Field Trip-The Arctic! (museum)

We took a field trip to an arctic museum to tie in with Biddy's main lesson block.We saw some beautiful clothes and amazingly well preserved animals. Biddy especially enjoyed seeing the sewing kit and arctic "diaper bag"All the kids enjoyed a rousing game of Eskimo Yo-yo but only Ferdinand was brave enough to sit in the dark by the big grizzly bear during the presentation.

People of Mist and Rain...

We have started off the year with a lesson block on Native Americans, specifically some of the peoples of the Pacific North West. We have been lucky to see some dancers from a local tribe, a 50 ft tall totem pole carved from an old growth cedar log, explored towering cedars at a near by university forest and hope to attend a upcoming salmon bake.

Here is Biddy's painting from the story of Raven bringing light to the People. We used Gerald McDermott's retelling of this trickster tale.
I thought a trickster tale would be a nice lead in to formal writing again,tying into our lesson blocks last year.



Our neighbor's church was clearing out some underbrush and we were able to score some stumps hooray! We were not going to get them until the pastor discovered they were destined for a home school "wood shop" and they were happily relinquished to us. They have been perfect for our building projects. Anyone else have kids do woodworking in chiffon dresses?



Biddy cut and sanded sticks to decorate into tiny totem poles.



Then she decorated and made this little diorama using the printout from http://susankae.com/

Hand Work...

We started some handwork lessons ...building off of the sheep exhibit we saw at the Renaissance fair we pulled some unprocessed wool out of the art cupboard (we have everything in there) it still has sticks and hay and dirt in it.

Dog brushes make a great alternative to expensive hand carders for kids.

We moved on to playing with dyed wool , checked out some drop spindles made from stones then pulled out some pretty new skeins of wool yarn. For some reason the kids got very silly with the yarn and kept making jokes about the word "skein" in Monty Python-esqe accents

Spent a LONG time winding the skeins into balls, chased down Ferdinand and Blue Eyes twice and spent a longer time un-knotting and re-winding the yarn balls.

Then showed Ferdinand how to make a finger knit chain.

He was very proud of it.

The joust!

We attended a near by Renaissance faire for the first time, Huzzah! What fun!
Ferdinand loved the joust almost as much as he loved getting to eat "sausage on a stick"!
Blue Eyes cheered loudly for the Blue Knight...

All the ladies in the crowd swooned over the Green Knight...

But the gallant Yellow Knight forever won a place in Iddy Biddy's heart...

When he paused to lean down and hand her a flower!

Weather Tree...

We used Donna Simmons's Christopherus 1st grade a few years back for our dd.
One of her favorite activities was creating a big paper tree to keep track of the weather on.

Now that Ferdinand is that same age we pulled out our syllabus. He has been a bit grumpy not so sure he wants to be older and "do work like Biddy"

I was explaining to him about making the tree while pulling paper out of the cupboard. Ferdinand is a pretty mellow guy not excited about craft projects but tends to go along with me most of the time.

I was a bit startled when he loudly shouted "THERE IS NO WAY I'M DOING THAT!" More quietly he continued "I'm using pipe cleaners" and with that he began rummaging around the art supply cupboard until he found what he wanted. He got right to work and spent a long time quietly and happily focused. He did get in a bit of huff about my lack of buttons but settled on using pony beads and found a little box to put them in. I asked him what color beads he was picking and he settled on these:

Blue-rain
Gray-cloudy
Yellow-sunny
Clear-freezing rain/ice
and one snowflake bead just in case:)

The boy knows his Coffeeland weather!







He is very pleased with his project and looking forward to more "work".
I was very pleased too, to see a little burst of initave from him.

Not back to school!

A fun week, waved good morning to the school bus then enjoyed our school cones with treats and new school supplies.
The first day of public school coincided with the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos this year so instead of our usual breakfast out we got to go to Liturgy-even better :)

A hit, a very palpable hit.

Ferdinand has been getting plenty of battle practice in this summer, unfortunately his sparing partner keeps getting his head knocked off.