Material used:
Today Kamina's school is closed due to teacher's training day, so I stayed home with her. After breakfast, we took a walk down the biking path near the house along the stream. About a mile down the path is a park where we stopped and played. Very recently Kamina got the hang of pumping her legs and swinging herself. She would sit on the swing and ask me to give her the first little push and then make herself swing higher and higher. Then we did some sliding, assisted monkey bar, climbing, and tire swinging. After an hour of playing, we started heading back home. On the way, we stopped where there was a gentle slope leading down to the stream. Kamina loves the stream and loves splashing and playing in the water. We watched how the leaves float down the stream, sometimes caught in the river rocks, or tumbling down with the water.
After lunch and nap, we had our first session on form drawing, the straight lines. Form drawing is one of my favorite subjects from Waldorf. It spans so many different subject areas, and prepares the children for handwriting, drawing, math, etc. If a child has some kind of learning dysfunction, such as dyslexia, form drawing can be a natural and quite effective way against it. Together with Montessori practical life and sensorial exercises, form drawing prepares a child for good penmanship quite effectively. First forms in Waldorf tradition start with straight and curve lines, which two constitutes almost all shapes in our life, one way or another. After these, there will be geometry shapes and running forms. We'll try to do form drawing pretty regularly while we're working on other subjects.
We started by making a straight line with our bodies, raising our arms up in the air, as straight as can be.
Then we brought Kamina's new jumping rope that she received for her 4th birthday, and lay it down in a straight line. Then we walked along the rope in a straight line. Kamina giggled doing it but thought it was too easy. So I told her to close her eyes and then walk along the rope. That took her a few tries, but she soon figured out how to use her feet to trace along the rope. Finally we tried walking backwards along the rope while our eyes were closed. Now that took her quite a bit of practice before she could do it. When she finally did it, she laughed in triumph and really got a good sense of straightness in the line. I can't take credit for the originality of this exercise. I got the idea from Ancient Hearth, a Waldorf mama who is really good at coming up with wonderfully engaging and artistic ways to keep teaching and learning interesting and exciting. I'll use a lot more of her lesson ideas in our ongoing learning. When daddy came home from work, Kamina couldn't contain her excitement and showed him how the walking was done.
After walking the jumping rope, we broke out our new blackboard chalk and practiced drawing straight lines on Kamina's new chalkboard, another birthday present. Kamina loved using all the different colored chalks drawing all sorts of straight lines, in different lengths and different directions.
7/30/11
Material used:
- Porcelain Fish Transfer/Sort & More Kit
- Stockmar stick crayons.
- Main lesson book paper (we used DRAWING PAPER 17.5in x 11.5in)
Today, Kamina spontaneously brought out one of her favorite Montessori practical life job: the fish job. She likes using tweezers, droppers, and pouring water back and forth. The fish shape of the beads to be manipulated only adds to her interest. The purpose of the job is not only to practice some of the most commonly used practical life skills, but also to strengthen the kids' pincer grip strength, something very important for gripping the writing utensil and writing.
I let her choose whatever colors she wants to use and however she wants to draw the lines, as long as they're straight lines and she uses stick crayons. Up till recently, she had been mostly using Crayola crayons. Both she and I now like the Stockmar beeswax crayons much better. The colors are better, and they blend well. The feel in hands and on paper is much smoother, and even though it usually doesn't take Kamina long to break other brands of crayons, she's never been able to break a Stockmar crayon even though she has dropped them on various occasions.
Today we studied curved line and put the drawing on main lesson page. It went pretty much like the straight line sessions. We made curved lines with our bodies, both standing and lying on the ground. We crawled along the curved jumping rope. We practiced on the chalkboard, and then we drew them on the main lesson page.
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