Working and Playing Hard Together

Looking back at this month, I am amazed at how much we’ve done together. We’ve explored the topic of “family” by graphing data regarding family members & pets, looking at American history by developing a timeline based on the lifespan of our oldest living relative, and starting “Family Tree” scrapbooks full of family recipes and more. We’ve celebrated the beginning of Fall season with songs, movement, and art projects too. We enjoyed our family pot luck and a field trip to an apple orchard.

Last Friday we celebrated October’s big holiday with our own home-made Halloween Carnival. The kids arrived in costume and did a costume parade. We had Cinderella, Ariel/The Little Mermaid, Briar Rose, a rock-star-diva, an army soldier, and an evil scientist in our parade.

Our Circle Time featured a singing game “Witches Brew” [which exercised the kids’ language arts abilities (pronoun & imaginative noun substitutions) along with musical development (matching pitch, solo/chorus)]. We also played a movement game with the classical piece by Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” We first learned a chant that matched the melodic motifs in the piece. Then the kids took turns being “sneaky people” or “terrible trolls” and took turns acting out their parts as the musical motifs directed the movement. They had no idea they were developing interpretive music capabilities as their game developed into wild frenzy. They absolutely loved this activity and asked to do it again and again and again.

Our chapter in “Ramona the Pest” for this day just happened to be the one title “The Baddest Witch in the World” with Ramona in her own Halloween parade.

Because of the smoky skies (the Esperanza fire) we had to stay indoors all day but we kept busy and happy with some fun cooperative games invented by me and the kids. We finger-painted Halloween icons with black and orange fingerpaint. We pinned tails on the black cat. Instead of bobbing for apples, we played an apple relay game where the kids had to pass an apple back and forth from their own toilet paper roll to their partner’s toilet paper roll without dropping the apple while getting through a tricky obstacle course together. We also made up a cooperative challenge in which the kids as six baby spiders had to make it to the web (across the room) together without breaking the web (three hula hoops) or leaving any others behind. This took quite a bit of problem-solving, but working together they did it!

Now that the skies are clear, perhaps you’d like to do a Sickening Scavenger Hunt, egg yoke relay, and map of the neighborhood (a.k.a. trick-or-treat map) at home with your child today or tomorrow. Let me know if you do!

Apple Picking & Feeding Catfish

Yesterday afternoon we carpooled up the hill to Tenaja (past the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Preserve) to an organic apple orchard and pond (Apple Creek). Mark, a "retired" professional, started the orchard and built the pond about five years back and he was very generous in sharing his time and passion with our small group. He showed us fish "nests" (spawning circles in the shallows of the pond), the windmill that pumps oxygen into the bottom of the pond (keeping it healthy in an all-natural ecological way), and some cottonwood trees that towered above us and were just "sticks" about four years ago.

The kids clamored onto the dock which extended into the pond and got to feed the fish big chunks of raw meat. We were amazed to see huge catfish with their whiskers and to learn that there were about 10,000 fish in the pond.

After a picnic by the pond, Mark walked us to the orchard and gave us each a big grocery bag and invited us to pick golden delicious apples from his trees. We were fascinated to discover some seemingly intact apples that were actually hollowed out and hiding voracious yellow jackets inside. When our bags got too heavy, we ventured over to the organic vegetable patch where Mark showed us his towering tomatoes, new beds of sugar snap peas, and strawberry patches. We purchased some purple sweet potatoes, white eggplants, golden pear tomatoes, and butternut squash and carried our treasures to the car full of thanks for our generous host. What bounty at the end of harvest time!

Family Dinner & Dancing

Tuesday night we enjoyed getting all the families together—the first time we’ve been able to get all the dads, moms, & kids here at once. We were thrilled to see how everyone related so well to each other. What wonderful families these kids have!

Each family brought a favorite family recipe to share with the group—we had Jeff’s chili mac, Elbert’s Polynesian chicken, the secret Bellah Waldorf chicken salad recipe that’s been authentically replicated by California Pizza Kitchen, and Alden’s favorite dutch apple pies.

The kids shared their be-bop rendition of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We had our Always Vivacious Actress play Goldilocks, and Lydia played the papa bear drum, Laurun played the mama bear drum, and Alden played the wee bear drum while Elex and Grace accompanied with shakers saying “yeah!”

I’d like to elaborate on the process used in teaching what might seem like a simple percussion accompaniment to this story/song. Using what I’ve learned in the Orff-Schulwerk process of teaching music to children, I first taught the children body percussion based on the call & response elements in the story/song. For the papa bear response, the kids patted their laps in the rhythm of the words, for the mama bear they clapped to the words, and for the baby bear they snapped. This helped them quickly learn a rhythm pattern that included quarter notes, eighth notes, and rests. If I had attempted to teach the kids this rhythm by asking them to follow the notes, or even “one-and-a two-and-a three—rest,” it would have taken a long time and would probably have caused frustration and anxiety. Instead, by following the rhythm of the word pattern, they quickly picked up on the rhythm pattern, easily replicated it with body percussion, and then effortlessly transferred this to percussion instruments. And we were able to share our creative results with only a three minute impromptu rehearsal. You’ll learn more about the beauty and joy of the Orff process in future entries here.

One of the kids wanted to sing our poetic rendition of “My Favorite Things,” so we gave an unrehearsed performance of this piece too. The kids are still busy illustrating their books based on this poem/song. We have some artists illustrating with cut paper, one with pencil sketches, and others with colored pencil illustrations.

