Moving in circles

Some of my favorite circles!

Today was the last day of homeschooling in the old house.

Tomorrow is moving day.  If you've been following our adventures in England, you know that this is a big deal.  The house we're in now seemed so pretty from the viewing, but after we moved in we quickly got a crash course in the dreaded rising damp.

This damp house has been the source of so much stress for me.  It's an old house, and moisture is not only rising from the ground, it's creeping in through the walls because of poorly constructed gutters, and creeping in through the roof because of, well, too much rain and poor construction.  Flat roofs belong in the desert, not in England!

For the better part of the last month I have been cleaning mold off all the wooden toys in the house, off all the wooden furniture, off picture frames and nature tables.  I have been cleaning it off windows and walls, ceilings and floors.  It's more than disgusting.  It's heartbreaking and it's wrong!

So moving day is finally here!  I'm so thrilled to be leaving this house behind, but I am still wary.  I have no idea if the new house will be any better.  Surely, it can't be any worse.  Other English people have assured me that most houses here do not have such problems, and I hope they are right!  When you move to a new country, you just never know what "normal" is supposed to look like.

So tomorrow we will embark on a new adventure.  Perhaps a less than perfect one, but hopefully much better than this.  There really is no perfect when it comes to homes*... or well, anything, is there?  Life isn't perfect.  Homeschooling is certainly not perfect.  Not even circles are perfect.

How fitting that part of today's homeschooling involved talking about our perceived perfections in the natural world and the reality of their imperfections.  To ice the cake of imperfection, we spent some time calculating the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a.k.a. pi.

Sunburst and I have been playing with irrational numbers quite a bit lately, and she is completely undaunted.  In the last couple of years her love of all things mathematical has really bloomed, and I am absolutely thrilled.  Having a 13yo girl who excels in and is excited about mathematical processes is something I consider one of the greater successes of our homeschooling.

As a bit of fun, Sunburst got to enjoy Vi Hart's hysterically funny and smart math video on irrational numbers and the Pythagorean Theorem.

I've been admiring Vi Hart's math videos for quite some time, and I plan to show each one of them to the kids as they come up in our lessons.  Not only are they wonderfully clever, but they're done by a female who so obviously embodies the passion for mathematics that I want to instill in all my children.  The underlying message is clear: Girls can (and DO) excel at math.  It's an imperative message to give our daughters, but I think sharing this message with our sons is equally important.

  *Gaudi's Casa Batllo in Barcelona seems pretty perfect to me.  When I think circles, I can't help but envision the front rooms of Casa Batllo, one of my most favorite buildings on earth.  Can't we just live there? (smile)

Book review: Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools

Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools: Classes 1-8 by Thomas Wildgruber

This is a book I've been wanting to write a review on for a couple of years.  I first stumbled upon it at the Goetheanum bookstore in Switzerland with my good friend Cari.  One look inside the book and we were both immediately smitten.  It didn't matter that the text was in German or that its purchase price was enough to choke a horse-- we both HAD to have it.

Early this summer it was released in English, and I hemmed and hawed about whether or not I needed a copy of it that I didn't have to translate.  The pre-order price at The Book Depository made it worthwhile though-- a mere pittance compared to what my German copy cost me.  So I winced only slightly before clicking the order button, and I'm so happy that I did, because while most of it is exactly the same, some things and images are different.  Plus, it saves me the time and effort of translating.

Let me repeat myself.  This book is so good that I bought it TWICE.

It's a wonderful guide to every type of painting and drawing experienced within Waldorf education.  Almost every section contains step-by-step guides and thoughtful commentary.  The pictures alone are so inspiring.  This is the book I had wished for when I started homeschooling Sunburst so many years ago and had only the vaguest idea what main lesson artwork should look like.

This is the book we've been waiting for.

Included in this masterpiece are the beginning painting lessons-- the ones that leave most of us homeschoolers with our heads spinning.  It goes on to give a wealth of painting examples for the main lessons in grades 2-5.  As a busy homeschooler teaching three grades, there are not enough hours in the day to do this many paintings.  But I love that they exist.  I love being able to flip though the book and pick and choose a few ideas to bring here and there.  Some ideas I change because that's the nature of art, and others I bring as is because they are just that good.

One major thing this book has done for us is to re-enliven our form drawing.  Form drawing is actually presented very differently in Europe than in the United States.  Okay, I don't know if I can honestly say "all of Europe," but I can definitively say that the main lesson books I saw when I toured the Steiner schools in Switzerland were filled with very colorful form drawings, not much different from the ones in Wildgruber's book.

