So it' s been a while

...because we've been busy. I've decided to journal more of our homeschool work, for your reading pleasure, and so that one day in the future I can look back and figure out what we do all day!

There's been some pressure to put Oldest in school. Husband's family is not comfortable with our our decision to home educate. Now the therapist is weighing in too, claiming that if we don't put Oldest in a peer environment, she'll become a teenager with separeation anxiety.

Well, I don't buy it. It's true, a 6 year old needs to get out some, and we're working on that. But I just feel at a deep level that she would not benefit from attending the local public school. The open classrooms and large class size would feed right into her attention issues. Last summer, when we had her assessed by the school, it was made clear to us that although Oldest needs occupational therapy and psychological support, those services are only available to children with learning disabilities, which she does not have. So their approach would be to put her in a regular classroom and wait for her to fail before getting her the support she needs. This could take years and make her life miserable. So I follow my gut and say no way. Not unless we find a better school setting for her that we can actually afford and that will take a kid with her issues.

So in the meantime, I am her primary teacher. And we're loving first grade, Waldorf-homeschool style. Our morning starts with walking the dog or playing in the backyard. Then we have our morning circle which includes jumping rope (or Chinese jumprope), some poetry, mental and active math, bean bag games, clapping games, singing and finger plays. Then we settle down at the table to work on our Main Lesson Block.

In February we worked on a "Qualities of numbers" block, during which we made rhymes about the numbers and explored what makes each of the 10 digits special. We drew, cut and pasted, and began to work with simple multiplication tables in our circle. To introduce the Roman numerals, I told a story of three travelers who want to find the entrance to a magic cave but need to solve 10 riddles first, one for each number. Oldest loved to solve the riddles, so I must find more for some of our other work. Once the travelers have solved all the riddles, they journey to the cave, receive bags of counting jewels, and meet the gnomes from Numberland. We left them there for a month to take a break and work on Language Arts for several weeks.

In March we worked with introducing consonants. While Oldest reads at a third grade level, she enjoyed hearing the story of the Proud Prince who had to go on an adventure to learn about the heart sounds in order to become a kind ruler. Along the way, the prince and his guide meet many different characters and hear lots of captivating fairy tales. Whenever the prince reacted emotionally to a situation (through his "heart sounds" or vowels - aaah, ooooh, etc.), he received a star. After collecting all five stars and in the process learning all five long vowels, the prince returns home to become king.

As the Prince was discovering vowels, and consonants were brought out from his journey or the fairy tales, we spent our mornings drawing beautiful crayon pictures from the stories and writing simple verses or sentences to go with them. Oldest is highly motivated to learn how to write, so she enjoyed (and struggled with) writing. She also loved collecting the gold stars for her Main Lesson Book, just like the Prince.

Following a week off at the end of March, we are now working on another math block during which our three travelers become friends with Mini Minus, Paddy Plus, Max Multiply and King Dominic Divide. While telling stories about these four process characters, we figure out simple math with our counting jewels. It 's been interesting to see how Oldest works things out. I've decided to keep from introducing math symbols until we've spent a few days with each character. I am deliberately slowing this learning process down to make sure we build a strong foundation of the basics, then hopefully we won't have to come back to them again in future years!

So it goes in Waldorf Grade One home schooling. I love how creative this learning process is, with drawing and modeling and crafts and stories. I love how this approach has awakened the imagination of both of my children. I work very hard to present this material in a fun way, but I see the rewards when the lightbulb goes on.

I do frequently struggle with the amount of work I am putting into this. There are days when my latent unschooler is knocking at the door, raising an eyebrow, shrugging her shoulders and wondering what is the point of all this? But I am seeing my children thrive. Just yesterday Oldest produced a stunning watercolor painting which we will likely frame and put in her room. She is thriving on this approach, and frankly, with 2 at most two hours of schoolwork per day, there is plenty of time off to discover other interests. At the moment this is focused on reading Magic Treehouse books and learning about history. We just spent some time reading about the first European settlers, and learned about the Titanic disaster for a few days. And now we're about to sit down to make some Origami butterflies to brighten up the house. Time to extract noses from books and work with the fingers!