Books and Lessons and Return to Rhythms

The Seven Year Old Wonder Book by Isabel Wyatt

I recently purchased the above book on amazon.com based on the recommendation from another Waldorfy mama. WE ARE IN LOVE!!!!  My son was intrigued when he saw the title, but once we opened it up and began to read, he instantly became enchanted with the book!  We have decided to take a break from traditional fairy tales for a while so we can read this book together. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, as it is so delight-ful and absolutely perfect for my 6 y.o. little guy. 

I have a bit to catch up on in today's post. This is because in my quest to lessen our children's screen time, I have been modeling that myself with less of my own screen time. It was a challenge at first because I do a lot of book-keeping and misc. work-related activities on my laptop. I have simply had to become more efficient with my time on the laptop. This has meant, of course, that blogging naturally will not happen every day - but I was never an every-day blogger to begin with. I like the more organic flow I've developed whereby I blog when there is a perfect time in the schedule for it that does not disrupt our daily rhythm.

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I had mentioned in my last post that I planned to do a craft/math project using bell peppers to create shamrocks. Here's what we ended up with!

Notice that some are 4-leaf clovers and some are 3-leaf shamrocks.  We did several pages like this, some we hung up "as is" and others I used to create a math game (see below).

For the math game, I cut out the shamrocks into individual squares and numbered the nodes.

Then, using our counting "jewels", we matched the number of jewels to the number of nodes. I wove a story into the game, saying that fairies were gathering the jeweled shamrocks for the Banquet of Stars. They fairies wanted to sort the jewels into: one group of 10 jewels, one group of 8 jewels, one group of 7 jewels, one group of 4 jewels and one group of 3 jewels. The fairies wanted to place the jewels on the beautiful shamrocks for the Banquet, so they needed to figure out how many 4-node shamrocks and how many 3-node shamrocks they would need for each group. The above picture shows how the fairies sorted the jewels and shamrocks to create the group of 10 jewels.

This was a really fun activity, and my son really loved creating different combinations of jeweled shamrocks!

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Today, we decided to group the jewels by two's, which went along nicely with the skip-counting we did during circle time.

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I wanted to show another example of Main Lesson Book for our son (grade 1).

I often display what I'd like him to create in my own Main Lesson Book (which I am using as a sort of "teacher's manual" as well as a way to plan ahead for future lessons).

Here is what I quickly created. We are working with elements, and clearly this page is about the element of fire as represented by the sun. 

Here is what my son created in his own book. I loved that he put thought into exactly what color each ray of sunlight should be coming from the sun. 

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Steiner Study

So, I wanted to keep better records on my personal study of Steiner (Waldorf) Education, Anthroposophy and related topics. 

Currently on my ipod:   I have the free audio 

English translation of  The Kingdom of Childhood, which you can find at www.rudolfsteineraudio.com. 

There are a *LOT* of resources on this site!! I am not sure if Steiner's complete works have been put to audio onto this site or not, but surely there is a large number of his works there.

Phew, I think I've caught you all up on some of the highlights of what's going on around our home. Our Australian visitor has returned to his home, which means our rhythm has returned to normal once more. The kids had no problems adjusting back to our usual rhythm, which means everything feels peaceful and dependable once more in terms of our homeschooling day.