We are approaching our last week of 2022 - full to the brim with the solstice, yule, Hannukah, and Christmas - what a whirlwind time. As such, the children have been in and out of school, taking rest as it is very much needed, and we’ve been having warm and nourishing days in the yurt. Firing up the wood stove to warm a space within which we can read, write, craft, sing, play our ukuleles, work on our abacus, learn about our brains, and explore improvisational movement. A beautiful way to close out 2022 together.
In smaller groups this week we were able to focus on our individual projects, and wrap up as much as we can before we head off into our break. We are putting together our handmade gifts, sewing, making balms, teas, and writing cards. We are working on poetry for our calendars, which we will continue into the new year as a rich and inspiring writing exploration. We had our second visit with Corinne deLangavant, a pantomime, movement teacher and singer, and it was further enlightening for both her and the children. She taught them about the history of ballet (rooted in ice skating, originally, which was solely a winter survival skill from over 10,000 years ago, and then Catherine de Medici founded the “ballet de court” in France as a military strategy to train soldiers to move on ice against the Dutch!) At one point after moving around together outside practicing ice-skating without the ice, we moved into the yurt to dance. She took out her guitar and asked the children, “do you sing?”, and then clarified and asked, “do you know that you all can sing?”. Whether or not she is accustomed to children resisting singing out of discomfort or lack of confidence I am not sure, but the children’s response was loud and clear. They looked at her a bit confused at the question, and then replied, “Yeah. We know we can sing.” They proceeded to belt out Gillian Welch’s “Miss Ohio,” and then asked for their ukuleles so they could all play her the song they are writing together with Laura using their three chords - F, Am and C. Corinne was left a bit speechless, and deeply inspired and uplifted. Here is a video link of the children playing their chord changes for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7IS9zVmWb8 We finished our chapter book on the Blackfeet tribe, called Om Kas Toe, by Kenneth Thomasma, and have started another by this same amazing author, as the children are enthralled with these historical accounts. Om Kas Toe shares the story of the Blackfeet as they discovered horses in the early 1700’s, and how that drastically changed the trajectory of their people. We are now reading Naya Nuki, which tells the story of the Shoshoni tribe and Sacajawea. We did venture out of the warm yurt each day, walking to the greenhouse to harvest and eat fresh sorrel, dinosaur kale, herbs and arugula. We visited the stream and noticed the seasonal changes in the water pattern. And we cared for the bunnies who are settling into their winter home out at the yurt. On Thursday, Bryn came to teach us more about the brain - this week the amygdala and prefrontal cortex - such powerful learning. Before we end the year, the children are eager to share some of their work, particularly their books. We are planning to have a Solstice celebration on Thursday this week - we will have school at Rachael’s house on 16th street in Edgartown, and we invite families to come join us at 2 o’clock for a read-aloud and sing-along led by the children. We will have some warm snacks and drinks together before we head off for our break! * For Thursday, you can either drop off at the yurt at 9 am and I can shuttle to Edgartown, or you can drop off at Rachael’s house anytime between 9 and 9:30. Pick up will be at Rachael’s in Edgartown, unless anyone needs a ride back up-island. Just let me know what works best for you. And just a reminder, our break is for two weeks - we start school again on Monday, January 9th. Thank you all, ~ Kaila
0 Comments
We started this week with a simple art project to review some of our spanish language learning, using the translated “5 Little Pumpkins” or “Cinco Calabazas”. Soon after we dove right back into our creative writing, either working individually or in small groups to finish up our stories and start working on our final drafts. One of the most wonderful things to watch as the children are working on their stories is their incredible ability to absorb everything around them and weave it into their own creations - from other stories we are reading, to characters from their own group play, or concepts we are exploring as a group. We are currently reading Ethel Cook Eliot’s Little House in the Fairy Wood, as a group, and if you haven’t had a chance to look into Ethel Cook Eliot’s work please do. It is beautifully written, and speaks so gently and clearly to where many of the children are in terms of their awareness of their own place in the world. At their age, they are undergoing a significant development in their prefrontal cortex, and thus adjusting their understanding of who they are in relation to this wider, more complex world around them. There is so much out there to read and explore as we attempt to understand cognitive development and neuroscience, and I have found Rudolph Steiner’s writings from over 100 years ago powerfully insightful and inspiring. I found this brief reflection, and thought I’d pass it along in case you wanted to read a bit more: https://www.sophiainstitute.us/blog/not-so-strange-after-all. And if you have other resources or articles along this vein of research, please pass them along!
