The Root Children Circle, Week 1

In the Waldorf tradition, kindergarten children learn long elaborate Circles, doing them for several weeks. We have been building up our capacity for focus of attention, as well as memorization of verses and movements, and will now be practicing and repeating the same Circle movement journeys & adventures over the course of a two week span. Here are a few notes from our first week working with a Circle developed by Laurie Clark and inspired by the 1906 book The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers.

We continued with our Songs, Verses & Movement for classroom routines.

Circle Time Introduction

#1 - "Good Morning, Dear Earth" verse

#2 - "Morning Verse"
from A Child's Seasonal Treasury, page 13

#3 - "We Stretch Right Up to the Star of Our Birth" verse
from The Breathing Circle, page 56

Monday

• read The Story of the Root Children by Sibylle von Olfers
• change Nature table display for Spring
• work in the vegetable garden

Updating the sunny Nature table with all of my houseplants and some Spring nature figures... reading the sweet story which will inspire our Circle for the next two weeks... working hard in the vegetable garden removing weeds and hauling them over to the compost pile with wagon and wheelbarrow, digging merrily, mending the fence, and organizing the tools in the tool shed!

Tuesday

• "The Root Children Circle," pages 79-82
  from Movement Journeys and Circle Adventures: Therapeutic Support for Early Childhood, Volume 2 by Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark
• add daffodils to Nature table

Playing with marble mazes in the morning... adding freshly cut daffodils to the Nature table... continued joyful work in the vegetable garden... our first time through The Root Children Circle with silver bell and golden wool ball.

Thursday

• "The Root Children Circle," pages 79-82
  from Movement Journeys and Circle Adventures: Therapeutic Support for Early Childhood, Volume 2 by Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark
• "Dish Gardens" from Earthways by Carol Petrash, page 127

Building tremendous structures with blocks, then silks, then all of the cushions from both sofas... making our first collaborative Fruit Salad in honor of the First Day of Spring... planting personal Dish Gardens in beautiful blue ceramic dishes donated by a family. Thank you!

In lieu of Stone Soup, our children have asked that they bring in a fruit each Thursday in Spring, so that we may either make fruit salad or smoothies. Today we simply tossed the juicy fresh fruit with strawberry Greek yogurt and it was delicious. Here was our list of group contributions this week:

pineapple
raspberries
apples
strawberry yogurt

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