play ball!

This week the boys started baseball classes via the same great homeshool organization that works with the YMCA to bring us the mixed sports class J participates in. Zoo Boy shocked me by agreeing to take the T-ball class. He shocked me even more by actually enjoying it and having nothing but good things to say about it afterwards. I have hope he'll even agree to go back next week! See for yourself:

He learned about base-running...










...throwing...










...batting...














...and fielding. He said that his coach (seen here all the way to the right) is "friendly" and "kind" and that he really likes him. So, woo hoo!








J watches Zoo Boy's class, waiting for his turn. He and other kids from the Instructional Baseball class he's in spent a lot of time playing ball on another field while waiting for their class. J's big-time into baseball this year. It's genetic -- I was a HUGE baseball/RedSox fan as a kid, even more so than I am a football/Patriots fan now (which I know some of you are going to find hard to believe). I used to live, sleep, eat, and breathe baseball, and even played on a boys' Little League team. (I wasn't any good, mind you, just enthusiastic.) So the boy was bound to fall into the same baseball pit I did when I was his age. Luckily for him, the RedSox are actually good now. Well..., better than they were back then, anyway....

J's turn.

in the round

This week's Keva theme was building in the round. Here's a few of J's creations, both at class and at home.

cantilevers

More Keva Class (and home) creations -- the theme for the 2nd week of classes was cantilevers. Here's J's creations (Zoo Boy chose to sit this one out).

And I tried my hand at a couple of Keva creations myself:

Western European crafts, part 2

I was going to name this post 'the end of Western Europe', but that sounded a bit too dramatic....

I'm falling horribly behind in posts, so I'll be working this afternoon to catch up, so please look back for a BUNCH of posts a little bit later.

This will be my last post about our Western Europe cultural block, I had to just put up these last few craft pictures. This first one is of a painted clay pot project we did with T and D, Zoo Boy's pot is on the left, J's on the right. We first sealed the pots along with a base coat of white, then used crayons to decorate them, then painted the entire pot with red, which the crayons resisted. Then we dry-sponged the paint off of the crayon decorations, painted over the whole thing with varnish, then added some final touches with colored glue. Phew. It was a long project, we worked on it for about 45 minutes once a week for 3 weeks. The kids are going to plant flower seeds in the pots. (As a note for others that try this project, you should just let the paint dry for half an hour, then dry-sponge it off -- ours waited a week, and it was more difficult than it should have been, I think.)


Here's another project we did with T and D, tissue paper "stained-glass" windows. I thought they came out pretty cool (they are prettier in real life than in photos). For this we folded tissue paper and cut the "points" off of them in increasing sizes, then used a mixture of gel glue and glitter glue to glue to pieces together in layers, from the smallest hole to the largest. We then glued on a chenille stem (pipe cleaner) to "frame" our window, and cut off the excess tissue paper. This was a two-session project.

And here's the most popular craft project of the entire block -- knight paper dolls! I actually purchased a book of these so all we had to do was cut them out and play. Zoo Boy was initially resistant to the idea of playing with "paper dolls", but once he saw how they worked, he was all over it. The boys logged hour upon hour of dressing up their knights in various armor and helmets and shields and giving them various swords and lances to brandish. QUITE a hit. I'm going to try to get paper dolls for each of the cultures we study!

And that's it!!! I didn't do all the cultural crafts I was planning -- there was at least one major stained glass project that we never got to, and we had planned a group puppet-making project that we just ran out of time on since the other things took so long. I think in the future (not this next block...) I will offer a class either through the homeschool classes or on my own to cover crafts within that culture. That will keep me more on track. Besides, if I'm going through that much trouble to prepare for a craft, I may as well share it with more families than just mine! And I always think it's more fun to do crafts with a group rather than on our own. Thankfully T kept me on track a bit this time, as our Western Europe blocks overlapped enough that we were able to get together on that, but this next block I'm on my own. If I get a couple of cultural crafts accomplished before the end of June, I'll consider myself a success!

The start of something big!

Look whose got a new bike! (Thanks Auntie A and cousin A!)

