A Full Michaelmas

Today we spent a lot of time cultivating our will forces. In other words, we did a lot. From collecting horse chestnuts (really, what will we do with them all?) to making conker dragons. From kneading dough to forming our own individual dragon breads. From harvesting apples to slicing and drying, cooking and saucing. From collecting hazelnuts to... well, we had to leave something for tomorrow!

Many hands make light work, and we had a lot of fun. It was a full Michaelmas, spent manifesting, transforming, and playing together. And with Moonshine's help, I managed to take pictures.

and foot!

While browsing through Rudolf Steiner's Prayers for Parents and Children, I was jarred to see two words in the following poem, er prayer.

The sun illumines
Stone, plant, beast and man.
Our soul enlivens
Head, heart, hand and foot.

The light rejoices
When stones sparkle,
Plants bloom, beasts run,
And people work.

So should our soul rejoice
When our heart grows warm and wide,
Enlightened thoughts grow strong,
Enheartened will can work.

In Waldorf circles it's pretty common to hear the words "head, heart, hands," but this is the first time I have ever seen them followed by the words "and foot." It goes without saying that Waldorf education, or Steiner education as they call it on this side of the Atlantic, does emphasize creative movement as an educational construct. But without saying it, it remains unsaid. Unspoken. Unemphasized. In browsing through the prayers, I notice that Steiner does emphasize it. In these prayers he mentions stepping and walking fairly often, which leads me to wonder when the words "and foot" got axed from the curricular mantra and why.

Here's a funny and brilliant TED video that reminds us to put the and foot back in education, embrace creativity, and make mistakes.



Thanks to my very dear friend MoxyJane for sharing it with me!

Saying goodbye

This is our last official week in our apartment, and it's starting to feel a little sad to see it go. It's a nice place... not a good fit for a boisterous family of five, but it sure is pretty.




As you can see, we have a lot of wide open space in this apartment. The kitchen is small, but we have two toilets and laundry facilities inside the house, which is not common in apartments here. The large, sklylit loft makes a wonderful playroom for the kids. The only real drawback is that we have no yard, not even a balcony. And it's a walk-up, which is fine, but hauling groceries for a family of five up three flights of stairs is tiring. And the noise... the kids have to walk on eggshells when the downstairs neighbor is home.

We pick up the keys to our new house on Monday. That's right, I said house. We found a house with a yard... not exactly the easiest thing to do in Europe, so we feel extremely lucky. My first question to the landlord was, "Can I put in a large vegetable garden?" He replied, "Yes. If you need more room, just ask the farmer to move the fence." Move the fence?!! Talk about accommodating!

The rooms are smaller in this place, but we have a view of the countryside, a bit of mountain, and even a castle! The house backs up to farmland, bordered by forest. There are horses and highland cows... and did I mention? Another homeschooling family lives just down the street.

Life will never be what it was in the states, but I think ours will be returning back to a more normal, noisy state. The first thing I plan to do is make sidewalk chalk and entreat Moonshine to the same sorts of number games that Sunburst enjoyed on our big concrete patio. And there will be lots of mandatory running games INSIDE the house.

Here's just a peek of what awaits us.



ps. Yes, I do see that there appears to be a drain in the middle of the yard. I'm trying not to think about what that means.

Grade Five Resources

As always, this is a work in progress. These are the resources available to me. We'll, see how many of these I actually use. It's in no way a complete list... but a good start nonetheless.
***Edit --I've updated the book list by putting the resources I loved in boldface. Hope that helps.***

Our Lessons

History

Discovering Atlantis
India, as promised
Everything cows
Ancient Persia and Forms
Ziggurat veil painting

Wedjat Eyes
Here Comes the Sun (cuneiform sundial)
Greeced Out
Homeschooling at the Acropolis
The Last Two Weeks
Week of Lions and Greece