As this group of children move, developmentally, from the willful mind to the emotional mind they face fascinating conflicts in their work and play. This week we approached a question as a group, which I think is one that most adults, and nations, face each day: how can we find a balance between protecting a space we have created (individually or as a group) and remaining generous and welcoming to others, who in turn can feel honored and respected enough to then share with us? This initially comes up with the issue of sharing, which these children have mostly shifted away from struggling against. At their stage, they are now experiencing group/tribal dynamics, exclusion vs. inclusion, and the deep emotional sensations of being “left out.” We practiced a short spatial activity to introduce communication strategies to move through these conflicts, and talked at length as a group. This will be an ongoing dialogue, and please feel free to share parts of this that may come home, questions that arise, or insights that you and your family have around this issue. I do wonder if there is anything more important than this issue at this moment in time.. To help clear out any heaviness of this complex topic, we made smudge sticks with herbs we had harvested from the farm. There are so many healing modalities that we seek to explore together as a group, and this is one simple practice that they each can do for themselves, or each other. In terms of how we, as a community, can support the children in new ways, I have been working with Ty Romijn for over a year, who practices Zero-Balancing and Five Element Acupuncture, and he has offered to lead parents through some helpful methods of bodywork that we can use with our children. He was also a Waldorf teacher and this work ties so well into the learning environment we are creating with our children. I am planning to host a session for any of us that would be interested during our Thanskgiving Break, and will let you know the details soon! Our Form Drawing work is truly expanding the children’s spatial awareness, and opening all of us up to the incredible natural patterns we observe all around us every day. The abacus is helping the children visualize and physically interact with the world of numbers, and this week we focused a lot on place value. We wrote down numbers up into the thousands, and they had to represent those numbers on their abacus, challenging each other with higher and higher numbers. We also introduced multiplication on the abacus, which is quite similar to division, so those will hopefully be practices your child can take home and try out over the break. We had many moments of quiet reading, we played our ukuleles and sang with Laura, and we made an amazing nettle seed cake with Gaby! After harvesting nettle leaves for years, this was the first time I had every harvested the seeds and it is a wonderful autumn activity (especially given that the sting of the nettles is much more mild at this time of year, if there is any sting at all, and the seeds have no hairs to sting so you can harvest without gloves). We ate the seeds raw and then Gaby guided the group in making the most delicious lemon nettle-seed cake. This article conveys so beautifully all that the nettle plant can do for us: https://www.sophiainstitute.us/blog/not-so-strange-after-all. Thank you Gaby for sharing this, and for your gift of cooking you are sharing with the children. That feels like a hefty email already, so I’ll stop there. But thanks for reading and sharing in this experience. Please reach out with any thoughts or questions, as always. And see you tomorrow! ~ Kaila This week we dove deep into our new instruments of music and of math.
We spent hours at a time exploring the abacus - each child in their own time having that spark, that moment when the visual of the beads and the concepts of place values suddenly came together. It was truly magical to watch. The excitement grew exponentially as another child began to understand how to count up to…one BILLION on the abacus. They could pair off once they grasped the concept, and challenge each other by placing beads on their own abacus and having their partner figure out the number. Some children went up to the 100’s, some went to the 1000’s, and everyone wanted to keep playing. This coming week we’ll take it further and start working through all four math functions using the abacus. Using integrative math, the beginning takes a slower pace, as they children understand the numbers through song, movement, and stories. With all four math functions together, they are approaching the system as a whole from the start. As I observe their experience through this systems approach, when a new element/tool is introduced the learning accelerates at a significant pace. When they are ready, when they have a foundation, and when their own creativity is part of the process, this is where great change occurs, and it is powerful to see. In a similar way, the children have taken to their musical instruments rapidly and with such passion. They added two more chords on the ukulele this week - C7 and F - and are strumming away as they sing together. The patterns in the notes, the scales, and the relationships between the notes is quite mathematical and is arriving at an opportune time as the children grasp these concepts together. We wrote thank-you cards to the “Ukuladies” and their words to express their gratitude, along with beautiful images of themselves playing their instrument, were so poignant. Perhaps in the spring we can invite the “Ukuladies” to a performance… We reviewed telling time this week, using our clock and our 5’s tables, and writing out the different ways we see the time out in the world. The children worked on their creative writing pieces, some of them beginning to write in their hardcover books, others going deeper in their plot lines and character development. They worked in their reading groups, and continued their workshop with Laura on what it means to “judge” someone else and how to make others feel comfortable as they prepare for interviewing. We harvested nettles, some experimenting with tasting raw nettle leaves which they agreed tasted very much like cucumber. Not only have they no fear of being stung by a stinging nettle, they are happy to put those leaves right into their mouths:) If a child happened to get a sting, a group created a “hospital” at the far end of the nettle patch where they gathered