Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

Hi Everyone,

On Friday Juliette learned about the cycle of dairy, being from cow, to milking process, to pasteurisation to transporting of the milk to the making of the final dairy products.

I racked my brain to come up with a way to teach her this that would be exciting….Basically, the cow gets taken into the milking parlor, the udder gets washed, the cow gets milked by hand or machine…. It has the potential to be BORING!

I drew the cycle of dairy on the blackboard with pictures in the relevant places, then we printed out from the internet a photograph of the various breeds of dairy cow. She really enjoyed this as a lot of the photos are of cute cows in dandelion fields.

She then stuck these onto a page and labelled them according to breed.

Then we again went to the computer and she listened to the sound of a cow mooing. Both Jules and StJohn loved this and listened about 10 times to the recording.

My Ideal would have been to take them to a dairy farm, but I couldn’t find one close to where we live, so we’ll do it when we get back home to Cape Town, as a revision exercise. In the meantime the dairy farm had to come to us!

After the sound of a cow mooing, we then got onto a site called www.moomilk.com, and she followed the pictures and read the descriptions of the dairy process, it has great photographs, which made the lesson a lot more real.

Once she understood the cycle and had a basic idea of pasteurisation, she then drew the diagram of the dairy cycle on a page and was able to draw as many pictures as she wanted.

After taking a break, we then did the fun part of the Dairy Cycle Lesson. We made a paperbag Cow hand puppet. I’d prepared all of this the night before as it was quite a chunk of work to get through.

After the hand puppet, which they loved! We quietly sat down and read a gorgeous book called Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type

The hand puppet and the story just brought the humorous side of the cow to life. We’ve now read the book 4 times in 2 days. It’s an award winning book, that revolves around cows that type, and send letters of demand to their farmer, and then not getting what they want go on strike. Both my 8 and 5 year old found it very funny.

After that we said our closing verse, and went for a walk to the park. It was a huge lesson, but was the greatest fun and we all stayed focused throughout.

I really feel it was the practical homeschooling techniques that brought it to life, using their senses to bring a possibly boring subject to life.

Blessings as you Homeschool this coming week.

Susan

Filed under: Homeschool on August 12th, 2007