F is for Fall

My students are LOVING the Waldorf idea of finding things that start with a certain letter of the alphabet and are also in the shape of that letter. When we made bread on Friday one student held up his piece of bread and said, look, B is for Bread! And, sure enough, because we braided the loaves there was a little bump and large bump on the top of his bread (viewed sideways) and it made a B. We've been doing The Wise Enchanter as our read-aloud and also making a Magic Book of our own. This morning at circle, Natalie says to me, Mama, I saw an F over the weekend! F is for Flower! She saw a hosta in bloom and the stalk made the thick upright part of the F and the two sprays of flowers coming off to the side made the shape of the letter. Then I had another child call out, F is for Fall and I really loved that idea. Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn and so we will do the poem "Autumn" by Charlotte Zolotow and then a Nature walk to find fallen leaves. We'll glue them to paper and make a leaf collage in the shape of the letter F. What fun!

There have been good parallels between what letter we are on in the read-aloud story and what letter we are on in our own Capital Letters lessons. Today was F in the story and the picture was Fish, which is what I'm using tomorrow. Our story will be "The Fisherman and His Wife" on page 103 of the Pantheon edition of Grimm's. Also the Wave running form in FD (which is why I bumped back Form Drawing to Tuesday instead of Monday's heart lesson, it goes so well with the story -- besides, for Heart we had the World Day of Peace so that pretty much did the trick, singing and stories and yoga and so on). I read My Mama Had A Dancing Heart
as a story about living peace every day and it's a good story too about the changing of the seasons. Love it when everything ties in together!!! It's one of the great joys of teaching. We did papermaking last week as a follow up to the idea that nothing in the universe ever goes away, it just takes a different form. It tied in with our recycling lessons beautifully as well as our Form Drawing (which was galaxy spirals).