematics Lessons for the Sixth Grade - Ernst Schuberth
Teaching Mathematics... Classes I-VIII, Ron Jarman

Literature/English/History/Science
An English Manual - Dorothy Harrer
McGuffey's Fourth Reader
McGuffey's Speller
Ancient Rome - Charles Kovacs
A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome - Alberto Angelo
Teaching History I - Roy Wilkinson
Teaching History II - Roy Wilkinson
Castle - David Macaulay
A City, David Macaulay
The Living World of Plants
Botany - Charles Kovacs
Drawing from the Book of Nature (love this!)
Handbook of Nature Study
Physics is Fun

German
Assorted picture books
Das Sind Wir - Peter Oram
Neue Fibel: Teil 3 - Paul Dohrmann
Kinderlieder Kinderreime

Music
Singing Every Day - Lila Belle Pitts
Various recorder books
Various piano books

Homeschool Planning

I'm still trying to slog through my Rome pictures... but meanwhile, I'm feeling the pressure to start getting things ready. It's August, after all. Local kids are back to school here NEXT WEEK. I can't deny any longer that a new year is upon me.

This year I've decided to try a different way to plan things out. That big sheet of divided paper that lots of people use just doesn't work for me, so this year I made my own template on normal-sized paper. It gives me the entire year at a glance. Plus I like to list my goals for each child-- emotional, physical, whatever I need to remember to focus on.

We still have a few things to finish up from last year. For Sunburst, that's Greece. Usually Greece has to be carried over to Grade 6 anyway, so I'm not worried at all. Actually I'm excited-- as of this morning we're planning a field trip to Athens this fall. Yay!!

It's still a work in progress, and I've probably left something out... but here's what I've got lined up for Sunburst this coming year:




And Moonshine... she's just not emotionally ready for the Old Testament stories yet, so we'll continue with stories from second grade-- there are way more than you can cover in second grade. We'll bridge the gap with Farming and LOTS of Math blocks, and then we'll hit the Old Testament in the early spring when Moonshine turns nine. With her birth date falling where it does we're always bridging the gap between years, waiting for the emotional/physical markers-- always-- before we jump in with both feet. It works for us.

Here's the plan for Moonshine:



Anyway, here's a blank of the template I made to use this year. It's not fancy or anything, but I thought I'd throw it out there if anyone was interested. Maybe it will work for you, too. When you click on the image it should open up into a larger format that you can save and print from.



Now I'm onto the micro planning of the first blocks... fun!!

How is your planning going? Is anyone else getting excited to start a new year??

Weekly particulars

Our little weekly schedule looks a lot like Aleisha's master plan, just what you'd expect from heavily-borrowed goods. Ours is still a work in progress.

I love the music practice in the mornings, directly after tidy time. It gets the job done when Sunburst is still an interested and willing party. She's working very hard on learning to read music, and doing an outstanding job at it, I must say. But it's heady work, and the mornings work best for that.

The other cool thing about our week is that we have so few "scheduled" activities away from the home. I've carved out huge chunks of time that can be "lesson time," which I haven't bothered to define very well on the map. With a nap-defying, self-asserting toddler in the house it's hard to say when the lessons will actually occur. Obviously I try to get started early, but sometimes it just simply doesn't work that way. So we have the freedom to just roll along and fit things in as we can without any time crunch to be anywhere.

We do have to be at our local homeschool park day, however. It happens once a week and we wouldn't miss it-- all the dirt digging, jump roping, and bug watching. And directly from there Sunburst has her horse lessons. We come home exhausted, but often, she still wants to do "school." I know, I know. She's an odd kid. So instead of planning a lesson, we have delegated that time "Old Time School."

I've been instructed that if I'm not going to wear a dress, I at least have to put my hair into a bun. Sunburst, however, puts on her Prairie clothes and bonnet and comes at me with her McGuffey's Third Reader and Speller. Or sometimes she'll surprise me and ask to do a maths worksheet. It's odd how much kids like to do worksheets, so we keep them around just in case.

Our only other exciting planned activity is for Moonshine. She badly wanted to take a gymnastics class, but I couldn't find one for her age group that wasn't in the middle of dinnertime. And so... one afternoon a week, for 30 minutes, we have homeschool gymnastics.

