Circle Template

To help you plan your figures for Mathe-Magics (we did the 12 point star made of 3 triangles today; it is nice with four different colors of ribbon, 3 ribbons of each color), here's a circle template. I find this helpful when organizing my ideas on paper and making notes of what we did for the unit binder.

The children are supposed to make the figure with their bodies, then draw it on the chalkboard for practice, then finally draw it freehand in their main lesson books.

Beautiful blackboards and chalks from Paper Scissors Stone

Making Your Own Chalkboard Tutorial

Actually, I was at a Waldorf workshop on chalkboard drawing and he said to cover the entire chalkboard thickly with white chalk and erase it SEVERAL TIMES -- this fills the pores with chalk. It's an important step.

What to Do With Green Tomatoes

My CSA strikes again, delivering a food I'm not quite sure what to do with.

Here are some recipes:

Green Tomato Rice

Green Tomato Cake

Green Tomato Soup with Country Ham

Green Tomato and Apple Chutney

Classic Fried Green Tomatoes

Teaching the Dewey Decimal System

Over the summer my daughters and I re-shelved our picture books in alphabetical order by author's last name. A few weeks ago we did the same to our chapter books. Today I decided that it was time to tackle the nonfiction books at the school. The neighboring teacher and I agree that we should organize them by Dewey Decimal Number and an effort was spent last year to label each book on the spine with its appropriate number. Now the job remains to identify the books which were not labeled and to reshelve the whole lot.

Using the Dewey Decimal page on my website to print and create a massive binder detailing the specifics of each Dewey Decimal number, I then had to decide how I was going to introduce this project to the kids. I decided that we would meet as a group at the end of recess each day and before lunch. Each day we would work in teams to search every bookcase for books that began with a certain number. Then we would bring the books we found together and look at the titles, and try to guess what the category was. I would use the binder to confirm. Then while the children ate lunch, I would reshelve the books in number order. I figured that if we worked on this project a little bit at a time, it would be much more doable. I also found a fantastic Dewey Decimal Classification resource. It's a website where you type a book's ISBN in the search box and it brings up the book and tells you its Dewey Decimal number. Hooray!!!!!

Today we did
000
Generalities (almanacs and encyclopedias)

100
Philosophy and Psychology

200
Religion


There were no books on the shelves at all in the 100's or the 200's. This is interesting for me as well, as the teacher, to help me realize what might be lacking in our library. The idea for this project came to me last week when I was standing by the shelving and realized that we had oodles of 500's and 900's but hardly anything else. So this will be a way to get a real handle on what we have and what we don't. It will also help me to become more familiar with Dewey.

When I introduced the project, I asked the children why organizing research books by author's last name might be a bad idea. They came up with two: if fiction and nonfiction were both shelved by author's last name, you wouldn't know the difference between made up books and real information (good point!) and that it would be hard to find all the books about a certain topic if they were scattered all over the place instead of shelved together. I told them that each topic was given a number and then the books were simply organized numerically to help people quickly find what they wanted. I showed them several books and identified the page with the information for the librarians (they are already familiar with the title page but this was new to them). I told them that the Dewey Decimal number is printed in the front of almost all nonfiction books (what a GREAT idea!) so that librarians don't have to spend all their time trying to figure out how to organize the books. I told them that libraries all over the country use this system. For example, my daughter is doing a report on Birds. If she knows what category number is assigned to Birds (598) she can go into any library in the country and walk straight to their Bird section. Amazing! Next I pulled two books from 292 and showed the children the number on the spine. I read the two titles and I asked them what the category 292 might be for (292 - Mythology). Then we hunted for our first number -- the 000's.

And, I have to say, it was FUN. :-)

Mathe-Magics

We are beginning a new main lesson (Math - 2nd grade) called Mathe-Magics by Eric Fairman. Or you could simply call it Number Shapes and Patterns. I am using his Path of Discovery series Math book A Steiner-Waldorf Mathematics Resource and Henning Anderson's Active Arithmetic (works best with a group of 12 children to make the figures).



I am putting together the following:
12 colored ribbons (3 meters long each)
12 golden stars made of thick paper
enough nuts for each student to have 12 (pecans, walnuts, or chestnuts work well)

The children already have boxes of colored pencils. I am excited about this unit! To be honest, I've always been a little bit afraid of teaching this block so I will post my notes as I go, so as to hopefully make it less daunting for someone else.

Star Template pdf

Bulk Pecans in Shell

Obviously, not everyone is lucky enough to gather horse chestnuts or acorns for free! But this would be the time of year to go get that manipulative off the ground if possible.

