We heard many, many myths and ended this block with Narcissus. He leans over the still water to see, not Mother Earth and her beauty, but himself. He cannot hear the nymph Echo who loves him. He whispers, ‘I love you,” to himself and she can only then echo back to him in his own words, her love for him. But he is deaf to hear, blind...
[read more]We arrived in Greece, moving north from the African continent, across the azure Mediterranean Sea to the land of Gods and Goddesses. We heard story after story of their very human exploits. Later, after North American Geography, will come the Iliad and we will step into history. To begin this journey we heard of Mother Earth and Father...
[read more]Egypt studies gave us a chance to experience life as a laborer and life as an overseer. Egyptians built some of the largest structures ever made in the world and they did it with slave labor. We divided into groups of three with an overseer and two minions and we built a pyramid from clay. Many of the minions had a hard time without...
[read more]Enkidu dies and Gilgamesh cannot live without him. In India, the eternal soul cycled through lifetimes and karma brought another chance to work through life's trials. But in Persia death takes on a sad finality, another duality appears, that of life and death. Gilgamesh searches for a way to see his beloved friend again and finds...
[read more]From Persia we moved east to the land between the two great rivers to hear one of the world's oldest stories, the epic of Gilgamesh. Here is the first mention of wrestling, that ancient sport that appears later in the Greek Olympic Games. Gilgamesh is part God, part man; he is arrogant and drives the people to build the world's first...
[read more]We left the oneness of India to encounter the dichotomies of Persia. This is the culture that domesticated dogs, invented fences for their herds, invented gardening, mastered fire and developed cooking. They saw the world as light and dark; the way the morning sun broke over the craggy hills to illumine one side and leave the other side...
[read more]The Prince Siddhartha’s story brought India to an end with the advent of Buddism. The prince will hurt nothing, and when his cousin shoots a swan, he rescues it and brings it back to health. The wounded swan was drawn in our books but we all wanted to paint the recovered swan.
Every culture has a flood story. India's is the story of Manu, an original good man who rescues a tiny fish from being eaten. The fish grows magically larger and tells him to build a boat. When the flood comes, the fish pulls Manu and his family to a new land, the land of India. We painted Manu's fish red in a blue sea using only...
[read more]The holy men of India lived on nuts and berries in the wilds of the Indian forests. What was most important to them was in their meditations and they did not mind the wild animals. We painted tigers.
We moved from Botany and the oneness of the world to a culture where the entire universe of space and time is a unity. As we learned in the poem “From Brahma”, opposites unite in Indian culture. We heard the stories of the Ramayana, of Sita’s kidnapping and rescue by Rama and Hanuman the monkey king. We painted the holy cow whose name...
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from Brahma
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanish'd gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They...
Mushrooms spring up overnight, with no sunlight, just the light of the moon. They have spores not seeds. One mushroom is the largest plant on earth. It stretches from the east coast of Canada to the middle of that country. Of course, we are speaking of the root sections. The fruiting bodies that spring up above the ground are what...
[read more]The beehive is open and we can see into it.
Cyprian ponders his drawing.
Katherine draws.
Alex focuses on his cactus in the desert room.
Alice drawing in the desert room.
Charlie hones in on his plant in the airoid room.
Arianna draws in the desert room.
Alena drawing in the desert room.
Luke and Leo settle in to draw in the airoid room by the koi pool with Chihuly glass lily pads.
Ashlynn draws.
Lucas and Liam settle in to draw in the desert room.
Ruth and Solveig settle in to draw in the desert room.
We draw, Victoria settles in.
The girls draw together.
Drawing and admiring each other's drawings.
We settle in and draw in the Desert Room.
We touch and look.
We are amazed.
We walked through the Palm room, Fern room, Desert room and Airoid room (heart shaped leaves.)
We begin meeting Mr. Gambill, husband of our German teacher Frau Gambill. We plan our walk. Click above on the title of this text and then two download potentials will open up. Click on those to see each photo unveil itself.
Click on the title of this text and then on each "download" poossibility to see a photo unveil itself. Thanks to Judy Krizmanic for taking many of these marvelous pictures. Also thanks to Monica Hopkins for coming along as with us.
We separated leaves from sage, purple shiso (like purple basil), and lemon balm. We tried to arrange them artistically as they grew up the stem. We were able to notice how the leaves changed their shapes as they moved from cotyledons, or first leaves, up through true leaves and onwards up to the flower, itself a metamorphosized leaf...
[read more]Taking the root's path down into the earth, we modeled carrots as they pushed down and swelled out. We tried to include the little sideways rootlets that grow 15 feet out to the sides of the main root! Their first leaves, the cotyledons give way to true leaves and we spent a lot of time in the leaf world. Here the plant takes in light...
[read more]These expansions and contractions continue as we follow growth up stem and out into leaf. We modeled leaves out of beeswax and drew the different kinds of expansions that leaves exhibit. This is different than classifying leaves based upon their outlines. We see, instead, the pushing and suctioning forces that spread and lengthen a...
[read more]Our third painting brought us up to the flower itself. We washed the whole page with yellow and then took away color to make a figure 8, a lemniscate. We walked the lemniscate on our classroom floor and discovered that if you hold out your arm, on one half of the form your arm is waving outside and on the other half it is inside the...
[read more]Our second painting was a long process: first a wash of yellow for sunlight from above. Again blue for water in the earth below. Then a wash of red over the blue creates purple for the dark of the earth. Then we planted a blue little seed. Washing clean and wiping our brushes dry, we took away paint to create white roots growing...
[read more]We painted first the blending of yellow from sunlight with blue from water below and created a breathing realm of green. We were re-establishing basic brush skills. There are 3 paintings below you can download one at a time.
Botany studied in Waldorf schools is an act of following metamorphosis. From Early Childhood classes on, the children follow seasonal metamorphosis. I began with botany so our fifth graders could vividly experience the blazing heat of summer fading into the cooler, wetter ripening of autumn. We have been walking to the garden to...
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Dear Parents -
Here is what I sent out in August regarding our Parent Teacher evenings.
August 3, 2012
Dear Parents of the Fifth Grade,
We are approaching the beginning of school and there are a few items to share with you. John and I set parent evenings for:
Wednesday, October 3, 7pm (with Nancy)
...
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Fifth grade is referred to as the “golden year” because students at this age are enthusiastic about learning, eager for new challenges and capable of hard work and creativity. Even in the social arena, they display a harmony that will soon be transformed by the pending complexities of the adolescent years.
In the Language Arts and...