You've got to begin somewhere

I guess when you start, you start at the beginning and for me, that would be about 3 years ago. David and I have thought about homeschooling for awhile and for all sorts of reasons. We decided after experiencing how good public and private school can be, and how bad it can be, that this school year we will take the plunge with our first daughter, Fiona . This year, Waldorf inspired curriculum will be used. It made the most sense to both David and I, I only hope to grow enough (inner work) to do it justice.

Last year she entered first grade. This year, after much consideration, we will begin, at the beginning and again with first grade. Have you ever marveled at just how amazing some peoples' minds work. It is as if they have bridged all those gaps the rest of us have in our understanding of certain subjects. Whether it be history, art, physics, chemistry, math there are large gaps each of face to understand them. These gaps are much of the reason we are starting with First grade material this year and will go into second grade stuff in the subjects Fi is well versed in.

The first main lesson block will be form drawing. Something I did a little with Fiona a bit in the spring, she loved it and hated it. She also obsessed about some of the forms weeks later in her play. Form drawing obviously hit a nerve. I love the meditative quality of it. Oh, if you're wondering what form drawing is, think about the repetitive forms seen in all cultures like Celtic knotwork or Greek running forms. As an artist, when I first tried them (they start very simply with Straight and curved lines progressing to more complicated rosettes) I felt,'how boring!'. But then I realized that it isn't about being able to draw a straight line or a circle, but how well-formed they are. You can really get sucked into it, like Thi Chi.

Well, we went to a 'not back to school picnic' today to help kick off the season. It was loads of fun. We have also started our school rhythm (for more on rhythm/Waldorf see http://mysite.verizon.net/res2216j/wonder/id4.html or just think of getting into a grove!)
so that we could do a few projects to prepare for the formal start of school. We've made a weather tree for Fiona to place a leaf on each day after our morning walk. She loves this! She loved cutting out all the different colored leaves, helping decide what color paper would go with what kind of day and she really liked making the tree with me. We used stockmar crayons (from my own childhood I might add-20+ years old, so buck up on the price you pay for 20 crayons,about $25, thes aren't like crayola!)and blended the browns for the trunk. Really grounding it into the earth and flowing the braches up and out into the sky.

Tommorrow we start sewing a recorder case for the Pentatonic Flute we will be playing this year.