And who is taking the first steps to learn how to ride without training wheels!

Go, Zoo Boy, go! Soon you'll be able to keep up with J!

peepers paintings

We finished off our week with a nature story from the Enki Education Kindergarten Nature Story collection. I chose "Peepers" because we are just this week starting to hear the chorus of Spring Peepers in the nearby swamp and in our wet pasture. and for some inexplicable reason we've never read this particular story before. For artistic digestion, I read the comprehension verse that goes along with the story (which we HAVE used in circle before) while we painted, as follows:


(Above is J's painting.) While I read the first stanza about the peepers waking up from the winter mud, we painted our entire sheet blue with only one dip of the brush into the paint. We painted with horizontal strokes from the bottom of the page upwards so that the darkest color was at the bottom and the lightest at the top.

(Below is Zoo Boy's painting.) The second stanza talks about the little frogs hopping through the swampy grass, and we used yellow paint on our brush and gesture-painted with a hopping motion across the center of the page.


(My painting is below.) The third stanza talks about snakes slithering in the fields, and we painted again with yellow, this time with a winding gesture across the bottom of the page.

The final stanza is about daffodils awakening and reaching up to trumpet in the spring. We loaded our brushes again with yellow, this time painting with individual upwards strokes towards the "sky", then we dipped just the corner of the brush in the yellow paint again and dabbed a "trumpet" on each "daffodil" (not that I labeled it that, I just read the verse and painted and the kids followed along). Since there is lighter color at the top half of the paper, the yellow remained truer, while our painting at the bottom made more of a green.

I do want to mention that although I'm following a verse, and there are perhaps images that could be recognizable in the paintings (for instance, this painting could be seen as a field with a pond behind it, with daffodils growing on the far shore), my only goal with these paintings are to allow the children to experience the interaction of the colors and to experiment with different brush strokes and gestures. I do prepare a bit in advance, deciding which colors and strokes I want to use for a particular story or poem, and whether or not there might be a picture hidden within the painting. Many times it doesn't work out quite as I had envisioned it, but most times it turns out better than I could have imagined.

I can't believe how comfortable I've become with leading water-color paintings. Painting was one of those things I'd always found super-intimidating. But for some reason this year, I've really launched myself into it, and now it's one of my favorite activities to do with the kids! Their enthusiastic response certainly helps to make me feel successful at it. Although I still think their paintings are far superior to mine, which is a good thing given that my paintings always have a bit of a 'stiff' feeling to them. Probably because I'm putting too much thought into them while the kids just go with the flow and experience the process rather than thinking about what they are doing. Which, of course, is the goal!

St. Francis and the Wolf

We wrapped our block of the Western European culture up in a nice neat box with a satin ribbon this week by working with a story to awaken our Sage for the block, St. Francis. In the Enki Education 2nd Grade story, "St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio," we revisited our friend Francis later on in his workings. The boys were absolutely thrilled to hear another chapter in St. Francis' life story.

This first drawing is J's, of Francis meeting the wolf in a forest clearing. An interesting note about this, J drew his background first and then discovered he wasn't able to get Francis to show up with the skin colors he'd intended on using. So Francis wound up being green. I just made mention that that's why I always draw the characters first, and the background can go in at any time.

J's written summary of the story. We work on our story summaries during recall the day following the story, all of us contributing equally. My contribution is pretty much starting off the summary with the first sentence, making grammatical suggestions to the kids' contributions, and writing everything down on a big pad of newsprint on an easel so they can copy off of it and into their good books the following day. The boys take turns composing the next sentence, with each one adding details they want to see included, or discussing how exactly they want to word it. I act as a somewhat impartial mediator in the process and don't write anything down until they've both agreed upon it.


Zoo Boy's story drawing, of the wolf following Francis back towards town. He really liked the part in the story where the townspeople thought the wolf was going to eat Francis, then realized that it was following him, not chasing him.









Zoo Boy's simplified summary.









My half-finished drawing -- apparently I got called away in the middle of drawing this because it's a little light on details. But anyway, that's Francis making the deal with the wolf and the townspeople that brought peace to the village of Gubbio.