"Welcome. My name is Miss Fiddlesticks, and today we're going to learn how to do a cartwheel."

Now, I can't do a cartwheel to save my life. Especially with my messed up foot, but with a class size of one, I can fake it. Plus, I'm the lucky sort of teacher who has a chief assistant demonstrator, Miss Sunburst herself, graduate of the gymnastics bar of fame. Or something like that. She took gymnastics for a couple of years anyway, and was quite adept at all manner of body contortions. She's fairly choleric though, rising to meet each and every challenge until she masters it. And as long as Sunburst was a helper and not a classmate, she was allowed by Moonshine to be part of the scenario.

We started out with a circle, sort of. I sang a greeting song I remembered from a parent tot dance class back in 2001. Then we did another song/movement game from that same dance class, that goes something like:

"Here we go skipping, skipping, skipping (or running, hopping, jumping, etc.)
Here we go skipping all around.
Here we go skipping, skipping, skipping
Here we go skipping and then we stop.
Give a little clap.
Now we all fall down."

We went on and on until we got tired, and then out came the gymnastics mat. We bought one for the girls to use years ago when I caught Sunburst trying to do front handsprings into the living room windows. There is a reason that there is a "burst" in her name.

So out came the mat and Moonshine rolled down it and did somersaults and asked to learn backwards rolls... and it was amusing. We worked on cartwheels, sort of. It went well. But Moonshine is less about the actual activity than the feeling of the experience. She wanted dialog.

"Miss Fiddlesticks, how did you hurt your foot?" she said, eyeing my still-bandaged foot. "Were you in a car accident?"

"Ah, no, " I said, trying to think up something fast. "It was a dog accident, actually."

She considered that for a moment. "My mom has a hurt foot, too," she said, and her eyes flickered and grew big and bright. I think in her imagination I actually became Miss Fiddlesticks instead of her mom. It was fascinating and weird all at once. And she went on to discuss with me in great detail the car accident and everyone's injuries and how the best part was having a sleepover at a friend's house. If I recall, there wasn't much sleeping involved... but it's nice to know she has processed it and found a bright side.

We ended our class with a goodbye song, and as I waved her off she circled back through the house and yelled, "Mom, I'm home from my gymnastics class!"

Planning ahead

Despite the illnesses, we had a really outstanding couple of weeks here doing the back to school thing. We're easing into it, and magically, after hitting a road bump or two, things are falling right into place.

One of the best things I did was to borrow Aleisha's fantastic weekly schedule visual. Have you seen hers? I love the idea that the kid(s) help create it, thereby owning it to an extent. And displaying it helps keep everyone on track. --I borrowed from it liberally, because she has things laid out so well.

I also borrowed some organizational finesse from Spinneretta, of The Jacobite Rose. She's got the best planner idea I've seen yet! And using downloads from Spinneretta herself and Donna Young, I've now got a working planner. Emphasis on working. Yes, I'm actually able to plan stuff, keep it in one place, and follow through. I've added a handwritten sheet for Goals (both emotional and educational) for my girls, and I'm good to go. I'm trying to write in pencil on those weekly sheets, so that I can erase anything we don't get done, and then move the item to the next day. What I'm left with is a record of what has actually happened, rather than what I intended to happen. I'm really loving it, and I think the nice thing about the planner is that it's something tangible that I can look at the night before and see what I need to prepare/do/think about in order to be fully present the next day.

I usually get so caught up in my own needs after my three kids go to bed that I forget to think about tomorrow. I get so bent on trying to get that dose of time for myself, no matter how minuscule it may be some nights, that I find myself often walking into the next day ill-prepared.

I've been reading such provoking books lately, perhaps the most so is Eugene Schwartz's lectures Rhythms and Turning Points in the Life of the Child. In the first lecture he says such incredibly smart things that, had I been underlining, the book would have looked ridiculous when I was through. One of those incredible things he says is parallel to something we learned with our exploration of Rosh Hashana-- that the new day starts at sundown. He says if you prepare for the lesson the night before, if you think about/meditate on the children in your care, you then take all of that with you into your sleep where you meet in spirit form with the children, have a "cosmic main lesson," and receive guidance, not only from higher spirits but from the children as well.