mullein, plantain and dock leaves with which they made bandaids and compresses for their classmates. We feasted on “crispy nettles” and brought some to Rachael’s on Thursday where we made nettle sourdough rolls. On Thursday we spent the beautiful fall day at Rachael’s, where we dipped our foraged foliage in beeswax, took a lovely walk through the meadow looking for winterberries (not a great year for winterberries it turns out!), and made pulled venison with Gaby. The children also practiced their play, and said a bittersweet farewell to our dear friend Astrolis! (Take a look at him this week in the last photo, with his hen, Scorpius, whom he named while she was still in her egg, and became our first hatched chick all the way back in February) It looks like a bit of a rainy week ahead, so be sure to send along rain gear and extra clothes and boots! See you tomorrow, ~ Kaila For those new to our group this year, each week I will send a reflection email that shares with you the concepts we are exploring, questions that are arising, ongoing projects, field trip ideas, and more. I include photos of the children, and trust that for the sake of privacy and respect for our school community all of these emails and photos are kept within this group. If you have a grandparent or caregiver you would like for me to add to this list, please let me know and I’m happy to connect them. This week was both a reunion of a group that has been together for anywhere from 1 to 6 years, and the beginning of new friendships with two new students. We are welcoming Eilish and her family to our homeschool this year, and what a beautiful, seamless integration it has been. Her light and joyful spirit, and her enthusiasm to learn and grow alongside this group of children is something we are all fortunate to observe and share. We are also welcoming Linden, after he has spent the past year with Ariana’s group, and is now moving up to our older group for half of each week this season. What a sweet and loving friend he is becoming to everyone here! The way the children have all opened their arms, both literally and figuratively, to both Linden and Eilish is inspiring. It is clear this is a community they have been building themselves, with their caring and creative souls, and as a result it is one they are proud to open and share with others. Our days start with morning circle, and this week we reviewed many of our morning circle songs and games. We are always adding to our repertoire, and each child has their favorites - Mirabai requests "pass the squeeze”, Audrey loves the “human knot”, Astrolis and Arlo are very excited about our new bean bag tossing game, while Zelda, Tavi and Georgie like to lead our multiplication table songs. Robin tends to jump into our “Just Round the Kitchen” song, Ayla guides us through “Good Morning Brother Sunshine,” and Francesca, our fluent Spanish speaker, helps us through “Buenas Dias a la Tierra”. Linden and Eilish joined right in this week, and their voices are an incredible addition to this choir. We visited each of our main learning spaces this week outside of the yurt: the main farm, to harvest pears, dahlias, and to visit our “elements” garden from last year; the laneways where we were sure to harvest autumn olives, check on the sumac (we estimate another week or two before the berries are ready for harvest), and collect mullein leaves and red clover flowers to dry; the stream, with its endless life and changes throughout the seasons; and finally the trees, our maple grove at which each child has developed their own relationship with a tree that serves as a home to them throughout the year. We began our journal work, which serves as a place to document our days and includes new stories we are sharing together. We are continuing our greek myths, which weave in and out of other tales and legends from around the world, and this week was the story of Icarus and Daedalus. These stories are powerful, and rarely subtle, and bring forth deep messages about relationships and emotions that we all experience in life. Last spring we became quite familiar with the stories of Daedalus, Theseus, Ariadne, King Minos, Medusa, Perseus, Cassiopeia, King Cepheus, and Hermes, among others. We will continue to draw the stories together, and explore the various meanings and feelings they inspire in us. These stories connect to our past studies of the astrological cycles and we will revisit our star gazing this fall and winter after the equinox when our night skies are more accessible. Our math work this year began with recognizing the different languages of numbers that have been used throughout history. We shared a story of the Roman numerals and then used our popcorn math games to play with these new numbers. I am attaching our math curriculum for fall/winter, which begins to work through area, perimeter, volume and various forms of measurement that the children will use as they build structures. As always, each child is at their own stage, so working together and at different levels and paces is how we accomplish our projects. Please look through the curriculum and let me know if you have any questions or ideas. This week we spent hours reading in the yurt - with the children asking/begging if they could read at various times throughout the day, during the sprinkling rain or waiting for our math popcorn to be ready. Now that the children are sounding out words, reading proficiently, or reading fluently in chapter books, there is an incredible amount of resources they share as they help each other through sentences, read silently in nooks, or pass on their favorite books to the next child. We will have literacy support multiple times throughout the week, math support once a week, craft support once a week, and music once a week. This year feels full to the brim with a community of caregivers that are sharing their passions and skills - thank you all so much. As always each week we bake our bread, explore the stream, care for our animals, and have a sharing circle at the end of the week. There are never enough words to express my gratitude to be alongside this group of children, and share a space that they have created themselves. It is a true honor. ~ Kaila |
Allen Farm
The Allen Farm program is for children ages six and older. Follow along our learning and exploration in the woods, on the farm, in our yurt, and across our island community, at the upper Woods School. Archives
October 2023
Categories |