January Calendar & Saving Eloise

"January brings the snow,

Makes our feet and fingers glow."

One of the elements in Grade 3 is learning about time, which includes the passage of...hence the calendar. We are making our own calendar and each month, have learned a little rhyme about that month, and create a drawing that represents it. The girls are contributing more to the creative pallet, as they get older and we decided to draw a figure by a warming hearth.

This gives us the opportunity to introduce measuring, as well. So the girls are becoming more familiar with how to use a ruler and how the metric system works! Any sheet of paper will do, but I didn't want a tear away calendar, so I opted to use our larger drawing paper. We kept the top half for our drawing and in the bottom half, we measured out our ample squares.

This also allows for the writing of the 7 days of the week. Each day, a square is crossed off and the girls tell me what day it is. They take great delight in crossing off another day!

We hung ours in our school room so they are within reach. Over the summer, my husband and I attemped to lazure paint the school room, which was a spare bedroom upstairs that we weren't really using. I am honestly torn between using our kitchen table and having our own room. I have done both and like both for different reasons. But I had found that we had so many crafts and projects out that the kitchen table was never clean, so from that aspect, I like having a room designated to school where we can leave projects out while finishing them. I hope to do another post on our room, how we did it, and how it turned out.

We also made our own blackboard, which I will share, as well. I had a lot of great advice from Jenn of Our Little Nature Nest. Her blog was a great inspiration and I was saddened to hear that she had to close it down. In any case, here are our calendars for January.

And now for Eloise...

This is her impound photo...

While this blog is primarily about our Waldorf-inspired homeschooling adventures, a big part of that is learning about compassion and respect for all creatures, great and small. Yesterday, we were blessed with an extra special rescue that I wanted to share.

Almost two years ago, we rescued a dog who had been attacked and had his eye removed. He sat for 6 long weeks at a shelter and no one wanted him. When we went to see him, someone who was walking by even told us that he wasn't a good dog. We should adopt his kennelmate instead! That sealed the deal for me...With his time running out, we knew in our hearts that he was meant for us! Our Jackie has been the most loving and expressive furbaby. He has been a blessing in our lives. I will always credit him to leading us on this journey, for his save brought us to a wonderful small dog rescue organization who welcomed us with open arms. We not only jumped in with both feet, but we also jumped in with our entire hearts! I couldn't have planned a more important learning experience and life experience for my twins if I tried.

Eloise is one of thousands of dogs that goes through the local shelters where we live. She, like our Jack, had been attacked and Animal Control found her and took her off the streets. Her eye was too far gone to save, so it was removed and she was brought back to the shelter and given a standard 5 day hold to see if her owners would come for her.

They never showed.

On day 6, she had to get out or she was slated to walk the Green Mile and would be killed the next morning. Yup - they give most of the dogs at this particular shelter only one day to get out. Not only was her eye an issue, but Eloise was deemed, 'rescue only'. That meant that her only hope of getting out was through an approved rescue organization. Luckily for Eloise, she had several Guardian Angels.

In the usual scramble that is the rescue world, the director of our rescue said she had an open spot for her, after another dog got adopted to a wonderful family. One rescuer drove over an hour to get her out. The clock was ticking and her time was running out. By 2pm Sat, she was safe in Tammy's car and the girls and I were on our way to meet her. Tammy drove two hours to get her to a meeting point and we drove two hours to get her from that point to our Saturday adoption event. From there, she would go home with the Director and begin her rehabilitation process.

The girls named her Eloise...and held her the whole way to adoptions. She gave them kisses of thanks and ate treats from their hands. Once at adoptions, it was Charley's turn to hold her and she refused to put her down. The looks on my girls faces as they hold these forgotten and unwanted babies, I shall never forget. It is the 'juice' that keeps me going, when I am tired and overworked. 'Just one more life,' I tell myself...yet one more always turns into yet another.

But you know, I really wouldn't have it any other way...look at how relaxed Eloise is, compared to her impound photo. The worst is behind her. She will not die in the morning. Her new life is just beginning. She has been given a second chance at life. She may never know how many people it took to save her, how many animal lovers prayed for her when her photo was circulating, the individual people that gave pledges for the vet care required to heal her injury, or that she has helped form my girls into the next generation of rescuers, who will save more lives when they are grown because of dogs like her...