I've heard this sort of stuff many times over the years, and while I believe in this spirit world he refers to, it has been awhile since I really made an ongoing, conscious effort to sit with the lessons and my thoughts at night. It's so easy to slide into the place of meeting my own immediate needs, rather than looking ahead to tomorrow. But Schwartz reminds me that the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. That this nightly preparation has such measurable effects, that it works and can be proven.

He says:

"Think of a main lesson that went especially well, one that you can look back on... you could look back on it and not only say, "Well, that was good. They really learned something" but you feel your inner being is somewhat transformed. You feel as though you and the children were speaking together, your hearts were beating as one, you were breathing as one. Something happened. Then look back on it and I'm certain that you will find two things occurred. One is that some point you practically threw your main lesson plan out the window and started to teach something rather different. It was still in that subject but quite changed and metamorphosed from what you imagined. And most likely the reason you did it that way was because a child asked a question... it was as though they were feeding you what you needed to say. It was coming out of their being and as they heard you speak what was on their soul, they smiled and said, "Ah" or grew more and more enthusiastic."

My inner being transformed? Our hearts beating as one? Breathing as one?

All this for planning ahead? Count me in!

Planning for Fall

With the recent events in my life being what they are, I've felt more than a bit unfocused. Scattered, emotionally and mentally. It's not a frame of mind I'd recommend to anyone, especially when raising young children and homeschooling. During my struggles this week to screw my head back on straight, I ran across a couple of quotes in my readings.

I'm always open to signs from the universe, and these two felt a bit serendiptious.

"Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends upon those who go on anyway."

--Robert Henri

"There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread."

--William Stafford

There are a lot of ways to interpret this idea of "thread." It can manifest as one's faith --mine being weighted by ideas of destiny and the interconnectedness of the spirit world with our own, which is something I have felt and experienced many times in my life. I have to take a breath and remember that everything happens for a reason, as it is meant to happen or unfold-- and that nothing changes but the earthly body. It's hard for me to really hold these ideas in the thick of grief, though I do believe them with all my heart, they don't dissipate my human feelings of loss or helplessness or suffering.

Thread can also speak to our relationships with others-- mother, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, wife.... We have this uncanny ability to tether each other to the earth, to life in all its messiness and hilarities. It doesn't get any more real than wiping bottoms or the salty tears of a teething baby or a four-year-old's knock knock jokes during dinner.

But what about homeschooling and how it applies to my family? Thread is something like a rhythm we can hold onto, a set plan, an order to our days. A bit of stability we can count on.

It's time to get back to a steady beat. If we can hold onto that, maybe we can keep ourselves afloat in this murky current of emotion. Anyway, it's worth a shot. I've come up with a rough plan. We'll try it out and see how it goes.

Monday - wet-on-wet painting/washing
Tuesday - music
Wednesday - handwork/mending
Thursday - music/bi-monthly co-op/park day
Friday - circle/foreign languages

We'll also walk in the mornings and work our second grade blocks into this weekly rhythm. Thursdays are our only "day out" from the house, so it should be easy. I still have to figure out what those blocks are going to be though. I like to come up with a theme that guides the year. Last year was our "quest for the light," which showed itself in our Martinmas play and lantern walk, our letter story, our intro to numbers story (working through the Cave of Mysteries to the Sky Queen with her twelve white horses,) and Robin Red's form drawing story/song. It felt perfect for the first grade year, a child just setting out on the path, coming into the light of knowledge, getting her first taste of that brightness.

The second grade child is continuing along that path, bridging this gap between the animal and spirit world, base behavior and a higher calling. Most Waldorf folks teach Aesop's Fables and Saints' stories this year. Me? I'm not feeling it. I'm reading over the materials and waiting for divine inspiration to strike me. Presenting the Saints' stories feels important, but my intuition tells me they need to be grounded in/with something else. Reality. Truth. Experience. Something. And that these lessons need to cast some light on the things that are unfolding in our own family, hold our space. But how? And what? Hopefully the right answers will come soon....

In the meantime, I will go on anyway. Blindly moving forward, grounded in rhythm and family and friendship, and dirty bottoms.