Autumn copywork, pressing leaves, and preserving spiderwebs

We have been very focused on the changes going on in nature right now. The nights are getting colder and the days are getting shorter quickly. It is very clearly almost fall.

Logan got his first taste of copywork today.  We copied a Waldorf poem onto watercolor paper and he wanted to be included… so I had him write the last lines on his watercolor sheet.  I think he did a fantastic job!

Here was Cyan’s copy work.  Her painting and her handwriting were just lovely.  They both are on the nature table now.  I knew it wouldn’t stay empty for long!

Today for Kindergarten science we pressed leaves! As we went on our nature walk he found fallen leaves and brought them in to press.

He loved the ones that still had green on them because they were ‘pretty’.

Then, along with the siblings, we preserved spiderwebs!  First, we went on a spiderweb hunt around the yard.  The best ones were found on the rhododendron bushes in the back of the yard.  They were still complete, even though there was no spider in them. 

Most garden spiders build a new web every night, so I didn’t feel bad about taking the three that we had found as it won’t take the spider long to build a new one.  I was careful, however, not to spray paint a web with a spider in it. 

The two we found with spiders sitting in the center of their webs we left alone, but we spent some time observing the spiders that lived there, and noting their brown and yellow markings (making them a type of ‘garden spider’).

I preserved the web by holding up some cardboard behind the empty spiderweb and spray painting (very gently and from over a foot away) the web.  I took about 20 minutes to let that dry.  Then I sprayed a sheet of cardstock with Elmer’s spray glue and waited until it was good and ‘tacky’.  Then I slid the cardstock behind the painted web, and gently pulled it forward until the web was stuck to the sheet of paper and this is what I ended up with:

We did two, and although you can see the color on the black sheet better in photos, I like the detail you can see clearly on the white sheet… which doesn’t show up in pictures as well, but is quite amazing in person!  We added these to sleeves in the kids nature notebooks after some fun up close observation and now they will have a spiders web to study at will!

It was a neat project to do after yesterday’s school project of reading about spiders and trying to make our own webs!

 

What a fun and awesome school day!

First day of school learning

The first day of school went well.  We were a little bit off schedule as we had an unexpected (but welcome) visitor.  Our first order of the day was to change out the nature table from ‘summer’ to ‘fall’!  The kids handed me stuff as I arranged it on the nature table.  I am sure we will have many more things to add as we take nature walks and get more into the fall season but for now, it’s just lovely and clean.

Box #1: Nature Study!  Today we got to compare bird nests that we have found over the summer.

This was a all kid activity.  They each got one and they described it as the others wrote down what they said on a comparison and contrast worksheet.

Box #2 - Animal Farm Game - was just for Logan.  He read all these and placed them so fast that I think I may have to make some harder cards for him!  The farm is expanding!

 

Box #3 was our interview box.  He wrote his name (with no help, I really wanted to see his progress between now and the end of the year), and then drew a picture of himself.

The interview was here.

Box #4 was a jar and some craft sticks.  Each day we put one craft stick in the jar.  Each tenth day we bundle the craft sticks together showing counting by tens.  However, today we only had one craft stick in our jar.  Hardly picture worthy. 

Box #5 - Cyan and Logan played number dominos!  They were both really good at it.  I am going to have to get a set of real dominos and look up the rules for another day.

Box #6 was wet on wet watercolor.

This was a Cyan and Logan activity.

Box #7 was the Dolch Word Kit.  We just worked on review for today.

Box #8 was Digraph Sorting from Pinterest.

 

Box #9 was a “September Me” from A Year of Kindergarten Writing.

No box #10 today…  just lunch!

All in all it was a great day!

Back in the saddle again. :)

We are stating light with a unit study on Little House in the Big Woods and a quick study of our maple tree out back that is having some trouble.  We only did 6 workboxes today so we could have our sunny day (one of our VERY few this summer) set aside for cabin building (we are making a playhouse!!).  I figured we would learn as much from putting the siding on our playhouse than we would from sitting inside doing worksheets. 