But the one thing she will know, is that she is...

LOVED

If anyone has the interest or passion to help rescue shelter animals, good people are always needed. Even if you can't foster, transporters are always needed and appreciated. Many dogs don't make it out alive because the rescues don't have a way to get them the distance they need to go, so if you want to make a different in the life of a dog, cat, rabbit, horse, goat, chicken, pigeon, rat, hamster, guinea pig, you name it - even turtles and iguana's turn up at the shelters, research a good rescue (sadly, not all are good) - and see if you can help transport :) I promise you, the feeling you get on the way from the shelter is one you will never forget, and the lessons you teach your children through example are priceless...

Catching Up...Math Block - Math Factor Tree

Math Block: Math Factor Tree by Marsha Johnson

of the Waldorf Home Educators Yahoo Group

Math was so bland when I learned it in a traditional school, so I'm thrilled that waldorf focuses on not only multi-sensory learning, but also a true deep understanding of the concepts of math. One of the best recommendations I have for all you waldorf inspired homeschooling mamas out there is to join Marsha Johnson's waldorf group. Even if you never read an email posted to the group, you can access her free files, which are wonderful! She is so generous to share them with us for no charge. I found the pdf file for the Math Factor Tree by going into:

- Files
- Age Specific Curriculum
- Grade 2
- factortrees.pdf

Since I worked mainly with gnomes last year with the 4 processes, yet it was fall and we had plenty of acorns and nuts to count, I decided to combine the two to add to Marsha's skeleton. We were also reading the story of King Arthur, so I made up a story of Merlin (and baby Arthur) who traveled through the forest one day and came upon two little squirrels who had no home to call their own. They were also very hungry as all the acorns had disappeared from the forest. Merlin conjured up a magic acorn and placed it in the soil. The acorn grew right before their very eyes into a Magic Math Factor Tree...

The one trunk of the tree became a One Tree...


The girls copied it into their MLB's.


We have been practicing form drawing and have been using the forms to decorate the edges of their MLB's. This form was very hard, but they both wanted to attempt it, so they did!


As our week continued, we embellished the story and the girls retold and added to it. Soon, the deer and wolves came into the forest to share in the bounty.


The girls took this picture of their crayons after school - creativity abounds!


We also added a lot of baking to this block. This is our homemade zucchini bread using a gigantic organic zucchini from my sister's prolific garden in Colorado! Mmmmmm....


Soon the Magic Math Factor Tree split into two and became a Two Tree...


Then a Three Tree... (this tree is drawn in several ways - 3= 1+1+1 and 3=2+1...)

More baking...we actually baked 10-12 different types of holiday cookies for a dog rescue fundraiser. We doubled the recipe and then cut it in half so they could each measure out the same amount - lol!

Meanwhile...the Magic Math Factor Tree split into Four... (4=1+1+1+1, 4=2+2, 4=3+1 or 1+3, etc)

And five...

And six...all the way up to twelve!

We stopped there - lol! This particular block in our math block took about a week and we had a lot of fun with it.

We started to read the King Arthur book by Roger Lancelyn Green, but it just didn't work for us at this age. It is a version we will return to when the girls are a bit older. However, I returned to a wonderful version of the story which was a great buy by my mother-in-law and is hard to find (it is printed in England for our friends across the sea and seems to be more available there).

If you can find it, it's called, "Knights of the Grail" by Linda Proud. It's published by St. James Publishing. I first read it to the girls when they were 5 years old and they enjoyed it immensely. Their daddy had been telling them stories of King Arthur and Sir Gawain and Sir Lancelot since they were very small. It is broken up into very short chapters, so makes a good night time read aloud.

Grade 2: Two Week Math Review Block

Much of this review block centered around games and manipulatives. We began the review by meeting our old Gnome friends and reading their verses, which can be found in my math archives from Grade 1 here.


