Waldorf Grade 5: Ancient Cultures Block

  Our second block of the fifth grade school year was Ancient Cultures, which combined language arts, history, social studies and geography.  As an aside, anytime we are not in a math block we always start our day with some math practice on the board, so that those skills do not get forgotten.

  Our first area of focus was India and it covered two weeks. As usual, we began by mapping India and studying the indigenous plants and animals.

 We learned the origin story Manu and the Flood.  We found references to Atlantis and compared it to Noah's ark.  For any of the myths or history stories, we follow a two day schedule of learning.  On the first day I tell the story, usually with a chalk drawing I have prepared, and Jack will make a main lesson page drawing.  On the following day he will retell the story, in his own words, while we work on language mechanics.  Some days he just writes, but if it is a complicated story I may help him make an outline first to make sure we don't leave out any crucial information.  

 We found a beautiful version of the Ramayana in the book A Year Full of Stories.  We really enjoyed learning about the faith of India through the Bhagavad-Gita and comparing it to our own values.

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 Since the boys are in the school room together, they often hear parts of their brother's main lessons. Will was halfway paying attention to the story of Rama and Sita when he heard mention of the Monkey King, Hanuman.  I guess the idea of a Monkey King proved irresistible to Will and he immediately had to drop his own project and get his vision on paper! This is one of my favorite things about homeschooling: that we have the space for this kind of work.

 Our third week of study focused on Buddha.  Again, we compared our own values and faith with The Eightfold Path and the Noble Truths.

  For our final week of study, we spent the first day mapping Persia.

  The following day we covered Zarathustra.  Again, this was a great opportunity to compare and contrast all of these world religions with our own.  How wonderful to see so many core values in common.  

  Later in the week we looked at Xerxes and the wars with Greece.  Jack is excited to get to the Ancient Greece block (thanks, Percy Jackson!), so he was eager to hear mention of Sparta.  We may have taken more of a Greek focus than was intended, but it's nice to have the student so eager!

Waldorf Grade 5: Geography Mini Units

  The first block for Waldorf Essentials Fifth grade combines mapping, geography and history.  We started with a review of US Geography, learning which states were in each of the four regions and remembering capitals.  This took us through the first week of school, studying a new region each day. For each region Jack made a main lesson page that listed each of the states and their capitals.  We worked with some map puzzles and even played the Stack the States app on the iPhone (the horror! So very un-Waldorf!  Yet, so very effective in this instance!).

   We studied Africa for the next week, mapping the continent and reading about the flora and fauna.  

 If you have ever used Waldorf Essentials before, you will know that the curriculum can often be a suggestion about what to focus on for the daily lesson.  Personally, I love having this framework and tailoring the lessons to fit the child.  It does mean you will need some extra resources, many are suggested by Melisa (especially in the grade overview audio recordings on her site).  The extra resources we use are normally wikipedia pages printed out, examples of main lessons found on pinterest and library books.  We have managed to build a pretty good home library over the years and I was able to pull several books to help with these units.  Here are the bulk of them:

 The Monkey and the Fiddle was our choice for the folk tale. Jack did a great job on his first summary of the year and took great care with his border and drawing.  We try to follow a two day Waldorf approach to Main Lessons,  listening to the story on the first day and then modeling or drawing from it.  On the second day, after the story has had time to digest, we write a summary.  We usually discuss it first, to make sure that we remember the important characters and events.  I will put proper names on the board to help with spelling, but Jack writes it himself.  When he is finished, we read through it together to catch spelling or grammatical errors.  I'm a big fan of focusing on a few items at a time, as I gleaned from Julie at Brave Writer.  For example, we may discuss the following: run-on sentences, proper nouns start with a capital letter, and sentences end with a punctuation mark. I'll have Jack look for those items on his own and try to limit any critiques to those specific areas.

  To wrap up the Africa block, Jack cooked an African feast for us, using this Moroccan Chickpea Stew recipe. 

  Our next mini block was Atlantis.  This definitely seems like an odd choice, but it is typical in the Waldorf fifth grade curriculum.  We talked about the legends, specifically Plato's writings about it, and where it may have been located. We also looked at maps drawn from Plato's description and made a clay model.  Like the other areas of study, we also looked at animals and plants.

  Our next stop on the mini world tour was Australia.  Aboriginal folk tales combined with exotic plants and animals mad this a really enjoyable unit to study. I am so glad we found out about the book Topsy-Turvy World: How Australian Animals Puzzled Early Explorers by Kristy Murray from some Australian homeschoolers on IG.  Reading about the European explorers' first impressions of animals such as the platypus and wombat was highly entertaining.  He chose to write about the kangaroo from the fifteen species highlighted in this book.