I am substituting my reading aloud for audio books right now to get in the groove of schooling again, and it’s working out beautifully. I will get back to having my school read-aloud time with them in a few weeks, but for now we are really enjoying Audiobooks.  Today, we listened to the first two chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” narrated by Cherry Jones.  If you haven’t heard this version, I highly suggest it!  She does such a wonderful job!  She has a husky tenor voice that it easily believable as Ma, Pa, or any of the children.  She does the singing and the fiddle music playing behind the story is just lovely.

We were all enthralled. 

After the chapters for today were complete, we started the Little House in the Big Woods lapbook, starting with the cover pages, the smoke house, and the log cabin on the back. 

Next up was nature study.  I had marked the page in Fun with Nature Trees, Leaves, and Bark to the page that had the maple tree on it and I sent Logan out back to discover which tree was the Maple.  It only took him a few minutes to come back in with a maple leaf!  I went out with him and we looked at the pictures and compared the maple tree in the book to our maple in the yard.  We came back in with a few leaves and spent some time making leaf rubbings for our Nature Notebooks.

We did two on top of each other with different colors so you could see the different sizes of the leaves on the tree right now… then we marked the date and wrote down the words ‘Maple Tree’ on the page.

Next up was a Montessori activity called “Animal Farm”.  Since Logan is reading 3 and 4 letter words pretty well now I just let him do the whole thing by himself. 

The only one he needed help with was “Lamb” (of course) because he was trying to find ‘sheep’.

After this we worked on Logan’s sight words while Cyan worked on her spelling list.  He is having a little trouble with blends and digraphs so I pulled out the ones that are in the first two lists of the Dolch Words chart and we worked on those for a few minutes. 

Then I moved over to Cyan as Logan played with the counting manipulitives in the next workbox.

She is doing spelling words from a note she wrote back in may where she misspelled them.  I had her write them correctly twice and then practice them out loud, then we did the test.  She only missed two, but she wrote those out 5 times while saying them aloud at the same time.  We will use this same list for the whole school week.

Logan’s last box for today was number recognition.  This was something he was really having trouble with when we started our break.  He doesn’t seem to have any issue now.  Even so, I made it so that he was using stickers instead of having to remember the number, remember what it looked like, and then trying to recreate that with his 5 year old fingers at the same time.  lol!  Next time I will add in him writing them, because it seemed that this was super easy and went very quickly.  But he enjoyed the success!

Kindergarten and 6th grade have begun!

Workboxes 4/24

Box #1 - Getting to the last part of Bambi by Felix Salton

Box #2 - Nature Study!  Today we studied squirrels and fern fronds.

We read about Feisty the Squirrel in our Ecojournals and the illistration on the side made Logan ask questions. 

It was such a PERFECT time to ask about fern fronds that I made him put his rainboots back on come out and look at our ferns.  The fronds are different…  They do not curl quite as much as the ones in the book, but they were still really fun to look at!

Cyan found a safe spot from the rain under the eves and drew a beautiful picture of our broken cherry tree that is currently blooming.

Box #3: Into the Forest game of food chains!  Both kids thought this was fun. 

Box #4 - Bob Book #4 and he passed it with flying colors!

Box #5 - Spindle Boxes to work on numbers. 

These are self correcting so it was cool to see him figure out what he was supposed to do and correct himself.

Box #6 - Writing his name with the proper spaces and case.  This still needs some work, but he’s got his whole name down really well (readable to anyone) so I am not pushing hard… just working slowly.

Box #7 - 1 - 10 Dot to Dot.  I added a ruler so he could make better straight lines.

Box #8 - Kumon book page from First Rhyming Words

Box #9 - pattern blocks.  It’s the first one I have added that has no color coding to it.  He did GREAT although he used pieces I wouldn’t have, which actually thrilled me because he figured it out all on his own.

Box #10 - This one has no picture and I am not sure why, but it was a movie on Geography and Maps from the library.  It had a lot of new vocabulary so we will be visiting it again before I expect him to apply any of the information, but it’s good to get those mental boxes started with good info early.