Saturday, March 28, 2009

coming home

High honks and low,
Fast wings and slow,
The skies all one song
That echoes below.

-from "Coming Home" by Beth Sutton, an Enki Education Kidergarten Nature Story

This Canada Goose (actually, there was a pair of them) that we saw on our hike yesterday inspire me to read "Coming Home" (an Enki Kindergarten Nature Story by Beth Sutton) during our Fireside Friday story time last night. It is the second part of a story we read in the fall. In fall's story, Little Goose left her home with her family and flew south for the winter. In this installment, Little Goose flies back home for the first time to the lake in which she was born.


Our artistic digestion for the story today was a combination led drawing/craft. We traced our hands into our Science Good Book, pasted in a goose head and feet cut-outs, google eyes, and real feathers, and then drew a habitat for our geese. This first is J's creation.




Zoo Boy's goose. He was very enthusiastic about the feathers, not so interested in drawing a habitat (guess he thought that goose looked at home in the middle of the lake -- he willingly shaded the entire background in blue).







We also chose our family outing for the day to take place alongside a lake where I was sure we would see some geese on our hike. Here the boys venture out onto a point of land to scan the waters and shore for geese.





Success! A pair appears to be planning on nesting on the island at the lower left of this picture. There's usually a pretty good goose population at this lake, so these guys must be early arrivals. We did note a lot of geese in a farmer's field on our way home from the park yesterday, so they are definitely starting to move through.


My hiking family, enjoying our afternoon stroll by the lake. It was another beautiful spring day!











As usual, I worked alongside the kids while we created -- not only does it promote more enthusiasm in the kids when I'm doing what they are, but it's fun for me too! So here's my goose. Zoo Boy particularly liked the personal greeting I included for Little Goose.






5 comments:

dongdong said...

oh, that is so nice. I love that nature story. What great drawings!! How inspirational.

Joy said...

Those pictures are great! What a nice way to integrate your nature walk with art. :)

Anonymous said...

i love the feathers!

Jenn said...

Love your geese! Although we are not using Enki this year, I always create along side my boys.

Just curious on how you are organizing all of your comleted schoolwork. Like do you keep binders for the boys? What do you do with yours?

Harvest Moon Farm said...

Jenn -- right now all their work is still in their Good Books. I suppose we'll bind it all as Enki Education suggests at the end of the year into one large book for the year. I'm hoping to weasel out of the actual binding process with a long binder, but I can't seem to find anything large enough, so I might be stuck with the whole tedious ribbon binding process.

Their handwriting sheets, quisenairre rod workbook sheets, etc, are in a pocket folder for now. I will probably include examples of each from over time in their final bound books. (For instance,their first sheets and their last sheets from the year.) the kids will be actively involved in deciding what does and does not go into their yearly books.

As for my stuff....I'm not sure. I never really thought about it, but I can't imagine going through the effort of binding it myself. I may pull out just my drawings and have them simply bound by an office supply place. But I probably won't do that yearly -- more like when we get to the end of Fairy Tales, then when we get to the end of Trickster Tales, etc.