The vehicle of Sept has been the Chumash Indians of Southern California. I found an amazing book put out by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History called "The Chumash People: Materials for Teachers and Students" which had a lot of wonderful hands-on ideas, recipes, games, and information on making this a fun block. This book will definitely come back in our repertoire when we study them in more detail down the road. But it would be great for unschoolers and those who do unit studies - all wrapped up in one awesome little book!

So one of the games that the Chumash played was a dice game. They made their dice out of California Black Walnuts, but I had these big English ones, so we used them instead.


We soaked them overnight so they would be easier to separately cleanly.

DH did his manly duties and broke them apart so we had six halves.

Instead of asphaltum (or tar), we made our own fake solution using glue and black acrylic paint :D

The dice were decorated using pieces of abalone shell chips, but we used clam shell chips instead. Less shiny and pretty, but it's what we had on hand.

And we let them dry overnight. In the meantime, while they were drying, we played a series of games. In the "Kemi" book, Kemi, his cousin Tonla, and his father go with others to the ocean to trade with the Chumash from the Channel Islands. They lay out their mats and present their items for trade. When a trade is agreed, the items are exchanged.

So we set up shop and the girls each got a basket with some special things from nature and created their own back story with their village name, etc. They came to my mat to trade their goods for mine.

We did a series of exercises where they would give me a certain number of acorns for a certain number of my shells. We used this to practice all four processes: ie - you are giving me 5 acorns and I am giving you 3 shells. How many total do we have on the table. 8? Correct. If you took all eight items and divided them equally among your four children, how many would each of your children receive? 2? Yes!

We worked through various stories this way, practicing as we went along.

Some I would write on the board and then they copied work into their MLB's.

We also read another short Chumash book called, "Tohi", which gave a lot of details about the Chumash life weaved into the story about a sweet and obedient little boy who was eager to help his father make a soapstone bowl for his mother, a tomol (the Chumash canoe), shell money (which the Chumash were famous for - the word "Chumash" actually means makers of shell money) and who learned to trade for cooking supplies. It was a very nice and gentle book for little ones.

Pasquala is one we will be reading this week, about a California Indian girl, though she is Yokut.

Finally the time came to play the Chumash dice game! We used larger sections of branches, instead of pencil sized sticks. But each girl got four sticks. They each picked even or odd (Charley was even, Elena was odd).

The way the game is played is the first player rolls the walnut shell dice and counts how many land with the flat side up. That number is written down and the player rolls again. Again the number of walnuts with the flat side up is counted and written down and the player repeats it a third time. The three sums are tallied and if the number is even (and the player is even), they take a stick from their opponent. If the number is odd (and the player is even), they give a stick to their opponent.

Then it is player two's turn. The game continues this way until one player has no more sticks left.

It was a great way to practice addition facts and to cover even/odd numbers, which is done in Grade 2. We used our *dragon's tears* manipulatives to count and then to divide in two groups, if the girls weren't sure whether the number was odd or even. They also noticed the pattern whereby you just need to look at the number in the units column to determine whether the number is odd or even (ie: the number 23 - just look at the '3' to see that it is odd).

We played the game until the girls started to grow weary of it.

We played more counting games with our beanbags (full of dog hair - yikes!) and put our walnut shells in our math basket to play again!

We have also been continuing on with our trickster tales at the end of math lessons from the book, "When the Animals Were People" by Kay Sanger.

The girls had decided to put on a casual play for Daddy from this story...

Both weeks were full of review of the gnomes, the four processes, and beginning word problems - always with the use of manipulatives centered around the Chumash tales (note the Rainbow Bridge in the pictures below). I didn't take a ton of pictures, as we were very busy this whole month, but most of our math review took place through games and copy work. The girls clearly grasp the concepts and I am very pleased with how Waldorf ingrains this subject into the child's understanding - and makes it really fun and not abstract and confusing. It's been a wonderful foundation!

We also finished up this block last Friday with a wonderful field trip to the Chumash Indian Museum in Thousand Oaks, CA which I had organized for our local homeschooling group. Pictures will follow - but it was a-m-a-z-i-n-g!