week #4 thoughts

We're a full month into our school year now, and I've got a few reflections on what we're doing and where we're going.

This past week, J started his chorus class (which he adores) in addition to his Monday soccer class with the homeschoolers. We spent the week noticing the changes that autumn is bringing to our landscape on our bike rides and nature walks. We explored the Hill-Stead Museum property in Farmington, CT, and did a bit of letter boxing there. J started Tae Kwon Do classes. And we attended a local arts festival. The weather was gorgeous, if you like bright, sunny fall days. Not so gorgeous if your well is dry and you need rain (hand raised!), although we did get half an inch of rain Thursday night. Not quite enough to fix our problem, but something at least. Of course, there's not a raindrop in our upcoming forecast....

The kids really sunk into their pretend play well this week, and I was able to move lunch back to noon (where I prefer it -- I had been doing lunch an hour earlier because they were transitioning to play better after eating the first few weeks, but now they are easily transitioning to play after our story). Our curriculum story this week was a nesting story about pulling up a gigantic turnip (a Ukranian folk tale). Something I've started doing to help with the comprehension of our curriculum stories is to add an item to our Nature Table near the end of the week that has something to do with the story we are reading. In this week's story, a series of people and animals try pulling out the turnip, each helping the other, and finally it's a small field mouse's help that gets the job done. Zoo Boy was thrilled to discover the mouse figurine on the nature table, and asked me, "Mommy, why is there a mouse here?" I said "Why do you think?" He looked at it for a bit puzzling. So I helped "What story did we read this week?" The light bulb came on "OH!" he squealed with glee, "It's the little field mouse from our story!" The mouse was immediately incorporated into their play. And as a completely unexpected bonus, one of our cats brought in a live mouse and deposited it in the middle of our living room, in full view of us all. The Map Man quickly pounced on it with a cup and caught it, and the kids had a wonderful time releasing it back outdoors again.

This was the week of the full Harvest Moon, which has special significance to our family, so each evening's Family Story time ended with a quick break before bedtime to go look at the Harvest Moon. The books we read reflected this theme: Raccoons and Ripe Corn, by Jim Arnosky. 'Possum's Harvest Moon, by Anne Hunter. And the gorgeous Hello, Harvest Moon, by Ralph Fletcher, richly illustrated by Kate Kiesler.