  Our geography block really set the stage for a fun school year.  We got a little busy and didn't plan a meal for Australia, which was a shame.  It certainly adds a lot to the unit and Jack is so proud to take charge of a family dinner.  Jack's map making skills improved greatly this month, as did his world geography knowledge.

Waldorf Grade 3: Old Testament and the Hebrews Unit

 After spending the first week of school reviewing math and grammar from last year, we jumped right in with our Old Testament unit.  We started with some geography lessons about the biblical lands as well as history of the Jewish people.

  With this background we moved on to the days of creation from Genesis.  Here are some of the main lesson book pages Will made to represent the first week.

 We used this youtube video to finger knit a snake for the Expulsion from the Garden story.

 Then we moved on to the fun stuff:  the fall Jewish holidays.  First we made a perpetual calendar wheel and studied the months and days of the Jewish calendar.

 Then we celebrated Rosh Hashanah by baking a Challah with apples and honey.  The recipe is from Smitten Kitchen, and one we use every year. Will did most of the work this year and proudly brought one of the challah loaves to share at Temple services.

We also made main lesson pages for Yom Kippur and Sukkot:

 We finished up our unit with the stories of  Cain and Abel and the children of Lamech, descendent of Cain.  Lamech's children are Jabel, Jubal, Tubal-Cain and Naamah.  I had never heard of any of them before but it was very interesting to learn about the father of animal husbandry, the father of musical instruments, the father of metalwork and the mother of the weaving arts, respectively.

Our next unit is a math study, but will incorporate Noah and his ark into the lessons as we learn about measurements.  

Some resources for this unit study include:  

  Jewish Holidays All Year Round 

  Children's Illustrated Jewish Bible

:Waldorf Grade Two: {Saints Block}

  When I began planning out our homeschool journey I knew that Waldorf was the pedagogy that most resonated with me.  When I saw the second grade curriculum centered around Saints and Heroes it gave me pause.  I am Catholic, much less devout than how I was raised, but a very spiritual person still, but my husband is Jewish and this is the path we have chosen to raise our children.  However, we do not feel that learning about other religions is any threat to our beliefs and, in fact, openly seek to learn about other religions and cultures.  The Saint stories are amazing and the core lessons about doing good works are applicable to anyone trying to be a better person.  We thoroughly enjoyed our first Saints unit and look forward to working on more stories as the year progresses.

  The saints unit follows the Waldorf model of listening to a story, creating from it (in the form of a drawing, modeling, a song or a play), and summarizing it on the following day.  My second grader, Will, has always been an avid writer and he likes to recount a lot of detail.  The challenge with him has been getting him to leave out some of the details and get the gist of the story written down before he gets tired of the task.  Sometimes he is adamant about including the minutiae and we just take another day to finish writing the summary.  The stories are included with the lesson plans from Waldorf Essentials and we really didn't use any additional resources.  I looked through a few Saints books, but found the material in the curriculum to be better.

  St. Francis was always a favorite Saint of mine, and I have visited Assisi a couple times, so he was a fun one to start with.  Will enjoyed the stories about his birth and troubles with his wealthy father. He was told in a dream to rebuild God's church on earth and so he sold his father's luxurious belongings to give the funds to a priest to literally rebuild the crumbling church.  Another dream revealed to him that "the church" he was meant to rebuild referred to the people, and so he set out to work in service to the people.  This theme on helping God by helping His people was a recurring theme I was happy to emphasize through this unit.  

 

  For fun, we made pinecone and peanut butter bird feeders to celebrate St. Francis' love for all creatures.

  Grammatically, we are trying to work on natural pauses when we read our work aloud to avoid run on sentences.

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  St. Jerome and the Lion is definitely an exciting tale and Will really enjoyed this lesson.  We also worked with our modeling beeswax to make lions.  It really is nice to work with as we hold it in our hands to make it warm and malleable while we listen to the story and then it's ready to form.  

 

Our next Saint story was the transformation of the powerful soldier Offero into St. Christopher.  Will was absorbed by the tale of Offero searching for the greatest master to serve.  He ultimately realizes that the greatest master is God and serving Him means putting down his weapons and using his strength to help people. 

my chalk drawing for St. George and the Dragon, copied from a pinterest photo with no link

Well, obviously, St. George and the dragon was a huge hit! Will was very surprised that George ended up killing the dragon.  He said he thought it would end like St. Francis and the Wolf or St. Jerome and the Lion, with George finding out what the problem was and helping the dragon.  Interesting.  He liked the Tomie dePaola story much better!

Our first unit on Saints culminated with St. Martin and the feast of Martinmas.  I'll record more about our festival in the next post.