Week of March 1

Our homeschool co-op is back in session! We haven't met in person since the first week of October, so Monday really did feel like the first day of school.

I know that social negotiation within a group of 10 -- when we've all been only with our families for a year -- may be complicated. In addition to giving them hours each morning of free play and social time, every student is choosing a spot in the yard to be his/her private "nook" for downtime and recharging. No one is allowed to be interrupted when they are in their nooks.

Monday, March 1

• Community Building: working together to make a floor inside our very muddy 12 x 20 foot screen room by opening up and laying down cardboard boxes and then covering them with a load of bark mulch, School Meeting and reviewing rules, read-aloud story during lunch time (Tal: His Marvelous Adventures with Noom-Zor-Noom by Paul Fenimore Cooper), setting up the vermicomposting bin / habitat for our new class pet (250 red wiggler worms which arrived at 1:45 pm)
• Early Childhood: new movement verses, read Eat Like a Bear by April Pulley Sayre, grinding wheat kernels to make flour, playing in a flour sensory bin (home-ground wheat flour, store-bought wheat flour, oat flour, coconut flour, rye flour) with toy trucks and animal figures
• Handwork: look at results of my first bundle-dyeing project (a linen table runner dyed using cosmos, woad, weld & madder), making 2- and 4-finger knitted snakes with two colors of yarn
• Lower Elementary: reviewing multiplication facts with flowers, hearing our first story for our Fearless Women in U.S. History block: Pocahontas
• Upper Elementary: assessing student prior knowledge of the 50 U.S. States with the Nienhuis United States Location Color Set exercise

Tuesday, March 2

• Community Building: build paths through the mud with donated cardboard boxes (thank you!) and a mulch layer, deciding at School Meeting to establish three student Peace Officers to help settle disputes between classmates impartially (I can also help if needed, of course, and I hold the title of Safety Officer, which is an adult role)
• Routines: set up Library Bin for the beginning of the day routine, have one-on-one reading meetings to get each child a chapter book, decorate bookmarks
• EC: practice movement verses with beanbags, read "Trees" poem by Joyce Kilmer, do bark drawing art activity from The Berenstain Bears' First Time Do-It! Book, set up mud kitchen for imaginative play
• Handwork: threading a needle, sewing button eyes to finished snakes
• LE: add Pocahontas to MLB, hear the story of Phillis Wheatley
• UE: continue U.S. map exercise

Wednesday, March 3

• EC: have each child begin sewing a wool felt beanbag using running stitch, talk about evergreen trees vs. deciduous trees (and teeth), read Ancient Ones: The World of the Old-Growth Douglas Fir by Barbara Bash, do a Nature walk and collect leaves from the evergreen trees and bushes in our yard, feel the waxy texture of the leaves, look at examples of foods which have a waxy outside to protect them (rutabaga, lemon, cheese)
• Philosophy: introduce Philosophy and Socrates, go over the rules of a Philosophy discussion, draw Friendship (no words permitted), discuss: what is friendship? is friendship important to you or not?

  read The Giving Tree and ask, is this a book about friendship?

  here are some student responses:

  I think it's about moving on.

  Sometimes you're friends with someone in PreK and then you're not and later you are again. Like it just drifts away. Like an ocean, the shore waves. It comes up, drifts away, then it comes back.

  Yes, it's about friendship. He didn't ask for those things.

  Even though he wasn't giving back, what he took he needed.

  Yes, it's about friendship. Every time, the boy still came back. Even as an old man. He went from a young boy to an old man and all in between coming back.

  Yes, it's about friendship. Because the tree was happy and the boy was happy.

  He was giving something back, it just wasn't tangible.

• LE: review multiplication facts, complete flowers and look for patterns in the skip counts, review Phillis Wheatley and read two of her poems ("An Hymn to the Evening" and "On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age), add Phillis Wheatley to MLB
• UE: play Elimination Game in a small group, assess student prior knowledge of State Capitals individually (pp.23-24), discuss what land is part of the U.S. that's not a state (territories and tribal lands)

  Inhabited Territories & Postal Codes:
  AS - American Samoa
  GU - Guam
  MP - Northern Mariana Islands
  PR - Puerto Rico
  VI - U.S. Virgin Islands
  DC - Washington, District of Columbia

  Uninhabited Territories:
  Baker Island
  Howland Island
  Jarvis Island
  Johnston Atoll
  Kingman Reef
  Midway Islands
  Navassa Island
  Palmyra Atoll
  Wake Island

  Disputed Territories:
  Bajo Nuevo Bank
  Serranilla Bank

Thursday, March 4

• Routines: make decisions about end of day routines and daily rhythm
  9 am - School Meeting

  9:45 am - Circle Time EC

  10:30 am - snack break and whole group lesson

  11:30 am - lunch time and read aloud story

  12 pm - Main Lesson LE

  1:15 pm - Main Lesson UE

  2:30 pm - clean up and gratititude journals

• Handwork: make knitting needles with acorn caps
• Philosophy: read Wise Guy: The Life and Philosophy of Socrates by M.D. Usher

• LE: work on individual math and language arts lessons, hear story of Deborah Sampson
• UE: update map with all 50 state capitals and postal abbreviations, take notes on inhabited territories and postal abbreviations, take notes on uninhabited territories, try to find territories on the globe, discuss Howland Island and Amelia Earhart

Friday, March 5

• EC: read The Carob Tree: A Jewish Folktale unfolding book from PJ Library, look at how tiny our baby trees are (hazelnut, hawthorn, pecan), take a nature walk around the yard and look for the special rosy-pink color of new growth -- new stems, new leaves -- on trees and bushes (the buckeye and burning bush were favorites), enjoy a wet-on-wet watercolor painting experience with Permanent Rose, start arugula seeds for microgreens, swing together in the hammock
• Eurythmy: colored light meditation, I A O movement sequence
• LE: recall Deborah Sampson and add her to MLB, read Bad River Boys: A Meeting of the Lakota Sioux with Lewis and Clark by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, discuss the need for Lewis & Clark to have a reliable interpreter on their expedition, introduce Sacagawea
• UE: work on individual math lessons, recall U.S. states & territories, discuss tribal lands, look at whose land we are on now with a fascinating interactive map (https://native-land.ca), look at map of current Native American Reservations in the Continental U.S., read Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story by Kevin Noble Maillard
• LE/UE: play The Lewis & Clark Adventure Game together

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