Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

Wow! Its been a busy few weeks and after having a holiday at home, spending time doing very little with my brain, I feel well and ready to take on a new term of work at school and to tackle the garden. (Garden sounds weird to me, it makes me think of flowers and fountains and maybe a gnome or 2) This is not our garden. Ours is a working piece of land. A few flowers but they’re not a priority at this stage.

A week ago we started school again. Its been great fun. StJohn is just about done with his letters so we’re planning an angel letter party next week Friday. Okay I just read that last sentence and realised most people will think I’m daft. Let me explain…

The way I teach StJohn his letters is by introducing each letter as a character, eg. B was Bertie the Butterfly, who loved to play with his bat and ball, Bertie also loved wearing blue and eating buns and biscuits. Okay, so all the consonants are characters and they go on a Journey through a magical land, crossing rivers, entering crystal caves and deep forests for find the fairy queen. They’re led by King Kyle by the way.

Anyway all these consonants meet along the way and as we near the end of their journey (we’re nearly there) they are all gathered at the foot of the rainbow bridge. The angel letters (aeiou) are all on the other side of the rainbow bridge. All the characters and the 3 of us, call the angel letters, asking them to cross the rainbow bridge and help us. We need them to be glue to hold the other letters together to make words.

I then light a candle for each angel letter that arrives, we say it write it and use it in a word or 2. Once all the angel letters have joined us we then have a party. ie. cakes sweets chips streamers.

I used this method with Juliette and I swear to this day she’s never forgotten it. It launched her into reading. She started gluing words together(metaphorically speaking), sounding them and reading off boxes, packets, in fact anything that had a word on it.  She was excited and still is. She goes through 3 books a week at the moment (eg. Roald Dahl’s books, and she looovvees ghost stories) I never have to ask her to “do her reading”, as I heard our neighbour tell her daughter.

Anyway that’s StJohn’s english/reading at the moment. He was introduced to Polly Plus last week again, and he’s happily adding any combination up to 10. So we’re on track.

Juliette is still busy with her Clonard Curriculum. We’re really enjoying it. We’ve studied the weather this week. Found out about different metals that are used in the home. Along with calculator skills and problems sums. Her spelling and comprehension are her strongest subjects. We’ve done direction, looking at compass points, a bit of mapwork. Oh and the dreaded Afrikaans. I’m not so good at Afrikaans. Juliette doesn’t enjoy it, no matter what fun I try and come up with so now we just do our allocated work each week, and I do my best to make her laugh, so she seems happy to open the books now, which is a huge improvement!

My best friend is afrikaans and I know she laughs at me and my sad english accent, but at least I’m trying! I have to, if I want to Homeschool I need to do a second language and my latin isn’t an option.

That’s it from a strictly “school” point of view this week. It was fun, tiring and overall I’d saying satisfying for all 3 of us. Of course there is a more than good chance that next week may go to hell in a handbasket which would be pretty normal, but this week was good!

Blessings to you all.

Susan

Filed under: Homeschool on April 18th, 2008