Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Main Lesson Block II

I'm not sure if I mentioned before but I decided to go with Donna Simmon's Christopherus Curriculum. I purchased the Language Arts book and the First Grade Syllabus. It is WONDERFUL!! I also have a few more of her books and highly recommend them to anyone wanting to homeschool waldorf style.

Although Sage is only 5 and would be considered Kindergarten level (waldorf specifies Kindergarten as ages 3 - 6) I haven't worked formally with him. He learns differently than Jaden. He does often sit in with us during our lessons so I include him as much as possible.

The past 2 1/2 weeks we have been doing a 4 week language arts lesson block. Jaden has been begging to do school and is excited each day to pick up where we left off.

For the main lesson, week 1 & 2 was spent with the first part of the alphabet story. Letters are presented randomly in a continuous story that is woven with the sounds of the letters plus Grimm's Fairy Tales stories. Each day we recap what we did the day before and review the letters and sounds we learned. Jaden would help retell the story as we looked at the pictures. We also reviewed the words in the story that started with the letters we were learning about.

Lesson A was handcrafts. We started week one with her braiding wool yarn together into ropes. Week 2 we made Knitting Nancys (hopefully the how-to will be in the winter edition of Rhythm of the Home).

This was also a 2 week block for the recorder so we did finger plays to warm up our fingers, sang the songs we were learning on the recorder and then played the songs. We worked on 3 separate songs: Mary Had a Little Lamb, Hot Crossed Buns and Aura Lee.

We are now on week 3. We are continuing on with the Language Arts main lesson and reviewed the entire story yesterday before continuing on. Jaden decided to work on re-drawing 3 of her pictures for her main lesson book as the first few were a bit sloppier than the rest.

For handcrafts we are continuing on with knitting. Today we are going to begin making our own knitting needles. They should be finished by the end of the week and next week we'll begin knitting.

The next two weeks we are supposed to take a break from the recorder. I'm not sure how long that will last as she loves to play it but for now, we will focus on watercolor for the next two weeks.
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Although I have eased up on teaching her to read, she has been making amazing leaps and bounds in this department. She read a name of a facebook friend of mine the other day (a friend she doesn't know and had never heard the name before). It was pretty cool, she asked if the person's last name was 'rob-ets' (it was roberts). I asked how she knew that and she said she sounded it out. She is doing that a lot more. It is great just watching her emerge w/o me forcing it.
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I'm also looking into the Feingold diet for Sage. I know he has chemical sensitivities, I've seen his behavior change when eating red or blue food dyes. I avoid HFCS at all costs and most other preservatives. I suspect he may be gluten intolerant as well which is hard for me to stomach but I'm looking into alternatives. I don't often buy bread but when it's in the house, he eats it like crazy. They both like pancakes for breakfast so I bought a gluten free mix. It's pricey but while I'm eliminating items, it's making my life a bit easier. Luckily, Greg is on the South Beach diet right now which is similar to the Feingold diet so it's easy to modify it for everyone. I just have to make sure myself and Adelena get enough to eat so we don't lose weight since we are the runts of the family and can't afford to lose a pound. Jaden and Sage don't need to, they are of perfect build in my opinion so I need to carefully supplement them as well but it's not as worrisome as it is for A and me.