Botany

Discovering Atlantis

India, as promised

Booklist

General
Eugene Schwartz (Millenial Child) Grade 5 files
Path of Discovery: Grade 5 - Eric Fairman
Spiritual Syllabus Grades 5-6 - Alan Whitehead
Waldorf Curriculum Overview - Christopherus
Grade Five files at waldorfhomeeducators - M. Johnson
Little Garden Flower publications

Math
Math Lessons for Elementary Grades - Dorothy Harrer
The Man Who Counted - Tahan
String, Straightedge and Shadow
Beginner's Guide to Reconstructing the Universe
The Joy of Mathematics - Pappas
Ron Jarmon's math book

Literature/English/History/Science
An English Manual - Dorothy Harrer
McGuffey's Fourth Reader
McGuffey's Speller
D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
Ancient Greece - Charles Kovacs
Ancient Mythologies - Charles Kovacs
Chapters from Ancient History - Dorothy Harrer (helpful)
Teaching History I - Roy Wilkinson (helpful)
Cradle Tales of Hinduism - Sister Nevedita
Ma'at's Feather (read alone)
Pyramid - David Macaulay (interesting)
The Living World of Plants
Botany - Charles Kovacs
Drawing from the Book of Nature
Handbook of Nature Study


German
Assorted picture books
Neue Fibel: Teil 3 - Paul Dohrmann
Kinderlieder Kinderreime

Music
Singing Every Day - Lila Belle Pitts
Various recorder books
Various piano books

The BOOKS are here!

I just received a new batch of homeschooling books in the mail today. I actually hooted when Einstein brought them in the door. I hadn't expected them for at least another week... even overseas, Bob and Nancy's bookshop ships FAST!

I've been pulling my hair out a bit about teaching fifth grade-- there is SO much to cover this year! India, Persia, Babylon (or is it Mesopotamia?), Egypt, Greece, Botany, Geometry... it makes my head spin! Living in a German-speaking region, we have zilch available locally. And as far as I know, I'm the only Waldorf-inspired homeschooler east of the English Channel, so I can't even have a peek before I buy... unless it's online somewhere.

Now that my first two shipments have arrived, I'm happy to report that I've made some very good, albeit blind, purchases:

Ancient Mythologies
by Charles Kovacs

I love the way Kovacs' books read. It's like you're listening in on lessons, and you are, essentially. He goes through various myths of India, Persia, Babylon, and Egypt in this conversational, talking to ten-year-olds way. The stories evolve fluidly in the conversation, and the conversation itself appears to be the red-line that ties everything together. The only downside is that you have to follow the conversation to really know where you are.... which the more I look at it, the less it seems like a bad thing. His stories really suck you in. I adored his Man and Animal book, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of it.



Chapters in Ancient History (in a biographic vein)
compiled by Dorothy Harrer

To be honest, I'm not very fond of spiral-bound books. It's a pet-peeve, I know, but some of the ones out there are just hard to navigate through, and regardless of the content, harder still to find on the bookshelf. They just all look the same! However, I am so glad I purchased this! It contains stories from India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. It even contains biographical tales of the major figures in Ancient Greece, which means that I may not have to purchase any other texts... like a separate copy of Gilgamesh. I can just boot that sucker out of my Amazon wishlist (along with all those Ancient Greek biographies) and move on. The best part is that each section comes with a quote (presumably from an ancient text of that time) along with a summary of the relationship between the people of that time and the celestial sphere, or heaven and gods. I find that simple explanation priceless, because honestly, this is all new material to me.

The language of these stories is very different from the Kovacs book mentioned above. Harrer's stories have more of an ancient feel to them, which is sometimes great and sometimes just plain wordy. Her sections for each cultural epoch are fairly small, and with few exceptions, different stories than what is included in the Kovacs book. I think I'll have to pick and choose between them.



String, Straightedge, and Shadow: The Story of Geometry
by Julia E. Diggins

I took Geometry my sophomore year in high school, and I simply loathed it. It bored me to tears, and perhaps because of the way it was taught, has since been this abstract thing I've felt absolutely no kinship with or interest in. That said, I can tell you that this book looks fantastic! It tells the story of geometry, from the oldest times through its progression to Ancient Greece. It's packed with eye-candy drawings, both of geometrical relationships and the people who used them (guys in butt-flaps and togas) and how they used them. It looks so interesting, that I'm confident this book is going to change everything for me!



