Freeflowing Days

How good it is to greet the day and flow with it.

Our days flow naturally, organically, and learning happens as it happens, naturally, and play happens as it happens, naturally, and all that comes between happens naturally and each day flows freely following whatever course happens upon us naturally and joyously.

Nature Boxes

Nature boxes created out of egg boxes. Wonderful fun finding all things colourful on nature walks.

A great idea I saw somewhere but don't know where, maybe Crafty Crow..Such fun and so easy for children to make.





Perfect for keeping nature treasures.

Dandelion learning

We've done lots of dandelion focussed activities recently.

Our Gnome Multiply was busily rushing about collecting and multiplying the number of dandelions we collected.



We used those dandelions to make dandelion biscuits (look here for a recipe) and dandelion tea. (Steep flower heads in boiling water and then drink and enjoy).



We collected up lots and lots and lots of dandelion flowers and dyed wool. It turned out a gentle yellow. The picture doesn't do it justice - it's more yellow than it looks here, a lovely colour.



I stumbled upon this great experiment here to make dandelion spirals with dandelion stems by splitting the stems and adding them to a bowl of water. We loved this and walked about the fields with a bucket of water making dandelion stem spirals as we went along. The boys do this frequently now, it's such fun to watch the stems spiral! Do try it if you have dandelions about.

Dry mud towers

Lots of fun can be had with wet, squishy mud, and when it dries out there is still lots of creativity and natural play to be enjoyed.



When the sun and wind dries out deep muddy puddles, there is natural puddle puzzle paradise!



The puzzles of mud can be pulled up, rearranged, used to build mighty towers or giants can fling them into deep seas of wet mud!

Sunday

Well, I didn't even manage to stay awake for Earth Hour on Saturday night! I fell asleep with the boys and my poor husband spent a peaceful, but lonely hour reading by candlelight alone. Our boys took it in turns to have a vomiting bug last week but this morning they are all better with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks again. Thank goodness our new babe didn't decide it would be a good week to decide to arrive. Giving birth and cleaning up sick wouldn't have gone too well!



Last week, Sol started reading and towards the end of the week, he picked up knitting and he is knitting little Noah a scarf. He is so happy with himself and it is lovely having him sit beside me as a knitting companion.



We have started on the Four Processes of Maths and had a great time sharing out strawberries which Gnome Divide had provided for a snack on our gnome division adventure.



The primroses are up and have little buds. The blackthorns are about to burst into bloom covering the hedgerows with their white blossom.



Wild violets are peeking here and there and the carpet of dog's mercury in the woods is emerging and adding green to the woods.



We loved this - a dog mercury plant has sprouted underneath an old snail shell lifting it up and up as it grows towards the sun.

A Beautiful Day!

Our Sol is reading! He picked up a book this morning - a Dr Suess book - and away he goes! I shall always remember this memorable day. The sparkle in his eyes! His joy!



Last week, we finished off a block on the lower case letters and the sounds of the letters. I knitted Sol a golden unicorn to present to him at the end of our adventure. He is called Sunbeam and he helped save the kingdom from a tribe of terrible trolls by using his warm energy of sun and love.

Outside

The farmer has started preparing the fields to sow organic wheat here. It always amazes us that within minutes of him starting to turn the soil, flocks of gulls arrive from nowhere and start looking for food. Incredible how they get to know...the boys call them crazy birds.


Warm enough to go barefoot and reconnect with the ground beneath.


A tribe of jabberwockys.


The insect world is awakening - our insect boy is delighted...


Wheelbarrows make mighty ships sailing the seven seas.


Wool on the trees for the birds to use in their nests.


And this mama sits in the gentle sun spinning, savouring every kick of this growing babe and loving seeing her children running free...

'S' for Swan

One of the letters we covered this week was 'S'. I chose Grimm's beautiful tale, 'The Six Swans'. Our Sol was moved by this fairytale. In our container story, Swans glided down onto a pond (letter 'P') our travellers were resting near and flew them along to the sea for the next part of their quest.

I was inspired by Donna Simmons' suggestion in her material to introduce the vowels as heart sounds, 'A' being wonder. Our travellers experienced wonder at their encounter with the swans and also on hearing 'The Six Swans' tale. We took a trip to the waterside to wonder over the swans that live there and we certainly each felt wonder at their majestic beauty and grace. Sol decided to collect six shed swan feathers along the water's edge.

Our gently flowing days

Our Autumn days are passing quickly yet gently and quietly, mostly spent recuperating from colds which have thankfully passed now but seemed to drag on way too long and slowed us down from our otherwise very active days.

My baby belly is growing beautifully round and our babe is happily kicking about - 18 happy weeks now - the weeks certainly do flash by quickly and I am savouring each day of being pregnant although I find my favourite time to wonder and contemplate about this little babe is mostly in the early hours of the morning or late at night when all is quiet and peaceful. It is such a joy to feel those gentle, early kicks. I have started knitting more baby knits.

