Second Week of Grade 1: Form Drawing

This week's Form Drawing lesson was on Standing Forms. Taking from Donna Simmons book, "Form Drawing for Beginners", we focused on six forms: square, triangle, circle, star, rectangle, and 4 leaf clover. I also ended up adding a very complicated form to fit the story I chose for this week's lesson and that is the crescent.

The story I chose was: "The Star Children" which is commonly told in Waldorf schools. It's a beautiful tale about Father Sun & Mother Moon and their star children who light the sky. One night, the star children are playing, not heeding their mother's calls. They hide behind a cloud and a gust of wind blows them to the ground and they are not allowed to return. Mother Moon sings, "Twinkle, twinkle, little star...how I wonder where you are..." and Father Sun finds a way to have the stars ride up on the wings of the dandelion fluff to visit them again. It's very sweet and was the perfect story for the shapes we were drawing. Can you spot all 7 shapes in my chalk drawing?

We also are overjoyed at the arrival of our Auris glockenspiel, which is heavenly (another post on that next week). Our day now begins with a scale up and down the glockenspiel, followed by an upward sweep of the notes signifying our special time is about to begin. The girls come to the table and we light our candle, say a prayer, our verse and begin the day's activities.

I told the story to the girls and introduced the shapes as the tale progressed. We then broke the shapes down to three days.

Day 1: triangles and 4 leaf clovers

Day 2: circles, rectangles, and squares

Day 3: stars and crescents (saving the hardest forms for last)
Each day, we would walk the forms outside using our sidewalk chalks, and practice before taking up our MLB's and trying our hand at them. The girls love to shade borders around their MLB work and are getting good practice with the block crayons.

The girls love drawing on the white board and it's a great way to practice the forms without wasting paper.

Here they are walking two of the shapes outside, giggling all the while as they try not to run into each other on the star shape :)

Charley was very proud of her stars. I noticed they were frustrated the first time they tried to draw them, but after one day of practice, they got it! The crescents were very difficult, though.

Then today, Day 4 (we took Monday off due to a doctor's appt), they drew the story in their MLB's. They were quite frustrated with the crayons as I was encouraging them not to draw an outline and fill it in, but use the block crayons to shade around their objects. Elena got it!

When we are finished with our work for the day, I go up and down the scale on the glockenspiel in our pattern, and then sweep down the notes signifying the close of the day. The candle is extinguished and we go about the rest of our day.

We will now continue to do form drawing once a week, using these forms we've learned the past two weeks.

The resources I found most helpful for form drawing have been:

~Donna Simmons "Form Drawing for Beginners"

~Eric Fairman's "Path of Discovery Volume One: Grade One"

~Supplies: MLB's, block crayons, stick crayons, chalkboard with chalks and eraser (and/or a whiteboard with markers and eraser), sidewalk chalk, sandscape with sand and a stick, a jump rope or string; and your stories. Another idea to use in the future would be to make dough, shape it into the forms, bake it and eat it (yumm!)

I also just saw that Kristie Burns from Earthschooling is coming out with a form drawing section and I'm really excited to see it! I love her materials and will be using many of them in our schooling (posts on that soon)!

Having girls who like lots of colors, I allowed the girls the freedom to use whatever colors they wanted and to do the forms large or small with as many or as little of them on a page. I did emphasize quality over quantity, but do want to allow them to make the MLB their own. I do not want to create "school at home" so allowing them these freedoms will hopefully protect their individuality and creativity. I also ask them to draw the forms with both the block crayons and the sticks to get used to the difference. I have read conflicting information on which is better to use so we are learning to use both. They definitely feel the sticks are much easier to control.

Next week we will cover our first Language Arts blog! Can't wait! Thanks for reading about our second week of form drawing :)