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.