The Diosa Dotada Endeavor

This morning, we embarked on a mathematical adventure not for the faint of heart.  It was rigorous and required my sharpest recording skills while Kindy Girl emphatically measured everything in sight with everything else in sight.  We used paper clips, wooden blocks, marbles, straws, and toothbrushes to measure the comparative lengths of tables, doors, dry erase boards, shoes, and each other.  We also drew and cut out Kindy Girl’s foot print and handspan to use measuring the dimensions of our apartment.  We compared these measurements to the same dimensions measured with my pace.  Next, we pulled out our bucket balance and measured the comparative weights of marbles, blocks, a bar of soap, markers, board books, toothbrushes, combs, cereal, raisins, and torn up construction paper.  Finally, to cap off the madness, Kindy Girl wriggled into her swimsuit and carted off pots, pans, bowls, cups, glasses and jars to the bath tub for some intense estimating and measuring of comparative volumes.  Naturally, the entire Triad eventually ended up in the bath tub and we retreated from formal education to their natural state of utter damp chaos.  Next up, a little read aloud time and maybe a nap.  

Today I taught my first Itsy Artists class for our homeschooling group’s exhuberant seven and under crowd.  This month we are exploring the arena of drawing.  February is a great month for them to make their marks.  I am using First Art by MaryAnne Kohl and Art Adventures at Home Level 1 as my primary sources of inspiration, along with some classic Crunchy Mama flair, of course.  I designed two seperate activities to engage to the young kids and the youngest kids in the group.  Today our littlest artists, ages 0 to 35 months, completed a Tactile Texture Adventure and spent the class coloring with jumbo crayons on coarse sandpaper, watching the bright colors scrape across the funky, new surface.  I had the parents peel the paper off their crayons before class so they could vigorously scribble uninterrupted as their crayons began to wear down.  The 3 to 7 year old crowd discussed what tools and surfaces they commonly use for drawing at home.  Then we took a look at what sorts of drawings have been created throughout history with a variety of materials.  We viewed a page from the breathtaking Book of Kells, planning sketches of various European Renaissance architecture, a delightfully amusing, mixed media Paul Klee drawing, and a drawing of one of Christo’s funky nature sculptures.  All of these works were created with various drawing tools and drawing surfaces.  The children got a stack of drawing surfaces to begin exploring.  Their packets included one of each of the following: white drawing paper, white tissue paper, yellow cotton fabric, heavy or thin cardboard, fine or very fine sandpaper, a round coffee filter, and in the spirit of Valentine’s Day a white lace paper doily.  (Additional ideas for this project that we did not have time for would include burlap, newsprint, heavy plastic, wrapping paper, matte board, rocks, wood scraps, wax paper and aluminum foil or any other surface you can possibly think of for yourself.)  The children brought their own traditional drawing tools including crayons, markers, highlighters, pencils and colored pencils, pens, and chalk.  I provided them with a few more non-traditional options to explore– bamboo skewers with charred ends, cotton swabs dipped in coconut oil, and their absolute favorite, chopped pieces of beets.  (Other options for further fun include cinnamon sticks, Glass Wax, bingo markers, and cotton swabs dipped in food coloring.)  Many of them wanted to know what other vegetables they could draw with and I slyly recommended they ask their parents to set up an experiment at home and let me know what other vegetables they successfully created art with at the next class.  Several children discovered they had a favorite tool/surface combination.  Chalk on sandpaper was very popular.  Beets on doilies was another favorite.  One young man used his entire beet chunk on his sandpaper, leaving nothing but the skin left.  All in all, great fun and exploration was had by everyone and the horizons of drawing were significantly expanded.  Next class we will be exploring the effects different lines create by reading Harold and the Purple Crayon and creating our own purple crayon story drawings while the youngest kids play with wet construction paper and chalk.  I’ll keep you updated on the fun. 

I remember when Kindy Girl began really chasing new knowledge.  It was exhillarating for both of us.  She would root out new discoveries and devour new information with reckless abandon.  I would delight in presenting each new topic and watching the experience unfold.  Lost in the mire of a year and a half of diapering and nursing duty times two, I totally forgot about those days until they exploded to the forefront of my mind this weekend as the Master and Mistress of De-struction suddenly got con-structive!  I had the honor of watching them work together to assemble a wooden shapes and colors themed puzzle.  After placing all the pieces in and out two or three times, the Mistress picked up one piece, looked up at me and held it out with an inquisitive little squeak.  “Circle.” I said, “Red circle.”  They both smiled and repeated emphatically, “red cir-whirl!”  She replaced that piece correctly while he grabbed another, locking eyes with me and copying his twin sister’s productive gestures.  “Yellow rectangle.” I answered.  She yelled “YELLOW!” and giggled.  He tackled “weck-tangle” pretty successfully.  I was hooked and immediately droppped the laundry I was folding in favor of ploping on the floor with them to shout shapes and colors and giggle hysterically at how funny all this spontaneous learning could be together. 

Oddly enough, about three weeks ago, I found myself wondering when would be the right time to begin actively homeschooling the twins.  Ask, and the answer appears! 

After recovering from almost two weeks of illness, we are finally on the go again.  We are way behind where I thought we’d be in terms of book learning at this point, but considering how young Kindy Girl is and how firmly I believe in a mostly child-led sort of program, it does not really concern me.  Now that she is finally feeling better, she wants to ”do homeschool” with a vengence, but not really book stuff.  She still has too much pent up energy from two weeks of shut in time.  It’s perfect timing actually because we have two weeks of fun filled adventures ahead of us.  Already this week we have been to Spanish class, park day and this morning’s Bicycle Safety class given by a terribly amusing member of the local police department who obviously has a gift for communicating with children.  Later this week we are headed to a relaxed playgroup and will be volunteering at a nursing home with a Valentine’s Day party.  Next week we will have Spanish class again, a tour of a synagogue, our music/art class, and a tour of city hall.  Who has time for school with all this experiential learning going on?