Sol and I are immersed in a language arts block. Inspired by Eric Fairman's 'Path of Discovery - Volume One: Grade One" Language Arts container story, I've created our own umbrella story through which to journey through the alphabet and weave together the fairy tales often used for introducing the Waldorf alphabet. This way works well for us, as the story is one I know speaks to and appeals and inspires Sol - lots of nature and wild foods and danger and adventuring and natural magic and wonder and activity and animals. Apart from drawing/painting the letter picture, telling the connected fairy tale, and using our senses to experience the letter, I try to find opportunities for us to 'live' our language journey if possible.

For instance, we covered 'V' for valley and 'H' for hut. In our story, the characters journey through a village in a valley and helped the villagers rebuild damaged houses. Their huts were made in a traditional house building method using sticks woven together and then insulated with a mixture of cow dung and clay - wattling and daubing . I was delighted to find a wonderful nature activities day hosted by forest wardens at a local nature reserve taking place at the same time we covered these letters! Some of the activities we did were wattling and daubing, grinding grain using stones and clay pot making. So, just like our characters in our story who assisted with wattling and daubing in the village in the valley, we wattled and daubed.

Here hazels sticks have been woven together and then covered with a clay mixture. Lots of messy fun - daubing.

For letter 'T' for trees, we used the Grimm's tale, 'Three Little Men in the Forest'. Our story had our characters journey through an ancient forest where they met three wise tree dwellers living in ancient trees who offered wise guidance to our travellers. We spent time learning about ancient trees and then revisited all the large trees on this farm to decide which must be the oldest (we have made friends with most!). Whilst there are no ancient trees here, we admired several of the oaks with hollows and wrinkly, gnarled trunks, but the tree we felt must be the oldest here is one of our favourites - a very large, beautiful beech tree.

Here is a picture of the beech tree taken back in February this year. This is a tree we visit frequently. From what I could discover the oldest recorded ancient tree in our area is a 600 year old sweet chestnut tree. We shall have to pay that tree a visit. (The most incredible trees I personally have loved and touched and admired are the precious, magical baobab trees growing in southern Africa and the beautiful ancient oaks in Nottingham Forest here in England.)

We have also been enjoying daily all that autumn brings in our natural surroundings. Deer bounding over open fields, beautiful, vibrant pheasants in the fields and woods. Lots of beautiful leaves falling, huge flocks of starling gathering and flitting noisily from tree over field to tree. We are living and loving Autumn.

Yew tree berries.

We have admired the berries of the yew tree and the beautiful berries of the spindle tree. The wood was traditionally used for the making of spindles for spinning wool; this use is the origin of the English names of these shrubs. Both yew and spindle berries are highly toxic.

Spindle tree berries. Pink with orange seed centre. Such colour!

So goes our days!

Grade 1 - second week form drawing

Last week was a second week of focusing on form drawing.  We covered shapes - circles, squares, triangles, diamonds, four leaf clovers and stars.  I continued to use our shimmering web story-telling spider stories to cover the forms.  My final story was about a harvest moon celebration. All the woodland creatures from our wood attended and each creature brought along different shaped tasty foods to share at a feast under the harvest moon.  All the boys loved the story which I told while we sat on the edge of a field next to a spider's web snacking on oranges and carrots!

We used the straw left amongst the wheat stubble after the harvest and baling to form the shapes and then walked them.  Here is a star.

After that we made a tyrannosaurus rex shape and I think he might have gobbled Sol up!

This week we are focusing on Michaelmas and then a short trip away at the end of the week for a special 7th birthday celebration.

Grade 1: Weather tree and form drawing

Sol and I created a weather tree this week.  When we return from our daily morning walk, he selects a leaf to add to the tree to reflect the weather for the day.  We have yellow leaves for sunny days, grey for cloudy days, blue for rainy days, white for snowy days and red leaves for celebration days like birthdays and festivals.  I came across the idea in Donna Simmons' First Grade curriculum which is one of the resources I am using this year.

We have been spending time this week on form drawing starting with straight and curved lines. We have drawn them in the air, walked the forms, drawn them with a stick in the soil, drawn them with our feet, modelled them with modelling wax and looked out for curved and straight lines in nature which Sol particularly enjoyed.  He's really taken to form drawing and keeps drawing them here and there throughout the day.

What inspired us both the most was the beautiful autumnal spiders' webs we saw lit up by the sun in the woods - full of straight and curved forms!  

This gave me the idea to create a story as we walked along using spiders and forms.  I will continue drawing from this nature story for form drawing as we go along.

We have also made a start learning to play the pennywhistle together using Jodi Mesler's great music curriculum.  

For handwork, we are working on making Sol's sewing bag using felt, hessian, knitting bee cord for the strap and lots of colourful stitching.  He just adores sewing!  We are also working on a peg loom woolen rug I should have done a while ago but came to a halt with over the summer.  This will be our storytelling rug.  Lots of wool carding, weaving and wool handling using naturally dyed fleece and creamy white cotswold fleece.  Just perfect to get cosy on listening to stories near the woodburner during the wintry months.