This was a busy week with programs starting up and visiting friends plus friends visiting which made for a fast yet fun week.

The boys have been learning grammar for a while using First Language Lessons, part of the classical teaching we had been using. It’s wonderful and has some great poems in it for memorizing and some of them (many!) we use for our circle time. It also introduces grammar beginning with nouns and verbs and the different types. I think I may still use it from time to time as I find it so valuable.

In grade 3 grammar is introduced in the Waldorf lessons.  Since Xman is familiar with some of the parts of a sentence from our grammar book it made it easy for both boys to do this lesson. This copy work is from a wonderful poem in the Watercolour Stories called Blessings of Fall. We read the poem together and then the boys copied the work using blue for the nouns and red for verbs. Xman switched ‘scarlet’ for ‘red’ poppies as he loves this colour. I can’t blame him – it’s a pretty awesome colour!

Xman’s is first and L’s is below.

I found it interesting the way L spaced his work out into verses as shown in the poem and X just focused on copying.

Math. Geez. Who’d a thunk I’d love math? Wish I had learned it the way the boys do. It was wonderful starting off with MathUSee and now using Waldorf is amazing. We have started with grade one for both. It’s not that they don’t get it. They know how to add, subtract and multiply and even divide a bit but I decided to start here because it gives a new understanding and a new way to look at numbers and how they relate to each other and the real world.

I love the number three. It’s just wonderful and so I was excited to introduce it in a new way:

•physical three such as a shamrock with three leaves; a triceratops with three horns; three colour receptors in our eyes.

•mental three such as trigonometry – measuring triangles (3 sides!); others threes like ‘trio’, ‘triad’, ‘triplet’.

•spiritual three such as the Holy Trinity; three divisions of self – physical, mental, spiritual.

We made a vine of leaves where each had three points and these points we numbered. The boys ended up with ten leaves of three points. I asked Xman (as I knew L would get this right away), ‘If there are 30 points of 3 then how may leaves have you drawn?’ He said, ‘ten’. And so we have learned some division. 🙂

The boys were thrilled to see their drawings as a way to count by threes. Much more fun for us than a workbook.

L went further and added all of the numbers you use to count by three’s up to number twenty-four to see if the sum would be a multiple of three (see lower right). We talked about how all these numbers are multiples of three and did a bit of division as well to see how many times three could go into 108.

This bit of work proved promising for me for it taught me that even though L is learning Waldorf grade one math he is using another level of thinking to go further with the basics. I need not worry that this is too elementary as it gives him room to explore and discover numbers in a new way. I have found that even with X it has opened his eyes to the relation of numbers that he wouldn’t experience with a workbook.

We read a story called How the Corn Came to Be. To continue the theme of three’s we thought of what we could make with triangles and Xman came up with some pretty fun drawings such as gems and a rocket!

He then went on to draw arrows and bows which he decided to price. If you can see the paper clearly he made a list of prices with the type of arrow that coincided. The arrow drawings at this point weren’t complete arrows but the parts of an arrow. You had to mentally combine the lines with the other shapes to figure out which arrow was which for each price.

This brought about more ideas with L and arrows being sold with his new currency called Qwaddel. Xman decided his were Quibble. L said one Qwaddel was worth five Canadian dollars so he did the conversion for the price of his arrows. These boys sell some pretty pricy stuff! 🙂

The fun didn’t stop here. The boys wanted to make their own currency. I found a recipe for air dry clay that was easy to make and for which we already had the ingredients. (We used recipe number four.)

The boys shaped their coins and once dry added value to them. Xman has red and blue for his Quibbel and L has yellow and green for his Qwaddel.

Now that the coins are dry the boys have started trading them. Tomorrow we add shellac to them to prolong their life. I think they will see a lot of use!

The more Waldorf we do the more I find their minds expanding to include other ideas and ways of thinking. Creating a new currency was so much fun. I can’t wait to see what week four brings!