Botany
by Charles Kovacs

I haven't yet given this the attention it deserves. But from first glance it appears to be great, in Kovacs conversational-style, and packed with information. The text includes all the different plant families, plants used by people (grains, coffee, etc.), and a bit about bees. Unlike his Man and Animal book though, it doesn't have accompanying artwork, so I'm less apt to delve in immediately. I appreciate the simplicity of his writing-style though, so I'm sure I'll get a lot of use out of it... though honestly, at first glance I like the following book better.



The Living World of Plants
by Dr. Gerbert Grohmann

This book is talked up as THE book to use for teaching botany, and really, it is THE book. It's written for children, so the language is simplistic (but not stupid) and to the point. Better yet, there are pictures; throughout the book are simple line-drawings corresponding to the discussion at hand. I appreciate that. It looks excellent! Essentially, this book has the same textual feel as Kovacs book, only with pictures.


I'm planning to combine these botany books with the beautiful drawing help in Drawing from the Book of Nature.

. . . . .

Since I'm talking fifth grade, a review of this book already on my bookshelf seems necessary...


Teaching History I: The Ancient Civilizations and the Fourth Cultural Epoch
by Roy Wilkinson

I bought this for cheap a couple of years ago from a local homeschooler who was cleaning off her shelves. It's good, it's interesting, but it's not enough by itself. This is the "how-to" and "why" guide to teaching ancient history. It has the cliff-notes version of the stories and gives a lengthy summary of the places and times at hand. There's even very small biographical summaries of the major Greek folks. But I wouldn't call it enlivened. It's dry and informative in that Roy Wilkinson style, which, the more I look at it notice is the point. And that has it's place. It's the kind of reading for me that takes a bit of concentration and note-taking... the kind you can't do with kids jumping on the couch. If I get some quiet moments, maybe I'll read more of it.

Uh, what's my job??

I'm trying to get back into the swing of things. I know, it has been awhile. I can't seem to find the time anymore. For months now... ever been there?

It occurred to me this morning as I discovered, yet again that we have no cereal in the house, that I'm really working more than three jobs here. Why is it that this has never crossed my mind before?

House-cleaner (working overtime now that we've advertised our apartment)
Personal chef and shopper (stores are NOT open late here)
Teacher - Grade 5
Teacher - Grade 2
Mother/Nurse/Laundress/Magic-maker
Wife

I know there's some overlap there, but honestly, it's a lot of work. I need more hours in the day to get everything done. Is it a planning issue or just a really full plate? I don't even know anymore.

What I'd like to add to the above list is Writer. But despite my best intentions, it's not happening. This blog, obviously, has not been happening. And that novel I'm still editing, again, not happening so much. I haven't even managed to read blogs in the last few months. How sad is that!?! I'm just feeling so blah and ick that I don't even know where to start.

So... let me start with YOU. I'm going to try to eek out some time this week for blog reading. Please leave me your blog addy in the comments and I'll pop over for a visit.

Happy little eggs

Easter was always my favorite holiday as a little girl. My mom would boil up dozens of eggs and as a family we'd all gather around the table together, endlessly dipping into the rainbow of colors.

Together. Looking back I think that was the biggest part of it. Easter was more about being together, doing together, laughing and enjoying and goofing around, than any of the other holidays. My dad would sit at the table and dip eggs with us, we'd hide them in the craziest places, and then have contests to see who could make their chocolate bunny last the longest. I never won. (I still have no willpower when it comes to chocolate.)

It's been a long time since we all sat down for Easter together, but I'm trying to keep that spirit of togetherness alive in my children, especially at Easter. Since we don't eat eggs, and we've given up the plastic ones (conveniently they don't sell them here in Switzerland), I whipped up an easy little pattern-- another one of my patterns of desperation. My girls, ages 7 and 10, helped knit them up. I hope you'll enjoy making them as much as we did.

