Good and Bad Children

This marks our first week of officially home schooling, and so far things are going smoothly--yes, for the ENTIRE THREE DAYS we've been doing it now. We started a week earlier than I originally planned, because Lissie was impatient and I thought it would be fine to do a light week to get ourselves started with our new rhythms. Our "story" this week is a poem, "Good and Bad Children" by Robert Louis Stevenson. I am not sure where the Waldorf community stands on his works, but I love them and so I am using them. I have always said we are only Waldorf inspired anyway.

Circle time is something new to us, and with a just-turned-6-year-old and a not-quite-2-year-old, I like to keep it short and simple. We start with a poem from the excellent book Seven Times the Sun by Shea Darian, then move on to our story. After the story, if I still have the girls' attention, we do a finger play. This week we are doing Open, Shut Them.

Today seemed like a good day for a craft, so I think we'll make Wednesday our craft day and we'll start a new craft each week. This week, Lissie "sewed" together a cardstock picture of a house. I am not sure how this ties into the Waldorf philosophy of doing real work (although it's certainly not a fake picture!), but as she used a real needle and real thread and it was her first sewing project, I am fine with it.  I thought it would be a cute picture to hang in her bedroom too, but she was, for some reason, emphatically against the idea.

Tomorrow would be our coloring day, but we are still waiting for our beeswax crayons to arrive. I do have an old set, but it's the original Stockmar color assortment. I wanted to get the Waldorf assortment for school, and it's always nice to have fresh, new supplies at the beginning of the school year.