Week of May 3

Some quick notes & links about our Outdoor Classroom activities this week!

Our current main lesson block topics are:
Jataka Tales
Ancient Mythology: Egypt

Mon, May 3
no school due to sickness

Tue, May 4
half day due to sickness

• Nature: observe mouse caught in trap (at noon when school let out Zac and I went to Chautauqua Bottoms to release the mouse)
• Gardening Projects: check on seeds, weed garden, begin to plant stinging nettles
• Early Childhood: play memory games (Who Pooped? and Pengoloo)
• LE / UE: get caught up on MLBs, glue dot in finished art projects, individual math work, measure height/width/mass of apple mummy, change salt on fish mummy (6 lbs of salt total)
• Poetry: recall Emily Dickinson from Poem in Your Pocket Day, read Emily by Michael Bedard

Wed, May 5

• Unscheduled Wednesday:

  check on apple mummies

  move apples from quart ziploc bags to large yogurt containers so the baking soda & salt mixture would cover them more completely

  glue dot artwork into MLBs

  continue with weeding and planting projects

  check on seeds germinating (we have a lot!)

  note growth in celery and beet experiments

  sort through seed packets and choose new seeds to plant (thank you to the families who have donated seeds and plants for our garden!)

  read A Fruit is a Suitcase for Seeds by Jean Richards and check our lunches for "suitcases"

  organize plants in pollinator & dye garden

  swing in the hammock

  play soccer

  dig in the dirt

  play memory games Pengoloo and Who Pooped? (this matching / memory game has been a huge hit because it has T. Rex poop in it)

  discover that you don't have to be able to read to tell if an animal and its scat are a match, because you can just compare the letters on both tiles and see if they are the same... as silly as it is, this game is pretty handy because the words are all written in capital letters, which is what children learn to read first in Waldorf, and so I'm pretty sure that after his name the second word Zac is going to learn to read is poop

  hang out on the mulch pile and chat about Harry Potter

  read next two chapters in Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt: Egyptian Mythology for Kids by Morgan Moroney

  "Hathor - Goddess of Love, Music, and Celebration"

  "Sekhmet - Goddess of Power, War, and Plague"

  do word sum for < mummification >, look at the "y toggles to an i" spelling convention, review the three English suffixing conventions (and explain the difference between a "convention" and a "rule") and look for examples of each, introduce the idea of "two step word sums" such as the word sums for < flying > and < replaceable >

  look at Ancient Egyptian numerals and hieroglyphs

  note that some of the letters we have in English are unvoiced or do jobs (such as the replaceable e) that didn't even exist in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, explain that their alphabet was strictly phonetic, consider how some English words would be represented hieroglypically (not letter-for-letter but sound-for-sound)

  for hieroglyphs, I love my hieroglyph stamp set but we can't share it right now during COVID, so I used the very nice Write Your Name in Egyptian Hieroglyphs activity from Royal Ontario Museum

  Hieroglyph Key (PDF)

  for numerals, I used pages 13 and 14 from Math Investigations Book 3 by Susan Gardner and Silvia Acosta (now sadly out of print)

Thu, May 6

• Early Childhood: dig in mulch mountain and make bird nests, transport mulch to fill in low wet places in paths, ride dump truck along the sidewalk, play board games
• Gardening Projects: mix soapy water to spray on pepper plants to repel aphids, continue with planting projects (finish stinging nettle, begin tomatoes) and starting seeds (three kinds of kale)

  having the Plant Adoption forms helps the children to keep track of which plants they've adopted and what still needs to be done for each (seed starting, planting, watering, checking for pests)

• LE: get caught up on MLBs, hear final story in I Once Was a Monkey: Stories Buddha Told: "Three Friends in a Forest"
• UE: add Hathor / Sekhmet to MLB, read "Bastet - Goddess of Cats, Joy, and Motherhood" and "Ptah - God of Craftsmen"

  discuss the Apis Bull and consider what it would be like to truly believe that every action someone did must be carefully written down because it foretells the future, joke about how a child falling out of his chair could be an omen of bad things to come... and then quickly bring everything in from outside because of a weather alert about hail

  is there a connection between a child falling and ice falling?

  if you did believe in omens and oracles, that hailstorm could easily be seen as evidence that they are true! if you believe something will happen, it makes you more prone to looking for evidence of it, which then will reinforce your belief even more

• Board Games on a Rainy Afternoon: Fiery Dragons, Pengoloo, Dr. Eureka, Dog Bingo, Passing Through the Netherworld, Harry Potter Clue

  after our SWI conversation about the < y > toggling to an < i >, I was pleased when a child came by and said to me casually about the intermittent rain, "the rain is toggling off and on like the y to an i"

Fri, May 7

• Classroom Routines: adopt a new rhythm in the morning work time of MLB / Math / Plant Adoption

  having a set regular daily time for Math is really helpful and, as a result, a lot more Math got done today!

  it has been an interesting process slowly transitioning them from the openness of March into a more academic and fixed schedule, while still allowing lots of time in the day for free play and social time

• LE: add "Three Friends in a Forest" to MLB, discuss the individual Jataka Tale presentations next week
• UE: add Bastet to MLB, hear "Thoth - God of Knowledge, Writing, and Scribes"
• Gardening Projects: lots of weeding and planting today (tomatoes, bronze fennel, eggplant, zucchini) as well as seed starting (turnip)
• Play: after finishing their main lesson book assignments, their individual math lessons, and their planting and/or seed starting projects, the older children get to play for the rest of the afternoon

  of course, the younger children get to play for the entire day!

  Lion in My Way

  Hide & Seek

  talking in backwards language

  Sudoku puzzles

  Harry Potter play

  fort building

  Pylos

  Quixo

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!