To download the pdf of this pattern, please click HERE.  You can also find it on Ravelry.

Felted Knit Eggs

Materials:
wool yarn scraps-- worsted or bulky wt
US #8 or #9 dpns
Wool stuffing

Instructions:
CO 12 st, and divide evenly onto 3 needles.
Place marker, and join into the round. K 1 row.

Row 1: *K1fb, k3* repeat to end of row (15 st)
Rows 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 11: knit every stitch
Row 3: *K1fb, k4* repeat to end of row (18 st)
Row 5: *K1fb, k5* repeat to end of row (21 st)
Row 7: *K1fb, k6* repeat to end of row (24 st)
Row 9: *K1fb, k7* repeat to end of row (27 st)
(begin decreasing)
Row 12: *k2tog, k7* repeat to end of row (24 st)
Rows 13, 15 and 17: knit every stitch
Row 14: *k2tog, k6* repeat to end of row (21 st)
Row 16: *k2tog, k5* repeat to end of row (18 st)
Row 18: *k2tog, k4* repeat to end of row (15 st)
Row 19: *k2tog, k3* repeat to end of row (12 st)
Row 20: *k2tog, k2* repeat to end of row (9 st)
Row 21: *k2tog, k1* repeat to end of row (6 st)

Cut yarn and thread through remaining loops to close top of egg, and weave in the end. Fill your egg with stuffing (moderately full--don't overstuff), and then thread your yarn end through the CO edge, pull it closed, and weave in the ends. Voila.

If you use wool stuffing, both the egg and the stuffing will felt together and create a nice weighted egg that bounces. You can also use fiberfil, but the egg itself won't felt as well as the wool-stuffed egg. Use fiberfil if you want to create a hollow egg, as shown above, for hiding little trinkets in. Once it's felted, just make an incision and remove the fiberfill.

To felt: Throw your eggs in a pillowcase or garment bag and wash in HOT water in the washing machine with some jeans or towels. I only ran mine through once because I ran out of laundry to wash, but feel free to do what you need to do. Don't forget to allow time to dry before the big hunt begins. :-)

Inside the Goetheanum

A while back I promised a look inside the Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. It's hard to know what to expect when you see the outside form of this massive structure.... but once you push open the heavy doors, it's like walking into another world.

Here's a peek at the ground floor, minus the cafe, book/art stores, and bathrooms. The bathrooms were pretty nice, too. There seemed to be art exhibitions at every turn, including two huge lazured murals. This is but a glimpse, and the pictures hardly do it justice, but I think you'll get the idea.

Whoosh!

That's the sound of another blogless month passing me by. March was fraught with so many things it's hard to know where to begin.

First, there was that job in Texas that we didn't get. Imagine homeschooling in a place with libraries, a huge homeschooling community, two gardening seasons, and wonderful friends. I don't have to tell you how bummed I was about that.

In the middle of that was Fasnacht, the crazy three-day carnival in Europe. Imagine streets filled with piccolo playing masked folks and confetti so thick it comes up to your ankles in spots. Fasnacht really deserves a post of its own (fingers crossed)... but towards the tail-end of that I had some health issues and had to find a doctor, fast.

I don't particularly like going to the doctor and avoid it as much as humanly possible, so you can imagine what kind of pain/suffering it takes for me to seek out a doctor in a foreign-speaking country. For one thing, most of them take vacation the week of Fasnacht, and their answering machines all have messages in a fast, thick Schwytzerdütsch. Speak to me in high German really fast and my eyes start rolling around in my head trying to catch a word or two as they zing by. In Swiss German, goodness... you might as well shoot me. In the end, I found one, and he turned out to be from the states, sort of.

My new motto concerning doctors is, if you're going to see one, see one in Europe. I have now seen three, and each of them sat and listened and took me seriously. There were no "come back if it still hurts in 6 weeks" comments. It was more like seeing a lay-midwife in the US; I felt like a person rather than a number being rushed through the system. I have now been prodded and poked, scoped and scanned, and the diagnosis for now is that I will live, at least for as long as I might normally live anyway. Coming from someone whose family has a history of cancer (my grandmother died when she was my age,) this is a fantastic prognosis.