Here's an example from our own form drawing lessons so you can see what I mean.

It's the same drawing, and yet it looks so much more impressive, inviting, and exciting.  Shaded with rich contrasting colors it becomes this palpable thing.  For those of us who were introduced to form drawing as practiced in the states, this is like a free pass.  There is no need to wait for freehand geometry in fifth grade to make form drawing look this beautiful.  And it helps my children to fill in the enclosed spaces so they can really grasp the feeling-- did they create balance?

Other sections of this book that I particularly love for the lower grades are the botany paintings and the drawing section with inspired artwork to display in the classroom.  If only I could draw this well!  The author goes so far as to recommend that children will learn more from our guided drawing examples on paper than from our use of blackboards.  I have noticed this to be true with my own children, and it is so nice to hear someone say this.

For the middle grades, I love that there are several wonderful explorations of light and shadow using different mediums.  And as if the book wasn't already useful enough, the entire section on perspective drawing is priceless.

But you shouldn't take my word for it.  To see all that's on offer here, you should have a look at the Table of Contents which is available as a pdf download HERE.  And then take a look at some of the images included in the book gallery HERE.  (Note, some of these images have been replaced by even better ones in the English translation.)

I absolutely adore this book.  I could go on and on.  There is one series of exercises that Sunburst and I attempted over the summer that really lifted our work in so many ways.  I look forward to sharing some of our drawings with you in the next few days, so I hope you'll come back for that.

Now if only we had a book like this for the high school grades...  Yes, I can dream!

Sunday woodworking

This past spring we seemed to have gotten into a groove of doing woodworking on Sundays.  I don't know why-- well, actually, I do.  All bursts of inspiration seem to come on Sundays at our house.  And woodworking is one of those things, for me anyway, that requires every bit of gumption I've got.

I'm not actually very good with a knife.  I have this inborn fear that I'm going to chop my fingers off.  I don't know where this fear came from, but it's probably not unwarranted.  I'm a bit of a klutz when it comes to pocket knives.  If I don't cut myself using them, I cut myself cleaning them.

The kids are undaunted though.  Both Sunburst and Moonshine have been well-schooled in the use of knives, thanks to Einstein.  That doesn't mean they don't have accidents-- they do.  But while the girls have been happily whittling sticks for years, we haven't done a ton of actual woodworking projects with them.  You know what I mean, the kind where you start with a block of wood and have a clear goal in mind.  It's something I've been meaning to rectify this year.

The first thing we did a few months back was to make simple cardholders.

The kids each selected a good width branch from the woodpile in the garden, at least 1.5 inches in diameter.  They used a small plane to remove the bark; planing is such satisfying work, they could happily do it for hours.  Once they were happy with the planing job, they took a larger plane and made a flat surface on one side.

They used a miter box to saw the end off at a right angle.  We let them decide how long to make it, which for them was anywhere from 4-6 inches.  Then we clamped the wood down very carefully, and they sawed the slit through the top.  This required some checking with a card to make sure the cut was even.

Here's the slit sawing work in action.  As you can see, we have only the most advanced facilities and equipment for this kind of work.  All joking aside, if you're like us, you just jump in and try things out without getting bogged down by the details, like decent clamps and flat surfaces.  Here you can see that we've got it clamped onto a slate bench in our garden.  It worked!

After the sawing was complete, the kids sanded and oiled their holders.  Even Kitty Bill, age 6, was able to complete this task without too much assistance.  I think they turned out so lovely!  I just love to see the grain of the wood coming through.

Another project we tackled was wooden strawberries.  We used the brilliant tutorial from the fabulous Katie Startzman of Duo Fiberworks; I just adore her work.

Because we didn't have the suggested wood, we opted to use green wooden branches from the garden.  This was great fun for us girls!  It definitely required a lot more focus and skill than the cardholders.  Both Moonshine and I managed to cut ourselves, but we didn't give up easily.  In the end, we managed to make eight strawberries between us girls.  Then Einstein gave it a try and ended up making ten of them, in less than half the time it took us.  His cuts looked nicer, too --of course they did.

Nonetheless, the girls and I were pretty proud of ourselves.

We left them to dry and promptly forgot about them for over a month.  Thanks to Kitty Bill, we finally got half of them painted with watercolors.  We improvised some green felt tops, and rather than drilling, we used knotted yarn for the stems.

Because we used wood from the garden, ours turned out smaller than the ones in the tutorial.  Chokingly small, for anyone age 3 and under.  Realistically, they are the size of Swiss strawberries, which is a tad smaller than the standard US or British variety.  Nonetheless, they are incredibly cute.