The kids then helped their parents learn a simple and delightful folk dance to “The Chimes of Dunkirk.” It was very special to have some kids dancing with their parents as partners, one pair of girls partnering off, and one parent couple actually dancing with each other!

Our wonderful evening together ended with more great conversation, the kids running around and having tickle contests with their dads, and as Alden told me later, some impressive speed-crawling by one dad. We are grateful to have such a fantastic group of families in our “Circle” and to see the special friendships growing.

"Our Favorite Things" Collaborative Poem

Our six kids collaborated to write this poem, modeled after the song "My Favorite Things" from the Sound of Music soundtrack:

"Our Favorite Things"

Chocolate cake, cookies, and all kinds of candy,
Hummingbirds sipping nectar from flowers,
Snow-covered mountains and clouds in the sky,
These are a few of our favorite things.

Easter in springtime, Christmas and toys,
Swimming in summer with the sun in my face,
Leaves turning colors, we celebrate Fall,
These are a few of our favorite things.

When my cat scratches,
When I fall in the dirt,
When no one wants to sit by me,
I simply remember my favorite things,
and then I don't feel so bad.

Legos and TV and stuffed animals too,
Toy trains and puzzles and pencils and glue,
Dressing my baby doll, combing her hair,
These are a few of our favorite things.

Rainbow of colors, orange, pink and green,
Dress-up and painting and a rainbow of flowers,
Goosebumps, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid,
These are a few of our favorite things.

When my cat scratches,
When I fall in the dirt,
When no one wants to sit by me,
I simply remember my favorite things,
and then I don't feel so bad.

Celebrating Fall & Family

This week we began our new theme for the month, "Family & Community," which we'll explore through an engaging variety of song, stories, art projects, math and language, social studies, and even science. We're also celebrating the beginning of autumn, which may be mild in our area but we still enjoy crisp breezes, blue sky, and a little bit of warm autumn color.

Our Circle Time this week included a song, "Riding Along the Open Road," which the kids learned to sing and then improvised with the lyrics through a movement game. They devised all sorts of ways to enjoy a Fall day, by skipping, marching, galloping, hopping, wiggling, and slithering "along the open road/under a sky that's clear/all in the Fall of the year."

We read together "Grandfather Tang's Story: A Tale Told with Tangrams" by Ann Tompert. Each child had their own set of tangrams to arrange in different animal shapes during this interactive and suspenseful story. This task may sound simple, but it's actually quite challenging. The kids worked cooperatively, guiding each other when one would get stuck. I shared with the kids that this fun puzzle actually gave them practice in important mathematical skills and stretched their visual-spatial capabilities.

Friday's Circle Time included "Show and Tell" (inspired by Ramona the Pest), where the children shared items from home that told something about their family.

For one of the exploratory sessions, the kids traced and cut their own set of tangrams out of construction paper to take home and create their own tangram stories and shapes, and to challenge their parents too. Did any of you try to make a rabbit or a fox out of the seven shapes? What about a hawk or crocodile?

Another exploratory session included collecting leaves from trees in the yard. We examined the shapes together, noticed the variety of shapes and edge patterns but also the symmetry in shape and even in the veins of each leaf. The kids created a beautiful fall leaf banner by cutting their own symmetrical (and some asymmetrical) leaf shapes from fall-colored construction paper.

During our art lesson this week, Ms. Spramani guided the children to begin a family portrait, building on the attention to detail that the kids exercised when creating their self-portraits two weeks ago. This time they looked at the shape of an egg to visualize the head shape for each family member, and they thought about proportion and spatial relationships when deciding where to draw each family member's head on the page, and how to size them.

The children stretched their literary skills in our final collaborative project of the week, transforming their pre-writing on "My Favorite Things" into a poem modelled after the song. Look for the delightful result in our next post!

What we did last week

We wrapped up our theme "All About Me" this past week. During Wednesday's Circle Time we listened to a recording of the song "My Favorite Things" (from the Sound of Music soundtrack) and then we collaborated on pre-writing our own "Favorite Things" poem. I recorded three pages of notes based on what the kids identified as their favorite seasons, things around the house, pets, wild animals, dress up food, and also a few things that make them sad or hurt. Next week we'll listen again to the song (read as a poem) and then draft our own collaborative poem.

The children finished assembling their "All About Me" paper quilts onto banner paper. Even though they worked with the same materials, each one was laid out completely differently than the others. I love to see individual creativity in action!

The group created a "Growing Tree" to record everyone's height, and then during another exploratory session the kids each completed Measurement Riddles. They worked in pairs to measure & record their own height and weight with a tape measure and scale, used a ruler to measure the length of their hair, and used a calendar to determine their age to the month. During our Quiet Reading Time I read their riddles and the kids loved figuring out who each riddle referred to just by considering the measurements. We also began reading our first chapter book together, Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary.

Wednesday's art lesson with Spramani was nice and MESSY! Spramani led the kids in using tempera paint and their fingers or hands to paint an image of a "favorite thing." They mixed primary colors to paint with favorite colors like purple and pink, and mixed in white to get just the right shade of blue, etc. You can bet the kids loved every messy minute of this project and created wonderful paintings.

Friday's Circle Time featured a song, "Remember September," to celebrate the beginning of Fall (and to learn about poetic imagery). I sang the song and played it on the piano, then led the kids in singing the song line by line as we discussed how the writer used poetic imagery rather than plain language. The kids then developed a beautiful movement skit with scarves and ribbons to accompany the song and bring the imagery to life. We'll use our deepened understanding of poetic writing as we continue to write our group poem next week. You can look forward to reading the results here in a few days!