Our story for last week was "Harvest Moon Magic," a very sweet story from Suzanne Down's Autumn Tales. Very fitting, of course, for the recent harvest moon! Both of the boys really loved the story and the new chalkboard drawing to accompany it:
The plan for our baking day was to bake brownies with walnuts as there are helpful fairies in the story who live in walnut trees. Short Pants nixed this idea, claiming that he didn't like walnuts. He is most definately going through the six year change! For the past month or so he has been very prickly. I will be glad when he's back to his normal self. Short Pants has heard me talking about the six year change with The Mister and will now announce proudly, "I'm in the six year change." Ha!
With the brownie plan nixed, we decided to try out our new shortbread pan instead. The boys were very excited about making cookies with animals on them:
They came out great and were a hit with all of us. The Mister made chocolate shortbread the next day - yum!
We took a nature walk up our road one morning instead of doing our normal circle time. Short Pants found some purple asters along the edge of our property, which was nice as they are mentioned in our September poem. I told him that they are also called Michaelmas daisies:
We are fortunate to have such a pleasant road to walk on - a dead-end gravel drive, so no traffic:
Of course, the best part of our road is at the end of it!
The boys love bringing apples and carrots for our neighbor's horses. Pita Pocket prefers just to look at the horses, but Short Pants now enjoys feeding them himself. Here he is giving his favorite horse, Prince, a carrot snack:
Our handwork last week was a bit different than normal. While we were at the craft store Short Pants fell in love with their foam haunted house kits. What's a mama to do? The Mister was working from home that day so he pitched in to help Short Pants put it together:
During our painting day last week the boys met Tricksy Orange Salamander during a story I created for them. I've had a lot of questions about my color stories and am thinking of writing them all up in a pdf to sell for a small fee. Would anyone be interested in purchasing something like that?
During our circle time this month we've been reading "The Little Red Hen." A friend of ours loaned us some story props she'd purchased from Mama Roots so that we could act out the story. The boys enjoyed setting up for the story and telling it very much. Short Pants even built a grain mill out of unit blocks for the hen to take her wheat too:
For our beeswax modeling last week we used a story called "The Uninvited Guest" from Outdoor Secrets. After we read the story we used pink modeling wax to make little worms. They are now residing on some "dirt" (brown felt) on the nature table. Pita said his worm didn't want its picure taken - ha! Sorry for the bad quality; the nature table is in a somewhat dim corner and it has been very cloudy here:
I can't say how happy I am that we've added Waldorf methods to our learning this year. There is such a sense of joy and wonder about it all.