mud pony

Horse of the wind,

Help me now

Guide me on my way.

Harness the Wind

Across the land

To bring me to my home.

-from "Mud Pony", a Native American Fairy Tale adapted by Enki Education

Despite my glib post from earlier, we really did accomplish some of our curriculum work this week, after a fashion. Instead of Adventure Circle, the kids participated in Sensory-rich relay races which I could manage from a sitting position, and practice time pretty much fell entirely by the wayside, but we did read and work with a Language Arts curriculum story, "Mud Pony", a Native American fairy tale about how a horse fashioned from Mother Earth's mud helps a boy become a chief of his people. In J's drawing, he covered his horse with a blanket to keep the rain from melting the mud back into the earth.


Zoo Boy's drawing. Since we were working with the letter "H", I substituted the word "Horse" for "Pony" throughout the story. Despite the fact that Zoo Boy's horse looked more like an "H" than J or mine, he had trouble seeing it, although he was delighted when we finally pointed it out to him in his own drawing. J saw it right away in his drawing, despite the fact that his looked the least like an "H". Go figure.

The boys capital and lower case Hs. J's is on top.












J's verse. I only used a couple of gold stars to remind him about the spacing -- he's doing a much better job of remembering. He's also moving along a little better with his writing -- he's prone to do quite a bit of dawdling as he writes, but he worked right along with this verse.

Zoo Boy's verse. He commented on the number of lines "Whoa, there's lots of first letters for me to write!" But he went about doing it happily enough, turning his tablet towards me to fill in the rest of the line as he completed each one. He again followed along on his verse when J and I read it at the end of our session.

My drawing, for comparison. This is the first time I've tried a "Gesture Drawing" with them. I started my drawing by saying "the wind blew across and down the prairie" while using the broad side of a block crayon to drawn a line (that eventually became the horse's ear , down it's neck, across it's back, and down it's rear leg). I then gave the boys time to do the same, then repeated a similar line, adding other features to the basic form of the horse. The boys followed along readily enough, but seemed a bit mystified about the whole process. I believe it was their lack of comfort/familiarity with this new style that caused them to add less detail than usual to their drawings. The led drawings I've done with them up to this point have been of the "Color Dynamic" type, where form arises from the basic light and dark areas we put onto the page at first. I plan to fiddle around a bit more with the gesture drawing with them this spring, and will bring some of that into our painting too.