I've learned so many things from my health scare in Europe:
1. Ovarian cysts can hurt like nobody's business.
2. Colonoscopies, while sounding like possibly the worst torture in the world, are really very interesting procedures. If anyone offers to show you the inside of your colon, say yes.
3. The colonoscopy drink mix is really nasty when it's warm, but with a little bit of apple juice and ice cubes, it's actually drinkable.
4. Anthroposophical gynocologists exist.
5. They don't "drape" for a gyn exam in Europe. Modesty is purely an American thang.
6. Hormones can make everything go haywire. And then some.

We managed to get a little bit of homeschooling accomplished in between my appointments and my laying on the couch clutching my abdomen. I also managed to get some editing done on my novel, a huge feat in and of itself. I put in a couple of really long weekends, and managed to surpass the 50-hour challenge doled out over at Nanoedmo (National Novel Editing Month.) This novel-writing thing has turned out to be another really interesting way to model Perseverance and Commitment for my children. It's a less visual lesson than my last huge undertaking, but it seems to have made an impression on Sunburst who has taken to trying to edit her own Nanowrimo story.

March ended with the bona fide arrival of Spring and the news that we might be facing another move next March, this time to Zurich, where homeschooling has just been made illegal. Lucky us, huh? I suppose we'll be finding out in the next week or two the official status on that. As usual, things are up in the air.

I'm starting to wonder if things felt settled, if I would still recognize it as my life.

Worms, math, and treehouses

Busy week! This week I presented the earthworm, straight out of Klocek's book, Drawing from the Book of Nature. It's still much too cold to go digging for actual worms here, but as avid gardeners, we're no strangers to the amazing, little creatures.



Worms segued very easily into a lesson on fractions when we read that if you cut them in half, they die. But if you only cut off the the hind third, they don't die. Sunburst has been hungry for new math problems, and instead of waiting to present this as a block, I just jumped right in with some ideas from Dorothy Harrar's math book.

Sunburst told me she hated fractions, so we started out with some sentences about fractions being good things and a story illustrating the truth of those sentences: Sunburst gets on the bus with an apple. Her hungry friends get on the bus, and the apple gets shared and cut each turn, until eventually there are sixteen slices - one for each child. Last to get on the bus is an old man who is starving. The kids all decide to share their slices with this old man, so that in the end, he has the entire apple.



And then we did some very simple fraction work to build the foundation.





I also backtracked through Dorothy Harrar's math book and brought forth a lesson from the second grade section-- it seemed more like a fractions story than a multiplication story.




Moonshine did a little math herself, sort of. While Sunburst was busy at work on her fractions tree, Moonshine wanted to draw a little tree of her own. This tree multiplied itself into a dozen treehouses, each one designed with specific friends in mind. When Moonshine gets an idea there is no stopping her.



And what of Kitty Bill? He got in on the drawing fun, too. Sometimes he likes to do that. Other times, like today, he just steals off with a pair of scissors and cuts everything in sight. Of course we prefer it when he draws pictures instead.

Remembering Autumn

Harvesting walnuts in France.



Watching everything turn to gold.



Loading up on winter squash.



Jelly making-- with wine grapes.



Enjoying the organ grinders at the Autumn fair.



Nature table in Autumn.



Moonlit walks along the Rhine.

Harbor seals

While I was hoping for two, so far we're only managing one animal per week for this block. I'm really proud of Sunburst's seals, and we both sort of laughed at how much trouble I'm having with the breathing tones. She's doing a much better job of it than I am.



Here's my progression. I like my first attempt better than my others, though it's mostly done with lines. My second one looks like a steamroller hit him, and the third (done with breathing tones) is nature gone wrong, sort of a seal-groundhog hybrid. Maybe it would have better luck at predicting the coming of spring.