wrap-up of week #1, block #1, grade #1

I'm sort of unsure what I should do about (or even if I should do them at all!) weekly summaries this year. I got a bunch of comments last year saying that the weekly summaries were their favorite posts of mine, so I'm a bit hesitant to drop them altogether. Yet this year I'm apt to be blogging more details of each story set. But I'll give weekly wrap-ups a bit of a start and see how they go.


I already blogged about our first day of "school", about our daily and weekly rhythms, and about the story work we did around "Little Falcon", our first Fairy Tale of the Year, as well as "Night Peace", our first Nature Story of the year. Yesterday I posted the details of our Adventure Circle. So I guess I'm going to stick to the stuff that happened this past week that I DIDN'T already mention. Like the above photo, of the boys dancing around a flagpole at Westmoor Park in West Hartford, CT, with their adorable friend D. We're going to be getting together with D and her mom (fellow Enki Homeschoolers) weekly to do nature walks and crafts and let the kids enjoy each other's company (which they certainly seem to!) while us moms enjoy each other's company (ditto!).


Here are the kids' first wet-on-wet watercolor paintings of the year -- J's is on top, and Zoo Boy's is below. We're sticking with the Kindergarten approach to painting, because they are both sinking into the experience so well and I feel like there's more going on there than I could possibly cause to happen with any outside input. My understanding is that the first grade approach to painting is designed to help the child sink back into the painting experience when they start to stray into representational painting, so I'll save it for when I think we need it. Right now, the boys are doing just fine on their own.

J poses by a Hickory tree on our morning walk, hoping to get hit off the head by a falling nut (yes, we wonder if he didn't already get hit by a few too many falling objects...). The nut trees along our route have helped to tie real life into our Harvest Adventure Circle, and we've added both Hickory Nuts and Black Walnuts gathered on our ventures to our nature table this past week.

Another example of tying in reality to our movement activities, we baked corn bread this past week. In the circle, we harvest our corn with the "Sickle", then bring it to "The Mill" to be ground into flour, which is then taken to the baker to be baked into bread. The second day of our circle, Zoo Boy questioned making bread from corn, so corn bread became a natural choice for our cooking activity later that day. Both boys tried it and gave it a thumbs down, and honestly, it was dry as all get-out. Next time we'll make spoon-bread instead (a moister version of corn bread, but doesn't hold together in a loaf, it needs to be eaten out of a bowel with a spoon).

Around the farm, we introduced our ewes to our new ram, Amos, who can be seen lounging in the background while the girls pig out on fresh hay. We're only breeding 4 ewes this year, as I sold more than half of my breeding stock to try to afford to feed the ones we've got. It's lean times for farmers, even small homestead farmers such as ourselves. We do have 6 ewe lambs that can be bred as of next year, so it will be easy to pick the pace back up again if next year proves to be a kinder year in the cost-of-feed department.

And it is with a heavy heart that I announce the death of our Monarch pupa. About 8 days after pupating, the chrysalis suddenly had a hole in the side of it, and there were a dozen or so small flies in the terrarium. Apparently a parasitic fly had laid it's eggs on our caterpillar while it was pupating, and it's larvae hatched out within the chrysalis and devoured our pupa in it's own home, then pupated themselves and emerged as flies. The boys were pretty fascinated with the entire thing. I'm heartbroken and disappointed. I let the chrysalis hang for another week, hoping for the best despite the obvious, but it started turning a sickly brown within a couple of days. Sigh. Not the experience I had been hoping for, especially given that our nature story this week is going to be about the life cycle of Monarchs, but still an amazing feat of nature in it's own right, and I'm glad that at least the kids can appreciate it, even if it makes me a little angry. (Worst part was that the newly emerged flies were small enough to fit through the screening on the terrarium and I had to deal with growing flies buzzing about the house for the rest of the week before I managed to catch them all and release them outdoors.)

Our Family Story Time stories this past week were Raccoons and Ripe Corn, by Jim Arnosky; The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree, by Gail Gibbons; and The Story of the Wind Children, by Sibylle von Olfers. Reading practice books were Sheep in a Jeep, by Nancy Shaw, for Zoo Boy; and Frog and Toad Together, by Arnold Lobel, for J. Our reading together chapter book is The Trumpet of the Swan, by E.B. White.