The First Few Days of School

Yoga outside on the lawn! Kids have yoga several times a week including Monday, Wednesday (on the Farm), and Friday.

Theatre games for getting-to-know-you.

Setting up school supplies and learning routines.
Subject color coding key for plan books:

yellow - Language
orange - Cultural (History and Geography)
red - Art
purple - Practical Life
blue - Blue
green - Science and Nature
brown - P.E. and Health
gold - Form Drawing and Penmanship
silver - Foreign Language

Getting brand new boxes of colored pencils, plan books, creative writing journals, and daily gratitude journals.

Learning how to plan a balanced day and make good choices for little bits of time. Choosing chapter books and picture books to read, getting lessons on educational games, figuring out what color each would be in your plan book. For example, the wooden marble run building set is green for Science and Nature (Physics).

Story Starters in a Jar - yellow

Colorku - blue

Circle Time: working on memorizing our poem of the week ("The Sun" by Grace Nichols), practicing multiplication tables, creative writing time

Form Drawing: straight line and curve, find these forms in nature and trace them with your finger, draw straight line and curve with your toe on the ground, finally and only once your body has completely internalized the form you may draw it with stick beeswax crayons on a large piece of paper taped up to the wall, roll beeswax candles (straight sheet of wax becomes a curve), begin finger knitting (straight piece of yarn becomes a curve)

Handwork - Finger Knitting: warp hula hoop loom to finger knit a rug, read Red Berry Wool, feel three bags of raw wool fleece straight off the sheep, talk about the process of making clothing from sheep to finished product

It was only after beginning to add finger knitting to our hula hoop loom that I realized that weaving this rug also makes a sun!

Quality of Numbers:
one - there is only one sun, one earth, one me
"The Prince Who Could Not Read" by Dorothy Harrer
recall the sun from Red Berry Wool, listen to "The Secret and Magic Name of the King" by Dorothy Harrer, make "one" with our bodies by standing straight and tall, this is the number one and it is also my name, I!
add Roman Numeral I and illustration of sun to main lesson book

I wanted to make sun tea but we ran out of time, so this might be a nice thing to do at home!

two - Snow-White and Rose-Red
(a Waldorf painting teacher once told me she uses this story to introduce how to take care of paintbrushes because the dwarf is so finicky with his beard! The brush bristles are like his beard and you never leave them sitting in water or full of paint at the end of your day...)

The Story of Geometry: String, Straight-Edge and Shadow
Prologue, Chapter 1, 2, 3
the development of Geometry beginning in the Stone Age
nature walk around the yard, collecting geometrical forms in natural materials, illustrate and summarize chapters and add to main lesson book