Oops, and Q is for Queen

I keep forgetting to keep up to date on our letter book! Q is for Queen. Some draw it as a queen standing in front of a large oval mirror, looking at herself, with her train dragging on the floor behind (the tail of the Q). This is the way I saw it done in the Baltimore Waldorf School. Our book had the oval of the Q being the queen's arms (held in a circle) and the bit sticking off was the crystals she was holding in her hand.

Two Ways to Do Finger Knitting

Sunday was the finger knitting lesson with my Sunday School class. I read them The Goat in the Rug to introduce the steps in making yarn and then had every child decorate a brown paper bag with their name, choose a color of yarn, and get started with finger knitting! Last year I taught my Sunday School class the way I learned to do this from waldorfhomeschoolers, which was to make a slip knot, put your left pointer finger through it, then lay some of the yarn from the skein loosely on the finger (to the right of your first loop). We played sheep jumping over the fence. :-) Last year I read them Red Berry Wool to introduce this so it worked great. Take the left (slip knot) loop up and over the right loop and drop it off the end of your finger. Repeat! Easy as pie.

This time I tried to show the students a new way, which is the way shown in A First Book of Knitting for Children and also the way I was shown at the Boulder conference. You begin with a slip knot, open it up wide, and reach your right thumb and pointer finger through the loop to grab the yarn lying behind. Pretend this is a fish and you are catching it in a net. Pull a loop of yarn through your slip knot loop and tighten (by pulling on the short end). Don't tighten so much that your new loop disappears! Just control the size of your "net" this way. Reach through the new loop -- your new net -- to catch another fish.

When I taught Natalie using the fish and net motif it was very successful and she caught on immediately.

When I went into the classroom to teach a mixed group of 3rd and 5th graders, I began with the net and fish idea but quickly found out that this didn't work for all the children. Some asked me to show them "the way we did it last year" again. Roughly, the fish and net worked better for the girls and the sheep jumping over the fence worked better for the boys. I wonder if this is because catching fish in a net requires a bit more dexterity? They were all very upbeat and positive about it though, and I had students remarking 'that way didn't work for me but this one is much better' or 'I like the fish and the net, that works for me.' So they were taking control of their learning and making sure it worked for them!

Today I went into Natalie's room to find out that she had unwound her entire ball of yarn and it was all a mess. Just then I remembered that Regina had told us that one additional test of first grade readiness was to give your child a ball of yarn to wind up. If the child winds the yarn towards herself it means she is still living inside her body and is not yet ready for academic work. If the child winds the yarn away from herself it means she is living outside her body and is ready to begin academic work. Natalie did some of each :-) so I didn't find it particularly helpful but wanted to pass it on nonetheless.

Natalie taking in her knitting basket and her chain to show the class tomorrow (they are having a guest come in to demonstrate knitting). She is very excited to show her friends! Regina told us at the conference that her daughter knitted such a long chain that it reached from the roof of their two story house to the ground! This idea has taken Natalie's fancy and I think that is her goal. :-) Regina said that the long chain later became a rug of some kind, so there's a use for all that length! Barbara Dewey had us use jumping ropes in our active math work and she recommended that you use several lengths of finger knitting twisted around each other and fastened at the ends to make the jump ropes. Finger Knitting is usually work for 5 year olds, so you can use this as a nice transition to the first grade math work.

Lessons Missed

Natalie is home sick again today. She missed making pokeberry ink with her class, which they used to write with. DON'T EVER eat anything from this plant!!! But the color is gorgeous and can be used with children who understand that it is not to be ingested.

I'm not sure what their class did yesterday; most things we can easily do at home so I will check with the teacher and see if I can "substitute" and fill Natalie in on what she missed. Tomorrow is my big Tidewater teaching debut. I'm very excited. I have all my things gathered up (the kids keep stopping by the hand carders and doing a little work on their way down the hall -- they are so appealing) and ready to go at 8 am tomorrow morning.

Leah and Rebecca continue onwards and upwards with rolling logs to make fences around their gardens, spreading mulch, and grinding corn. The babysitter today brought Tikki Tikki Tembo which was an instant hit and all afternoon they climbed the mulch pile and played "falling down the well" and "Old Man With The Ladder." :-)

The two younger also had their dentist appointment today so everyone is excited about new toothbrushes and pretty two-minute egg timers. They just gave us the regular kind but Rosie Hippo's carries adorable toothbrush/timer holders for girls and boys -- nice stocking stuffer idea!

Wool Lesson

Here are my notes for my "wool" lesson with the kindergarten class. Estimated time: 1 hour.

begin by reading Pelle's New Suit by Elsa Beskow
show raw (washed) wool
show and demonstrate hand carders - from A Child's Dream Come True
pass around hand carders for children to try
show undyed roving in white and grey - from A Child's Dream Come True
show dyed roving - from Weir Dolls
show and demonstrate drop spindle

"Soap in a Sweater" Felting Project:
dyed wool in various colors
wool yarn for accent colors
small bars of soap, one for each child
bins of hot water, one for every three children
short lengths of pantyhose tied at one end, one for each child
cooling rack for soaps to dry on


By the way, if you're washing your own just-sheared wool, there is a way to do it other than to wear dishwashing gloves and just ignore the poop. Trisha Lambert of The Colors of Nature told me that you can do it in a washing machine. Just turn off the spin cycle, run using warm water and add a little liquid soap, and rinse and drain several times. We did the hands-in-poop way and just poured the water into the vegetable garden. But I wouldn't do it again. ;-)