The kids couldn't wait to add them to their play kitchen/store/cafe.  I love that all three children still adore this kind of imaginative play.  And to make your own toys from branches in the garden-- is there anything more magical than that?

First day back

Today was our first day back to lessons, and the shining faces of my children said it all.  They were so ecstatic to begin another learning adventure.

We started the day with a little ceremony outside in the sun.  I led the children into the back garden with a little follow-the-leader movement song.  It was mostly for Kitty Bill's benefit, but all of them were happy to participate and take up the wonder of the moment.

Tip-toe, tip, tip-toe
Tip-toe, tip, tip-toe
Gallop, gallop, gallop, tip-toe
Gallop, gallop, gallop, tip-toe
Hop, hop, hop, tip-toe,
Hop, hop, hop, tip-toe
Skip, skip, skip, tip-toe
Skip, skip, skip, tip-toe...
Stop!

It's actually a long path to the back garden, but when we finally arrived I welcomed the children with a little song that I made up on the fly-- I can't always manage to plan these things ahead of time.  I welcomed Sunburst into Grade 8 by waving the rainbow over her head, tying a silk around her shoulders, hugging her tightly, and giving her a little something to keep in her pocket.

She helped me wave the rainbow so I could call Moonshine forward to run under the rainbow into her Grade 5 year.  She has been counting down the days until lessons started again, and she was absolutely beaming!  She also had a silk cape, a warm hug, and a little something put in her hand to wonder over.

Then it was Kitty Bill's turn.  He was so happy!  I sang him a little song about growing up and being ready for first grade (again, something I made up on the spot), and then welcomed him under the rainbow with a silk, an extra large hug, and a little something.

The idea for the little somethings  came to me late last night.  I had been racking my brain trying to come up with something special to commemorate this year-- a really special time with all three children engaged in formal learning together.  In my planning over the week I realized that each of them were facing a different adventure this year.  I decided to represent that in symbols.

I went outside and found a suitable branch in our wood pile, sawed off three rounds, and gave them a minimal sanding.  Then I sketched out the symbols and took a woodburner to them.  Kitty Bill received a heart; it's a perfect representation of Grade 1 qualities.  Moonshine received a leaf which represents the new beginning in Grade 5.  We'll dip our toes into the creation stories and myths of several ancient civilizations this year, and we'll learn about the growth of plants in botany.  Sunburst received a compass as we begin our voyage into the discovery of new lands and new ideas, battles and rebellions, but it's also so she doesn't lose her way into the teenage years.  I purposely left the directions off the compass so that she could find her own north, her own way.

She seemed to get it.

The special somethings were a big hit.  Throughout the day I spied each one of them taking up their wooden symbols and caressing them, studying them, even smelling them.  Sunburst and Moonshine are already planning to independently knit special bags to keep them in.

And all that worry about how I was going to adjust our rhythm to teach three children was for naught. Somehow I managed to present three main lessons today.  I led Kitty Bill into the opening of his wondrous alphabet story, walked Moonshine into the realm of the mysterious, sinking Atlantis, and dove headlong into sea voyages of discovery with Sunburst.  It was a day of stories, singing, forms, bean bags, counting, balancing games, clay modeling, knitting, German, and mathematics.

Around four o'clock, after completing two pages of review on geometry and ratios, Sunburst asked me, "Is that it?  I feel like we haven't done enough today."  Silly girl.  As Moonshine was busy modeling her idea of Atlantis in clay, even Kitty Bill asked for more work.  In the end, he agreed to take up his new block crayons and draw a picture of his entrance into first grade.

I remember when the girls first tried out drawing pictures with their block crayons.  I vividly recall teaching each one to gently shape the forms instead of drawing with lines.  Neither of them thought it was easy.  They both struggled with holding the blocks in just the right way.  Sunburst used too much force; Moonshine didn't use enough.  Drawing with these crayons really is an art lesson in and of itself.

Since I wasn't having Kitty Bill draw in a lesson book, it didn't occur to me to guide him.  I wasn't even watching.  I didn't model anything for him to replicate.  I just said, "Why don't you draw something from today with the rainbow," and this is what he came up with.

The girls saw it first, and they were amazed.  How did he know to do it without lines?  How did he know to shape it?  How did he know to make the cape behind?  How did he get everything so perfect?

He shrugged his shoulders and told them that he had been watching them draw for a long time now.  As if it were that easy.

Each of them shared their hopes and dreams with me for learning and growing this year, and when I kissed each one of them goodnight, they all remarked at how excited they were for tomorrow.  It can't come soon enough.

I have a feeling this is going to be a really great year.