I Choose Love

I guess this song has been around a while, but I just saw this video for the first time this morning and really wanted to share it.

Tallulah Falls

I still had a few pictures from our trip that I wanted to share, but I got distracted by our first week of Autumn Homeschooling. A lazy Sunday morning seems like the perfect time to show pictures from the most strenuous exercise we had on the whole trip.

Tallulah Falls, in Northern Georgia, is a beautiful workout.

This first view is the easy one, that anyone can see. It is only a short walk from the visitors center and is stroller and wheel chair accessible.







The rest of the series of water falls requires some serious work to see.

There are stairs, followed by more stairs, followed by even more stairs...







There is a swinging bridge at the bottom of the first long flight of stairs,



and then more stairs.



The pay off is this beautiful view at the bottom ( only 100 people a day are given permits to go beyond this point, so arrive early in the day if you want to do more exploring).










Going down all those stairs wasn't really that bad, it was the upward climb that showed us all just how out of shape we were.



When we reached the top, we took a short walk along a path, that had no stairs, to the overlook of the hydroelectric dam.





Then we retreated to the blessedly air conditioned visitors center.

Our Homeschooling Day

I just discovered this great blog called Life With My 3 Boybarians. It is currently hosting a "Not Back-to-school" blog hop

This week, participants were asked to post a link to a post about a day in the life of their homeschool, so here's mine.

7:00 a.m. : My alarm goes off. I get up before anyone else, because this is my chance to make coffee and work on my blog in peace. DH sleeps later because he stays up late working on stuff for school ( last night it was planning a lesson for the Intro. to Anthropology class he's teaching today).

9:00 a.m. : A boy and his bee:


Yesterday, Blaze found an inflatable bee that I bought at the Dollar Tree ages ago, thinking it would be a good prop if we did a unit on insects someday. He was really excited and wanted it blown up right away so he could play with it in the bathtub. Then he insisted on sleeping with it.

So, anyway, at 9:00 I wake Blaze up. I've been reading to him a little each morning as a way of gently starting our day. This morning I read On Beyond Bugs, because Bee wants to hear a story too.



Blaze gets dressed while I fold some laundry that I brought back from the laundry room late last night. Then we play Easy Sight Word Bingo while munching on a bowl of dry MultiGrain Cheerios.



This is the only day this week that we haven't gone outside to play on the swings on the other side of the apartment complex right after getting dressed ( the swings closest to our building are blocked off, because they are in the middle of the construction chaos). Swinging before sitting down to work, helps Blaze focus better and feel calm. We didn't go out because the construction seemed louder and more chaotic that usual and twice we had people knocking on our door because they were trying to see who was still without phone or cable connections (we now have cable, just no phone).

Blaze's occupational therapist has suggested that he needs to continue working on his handwriting, so he works independently on a handwriting page, while I take a shower.

After my shower, Blaze asks to be brushed (we had started therapeutic brushing with him a year ago because of his sensory integration issues) and then we work together on the last 2 pages of Unit One of the Spectrum Dolch Sight Word Activities book (volume 1).

Blaze then has free time until 11:15, when we have to drive DH to school. After we drop him off at the university, there are a couple errands to run. We go to our storage locker to pack away all the camping gear and pay for another month of rental, go to Macy's to exchange a broken coffee grinder for one that works, and go out for lunch (fish tacos).



We had taken bread with us, because we planned to go feed ducks in the pond near our storage locker, but it started raining.

When we get home, Blaze does his math on the adult bed ( we live in a very small apartment and the adult bed is often our classroom).



Blaze then lays down to listen to me reread the story of The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. This was the third time this week I had read this story. He had started working on a Main Lesson Book page for the story yesterday, but hadn't finished it, so he works on that now and as soon as that is done, I declare our first week back to homeschooling complete and we celebrate with a bowl of ice cream.



This week went pretty smoothly. The only rough day was Tuesday, but that's not bad when we are just getting back into the swing of things after Summer break.

Narurally Colored Modeling Beeswax

I really like the modeling beeswax that is sold by Waldorf art supply sources. It smells wonderful ( I can't stand the smell of Play-Do), is easy to clean up, and can be used over and over. The only drawback is the price, so last night I made my own. So far, I only have 3 colors, but it's a good size supply and it only cost about $7 to make.


Modeling Beeswax Recipe

4 ounces of beeswax
1 teaspoon Lanolin
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil



Melt the wax, lanolin, and oil in a double boiler. A clean soup can, sitting in a small pan of water, works well for this and is just the right size.
Use a wooden skewer or popsicle stick to stir the mixture while it melts. For a natural beeswax color, nothing more needs to be added. Just continue stirring while pouring the mixture into a foil lined cake pan or pie plate ( the foil is optional, but it makes clean-up easier).



Let the wax cool for about a half hour, cut into wedges, and remove from pan.



