Sunday, May 27, 2018

Picnic & Play: Wombat Stew

I have two back posts to write: my notes from the end of the school year, and my notes from Zac's birthday and our trip to the Waldorf School of St. Louis for their Little Red Hen Baking Party.

But right now I'm really excited about the deep clean of my garage. It's no longer a garage... I finally have an Art Room! Yes, folks, now I have a house with a Library and an Art Room! I am tickled pink. It is pretty funny to see the space gradually turn into a school. And I absolutely love it. As a matter of fact, the more it becomes like a school, the happier I am here.

June 1st is the start of my Mommy & Me summer activities, called Picnic & Play. I am very inspired by my trip to the school in St. Louis, and want to add songs and routines to make our activities even Waldorfier, but I also know that learning a bunch of new songs -- and teaching them to parents -- will be more successful if we do it slowly over time.

So I have to be content with being more traditional as we start out and gradually getting more Waldorfy.

That being said, this summer is going to be an awesome time of getting to know my early childhood kids and their families, spending time with Zac doing new things, and organizing my house so that it finally looks the way I want it to AND I can find everything!!!

The first story I'm feeling really inspired by is Wombat Stew. As soon as I read it to Zac, I thought, "This would be GREAT for a sensory table activity." So we are going to do a couple of days worth of Australia & Oceania things. There will be a variety of ages of kids coming to Picnic & Play, so I am just going to start by noting everything I have that would be at all relevant.


Wombat Stew


Nienhuis Montessori

Waseca Biomes

Books & Music

Miscellaneous

Wombat Stew contains lots of animals (dingo, wombat, platypus, emu, blue-tongued lizard, echidna, koala bear) and lots of ingredients to add to the stew (mud, feathers, 100 flies, slugs & bugs & creepy-crawlies, gumnuts).

Right now, my thoughts are

June 1 - Sensory Play

  • learn and sing "Kookaburra"
  • read Wombat Stew
  • look at and feel picture of koala bear in Wild Animals Touch and Feel
  • look at Zac's stuffed wombat
  • sensory play (mud, feathers, flower petals or tiny leaves or paper circles punched from a three hole punch for the flies, water beads for the slugs, spider Halloween confetti for the creepy-crawlies, small pebbles for the gumnuts)

June 2 - Dramatic Play

  • sing "Kookaburra"
  • learn and sing "Don't Ever Step on a Snake"
  • read Edward the Emu
  • pretend to be visitors to the zoo, dress up in play silks to be the different animals (emu, seal, lion, snake)

    • adults sew animal finger puppets for tomorrow

June 3 - Puppetry

  • sing "Kookaburra" and "Don't Ever Step on a Snake"
  • learn and sing "Waltzing Matilda"
  • read The Rooster Struts and act out the motions of the different animals
  • perform kangaroo poem with finger puppet from Around the World with Finger Puppet Animals by Suzanne Down
  • use the wool felt finger puppets which match the animals included in Richard Scarry's book to make up and tell your own stories*
    (rooster, chick, duck, goose, ant, bear, giraffe, fish, elephant, worm, monkey, kangaroo, eagle, frog, fly, sloth)

    • *animal names in italics have patterns in Suzanne Down's book; use swan pattern in grey to make the goose

June 4 - Cooking

  • sing "Kookaburra" and "Don't Ever Step on a Snake" and "Waltzing Matilda"
  • read Diary of a Wombat
  • look at carrots with tops
  • look at beautiful white and purple carrots
  • wash carrots
  • make recipe with carrots!
  • plant carrot seeds in our garden, send home carrot seeds for children and families to plant together

I have a wonderful new Waldorf kindergarten cookbook and I can't wait to try my very first recipe from it! It's called Pumpkin Soup and Cherry Bread: A Steiner-Waldorf Kindergarten Cookbook.

Arranged seasonally, this book includes three Spring recipes which feature carrots: Carrot soup (p.44), Carrot curry (p.46), and Carrots with satay sauce (p.48). This is a great cookbook which contains, as you would expect, inspiring pictures of a Danish Waldorf kindergarten classroom including foraging and cooking outdoors, helpful information about how to include fresh seasonal produce in all aspects of your curriculum, and details about how they run their school. However, this book is uniquely helpful because each recipe's ingredient list is given twice, to be the correct amounts for a family of 4 AS WELL AS for a classroom of 40 children.


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