Halloween Read Aloud, Christmas Wish Lists

In class we are doing Candlemaking as Handwork for October, but I haven't decided if we are going to carve anything and make lanterns or if I'm just going to send the candles home and let the families decide. I know that we aren't going to do a Halloween read aloud story because it's Audubon this month. But I am doing a Halloween read aloud with my kids at home because I happen to have a favorite chapter book from my childhood -- I saved my copy -- and I've decided to read it to them. It is called THE WITCH WHO SAVED HALLOWEEN

I had a family meeting with the children today about Christmas Wish Lists. As we've unpacked the basement after the most recent move, it has become increasingly clear to me that these children have plenty of toys, books, and clothes. They don't need more STUFF. What they need are new EXPERIENCES. So we had a meeting about making wish lists of things we want to do. I just got the two older girls new bikes, for example, and a soccer ball. Last weekend my boyfriend (who I have been dating for a few years but have known for half my life) and I took the girls camping... and they had a blast. Last night he surprised me with tickets for all five of us to go to Ovo by Cirque du Soleil since it's appearing in the DC area. He waited for years to decide if we were serious enough for them to meet him. I guess things are getting pretty serious now! :-)

Anyway, here are the lists I got back from the girls. I told them not to worry about money, just to put the things they want to do and I'll figure out if I can make them happen.

Natalie's list includes snowboarding, ice skating, having hot chocolate, going to the movie theater, and dance lessons ("tape and balay")

Leah's list includes a trip to Russia and China, winter camping, rock climbing, tap and "balae" lessons, and skiing

Rebecca's list includes going to the fair, visiting a corn maze, going out to lunch, and "ballat" lessons

It looks like Ballet Shoesis going to be our next read aloud!

Make Knitting Needles First

Yes, I've been teaching kids to knit for years now... and this last evening I had a major breakthrough. Make the knitting needles FIRST! Before you start laughing, let me explain. We always go through the story of wool -- where it comes from, how it is processed, what it looks like in all the different stages -- and try spinning it some to make our own yarn. Then we do finger knitting with one finger and finger knitting with the whole hand (four fingers) and then we make our needles and then I teach them how to knit with needles. But when you have kids finger knitting like crazy, all the pencils in the classroom mysteriously disappear as children will use them to hold their loop in place when they set the finger knitting down. By making the needles first, they can use their needles to hold the finger knitting loops instead of all the classroom pencils!

TA DA!

Amazing. It's amazing to think about all the things I will have learned about teaching when I've been doing this for twenty years.

Big Run State Park

The girls and I went to Big Run State Park this past weekend. We had a long weekend so we decided to head to beautiful slightly mountainous Western MD. It is the most mountains the girls have seen so far anyway. We had a wonderful time... even saw a bobcat. I've never seen one in the wild! The girls played so well and so imaginatively in the woods and in the stream... I never heard the words "I'm bored" once. Rebecca even spent a goodly amount of time rolling around on a muddy hillside, completely content. Natalie made some kind of fairy stew she called Fish Mash, using rocks to cut up weeds from the stream. She did that for at least an hour. The children had so much fun playing in the mountain stream that Rebecca started to cry on the way home, saying "I miss the campsite." They begged for a longer trip. Of course we will do it. We'll also have to read Thomas Locker's Where the River Beginsnow.




Actually, another river book comes to mind also. We drove past a huge paper mill on our way to the park (in the town of Luke MD) which reminded me of A River Ran Wild: An Environmental Historyby Lynne Cherry. This is an EXCELLENT book and a true story to boot. Click here for some suggested curriculum activities to accompany it.




We've done well with our slow course into Camping with a capital C. This time we were a little farther from the bathroom (and they had composting toilets instead of flush and no showers) and it was quite a walk to the potable water for refilling our water bottles. We took two campsites (71 and 72). 71 was a double so we could set up both tents but it didn't have a picnic table so we paid for 72 also and the girls ran back and forth and we had a sleeping part and an eating part. They have black bears there but we didn't have any trouble.

When I got home my face felt all full of grit so I went online to look up cheap homemade facial scrubs and found a great one. Equal parts sugar and extra virgin olive oil. You can easily make this an organic homemade facial scrub by using organic sugar (I used turbinado since it was what I had on hand) and organic EVOO. Simple, easy. 1 tsp of each ought to do it for one shower. Then wash with your cleanser and moisturize in the regular way. Worked great.