For red wax, place 2 teaspoons of alkanet root in a small piece of muslin or cheese cloth and tie the bundle closed with a long string. Holding onto the string, lower the cloth bundle down into the hot wax mixture right after it is all melted.



Leave the wax mixture on the heat for another 5 minutes, stirring constantly.



Carefully remove the cloth bundle before pouring. I found it easiest to use a pot holder and carry the hot soup can over to the trash can to remove the alkanet bundle, because it was dripping hot red wax.

For orange wax, I remelted half of the batch of natural color and half of the batch of red and added a little cloth bundle with a 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric, following the same directions as for the alkanet root.



These are all good colors to go with the upcoming Fall season.





Modeling Beeswax is not only a good play-do substitute, it is also good for decorating candles. The wax will stick to other wax just by pressing.

They call this the "renovation"

This was the scene yesterday, directly in front of our apartment. If it's not bad enough that we have to listen to that all day and that it has now been a month since they started, yesterday around 2 p.m. they cut the Cox Cable by accident. So we have no T.V. or internet. I don't know what time they cut the phone line, but that happened, as well. They didn't bother notifying us that the phone line had been cut, so I didn't find out until after 5:00, when I was wondering why DH was so late calling for a ride home from school and I picked up the phone and found no dial tone. It was raining, but I went out and found one of the workmen and he told me what had happened.
There was a residents meeting last night and I bought up my concern that without notification that the phones are down, one of us could find out when there is an emergency and we are trying to call 911. They said that they would communicate better with us in the future.
Another person brought up the issue of our rent increase, at the same time that livability had gone down, but we were told that nothing could be done about that.
I am at the public library right now, so I can use the internet, because almost 24 later, we still have no cable.

The Humans in the Zoo

A friend posted this link on Facebook this morning and I wanted to share it with all of you:

A sign that hangs in the Bristol Zoo

Amazing Butterflies

If you are in the Gainesville, Florida area, or this traveling exhibit comes to a museum near you, and you have young children, go see it! It was really fun! Blaze had been asking all Summer to go, but we only just got around to it last Friday.





The exhibit is in the form of a maze and follows a butterfly through it's entire life cycle in a very active way.

The child is soaking wet, because it was pouring rain when we arrived at the natural history museum






Some of the paths in the maze lead to perils, others lead you towards the next stage of development.







Blaze scared a little girl while he was doing this




Then there was flight!



We also looked at a small exhibit of modern Zuni art that used butterfly imagery.

A Little Video Reading Review

Blaze is still having problems with his reading, partly because he has trouble processing all the sounds in the words. It's very connected to the problems he continues to have in speech, such as leaving off the first syllables from many words. A couple weeks ago his speech therapist and I started compiling a list of the words he does this to on a regular basis and the list is getting quite long. It includes words like computer, which is "puter" and pretend, which is "attend".

I have collected the following videos to use with him this week, as a review of phonics and sight words that he has worked with in the past, but has not fully retained.








Beginning Sight Words:



Movements to go with sight words:

Our Homeschooling Plans for Second Grade

We started our new school year today. Once again we will be using Math-U-See for Math, because I really like the way the lessons are presented. Blaze still has about 10 lessons left in the Alpha book ( I know I said we were going to do those over the Summer, but that determination only lasted long enough to finish one more lesson after the regular school year ended).

Math_U-See





For the first time, I ordered a curriculum instead of completely making up my own. We will be using the second grade curriculum from Christopherus, Waldorf homeschooling, but I'm going to be supplementing it with extra handwriting and reading materials, as well as the Math-U-See.




Christopherus

Waldorf Second grade includes a unit about Saints and Heroes, so I have begun collecting books about Saints. We are not Catholic, so we didn't have very many of these books in our collection prior to this.

We are starting our school year with a Language Arts unit of animal legends.



Following the recommendations of Christopherus, we will be using a kinderlyre for music lessons, but we will not start that for a couple more weeks.



For art, we have a new a new book about drawing with the block crayons, which I would like to use. Blaze is not a big fan of crayons, though. I think it's mostly the way they feel that bothers him ( he has some sensory issues about the way things feel in his hands). It is recommended by the Waldorf Curriculum that children not be introduced to pencils until third grade, but Blaze will be using Lyra pencils for most of his work. This is one of those things where the child's temperament is more important than the established educational practices. If he isn't comfortable, he won't do his best work.



We'll also be doing lots of craft projects and water color painting for art. Blaze told me a few days ago that he thought his whole school day should be nothing but water color painting.

Unfortunately, the picnic table that we had been using for our messy art projects, like painting, is gone and our the area behind the apartment where it used to stand, currently looks like this:



We are scheduled to have another water outage sometime between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. today. It will be the third such outage in the past week (one was unscheduled, because the workmen broke the water main).