Nuts Reprise

Continuing with the "continuing with Fall" thing that we have going on here... Natalie is staying home sick and we're trying to get her as rested as possible so she can go back to school (tomorrow they are making ink from pokeberries and writing with feathers). I have a hard time keeping her quiet, like all 5 year olds who no longer believe they need to rest in the afternoon, so I opened up our Montessori order and looked for something I could give her to persuade her to stay in bed. The solution was the Olivewood Nutcracker. This design is very easy for small hands and contains the mess. She has been begging to crack and eat the chestnuts we gathered on a nature walk through the cypress swamp, so today I gave her the nuts and the nutcracker and told her to go to town. She stayed in bed, quiet, which was the goal and I just checked on her now and she is sleeping. Hooray! They are doing so much cool stuff in school now that I don't want her to miss it. I am excited about doing the wool and candle dipping lessons and I will post my notes here in a bit when I get them organized.

O is for Opal, P is for Prince

We've gone a little further in our alphabet book. O is the magic pebble, an opal as it turns out. P is the pouting purple prince who eats purple popcorn. Once he helped someone and stopped being selfish, he was magically transported back to his family (he had previously been stranded on the beach in a huge empty purple palace).

We are continuing with mulching work -- which the children LOVE. Natalie "fed" our bag of Amish Friendship Bread starter today: 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk. I was on a big organizing streak and sorted through all my scrapbook supplies, rubber stamps, and cardmaking stuff. I also did a ton of loads of laundry. One of the online purchases I made through the waldorfcurriculum-supplies Yahoo group was a bag of felt scraps. This turned out to be long thin strips of different felt colors, which I immediately put to use in my "Pin the Tail on the Cow" party game for Leah. I had been thinking of making a large cow outline on a sheet and I wanted to use fabric and sew the pieces down, thereby making a decorated cow sheet which she could keep and use on her bed each night. A nice momento of the party. And, if you really wanted to get creative, you could sew down each of the tails that the cousins put on (in their wrong, funny locations) and put the name and age. Or you could just put one tail in the proper spot, fasten it down, and give it to her to use on her bed. Either way she is very excited about it and I have a ton of hand sewing in front of me. I called my friend Jenn to find out how many teats a cow has on her udder and she probably thought it was the strangest message she had ever gotten. :-) But I worked very hard on that cow and I want it to look right, you know?

Cinderella "Work"

Since Natalie is in a Montessori school, all her class activities are presented to her as different kinds of work. At her OT evaluation, they told me that she needs to improve her finger and wrist strength so that writing does not fatigue her and recommended that she be given the task of picking up pins with a pair of tweezers and dropping them down the neck of a small bottle. Also, she should be doing a lot of work with clay. So I filed these suggestions away and that evening we were reading Cinderella (as a follow up to the needle felted pumpkin) and lo and behold, Cinderella was given the task of picking lentils out of the ashes! And I thought aha, we have lentils! So I set out a tray for her filled with sand and lentils, along with a pair of tweezers and a small bowl, and she has been happily doing Cinderella work for days.

November for us so far has been a continuation of our fall themes in September and October. Pumpkins, with the needle felted pumpkin. Root Vegetables, with the story "The Turnip" which I did with the children and sent into school for them to do (Natalie helped set up the figures on the silk and tell the story) along with a whole turnip w/top and a pot of turnip stew. The children have been continuing to bury their bulbs deeper by adding layers of mulch to their garden beds (each child has a garden of her own). This week is full of doctor visits and other appointments so we won't be doing much, just getting ready for Leah's party on Saturday. Today we went out and bought six bottles of organic grass fed cow yogurt so that we can use the milk bottles in our party games. Right now I am thinking:

pin the tail on the cow
pig nose relay (put the pig nose on, run to the other post and back, take off the pig nose and hand to your teammate)
milk bottle magic (fill the bottle up with water, see how many pennies you can add -- one at a time -- before it overflows)
farm animal charades
moosical chairs

Then it will be time to hunker down and get serious about Christmas. I finished making my hand-stamped Christmas cards today and now have to find the names and addresses of everyone on my list, as well as organize all the piles of gifts I've bought and see what there is left to do. The plan was to get all the shopping done by November 1st and then have 2 months left to complete the handmade stuff at a leisurely rate. Ha! :-)

I've been invited into the classroom to do some lessons as part of their Pilgrim theme. Thursday I will be teaching the children about wool and doing a wet felting project -- probably felting a bar of soap -- and Monday I will be leading them in dipping candles.

In Sunday School, we began with finger knitting today (I also taught Natalie) and next week will be making our needles. To support Heifer Int. we will be knitting small chicks (from Knitted Animals) to sell for $20 each, the cost of a flock of chicks. Today during the finger knitting we did the story of Solomon Building the Temple, and his death and The Kingdom is Divided. Next it is on to some of the prophets.

I had a S.S. guest today who was so excited about the class that she begged to come back next week because, she said, "I want to see what you're going to do." That made me very happy. My supervisor filled in for me last week while we were in CO and wrote to me, "Fun story, happy children!" Their drawings of the two identical bouquets of flowers were beautiful. I did one myself, for my S.S. lesson portfolio, and it came out quite lovely. Watercolor pencils are really nice for this.