Late Fall

A rousing game of chess between Dallin and Preston on a Sunday evening:

Halloween:

Preston's was the easiest costume ever.  He found Dallin's old Star Wars costume down in the dress up bin, and from that point on, that's all he wanted to be.  I think it was partly so he'd have an excuse to go to Walmart and buy a light saber.

Blurry, but he has a cute smile.

 Preston really loved the math we did this month.  In the Waldorf educational tradition, the first math unit of first grade is called the Qualities of Numbers.  I have not seen anything like it in any other method.  We explore each of the numbers 1-12 and talk about "what IS that particular number?"  What is one?  What is 9? etc.  I told a story about a king who wanted to know what the most important number was.  He sent each of his twelve knights out on a quest to find out.  Each one came back with a different number to present to the king as the most important, with different reasons why.  At the last minute, I decided to make little peg doll knights, each with a shield representing his number.  Preston really really loved this and played with those peg dolls quite a bit.  Every time we told the new installment of the story (which lasted the whole month), he had to line them up in the perfect order.

I have to get the rest of Preston's birthday pictures off of James' phone, but here he is riding his new bike, which he mastered perfectly the first day he tried.  (It helped that he has had a little balance bike for the past few years--he already knew how to balance.)

Here is some more math work.  We learned all the Roman numerals as well as Arabic, because the Roman numbers show the relation of the numbers to the body (fingers and hands).  

 

Here are a few examples of the beautiful pages Preston made to showcase each number.  He dres each knight's shield with things to represent the number we were learning about.  Seven is for the colors of the rainbow and the stars in the Big Dipper (as well as the days of the week).

Five is for the five-pointed star and for the petals of some flowers.

The purpose of wet-on-wet watercolor painting lessons in the younger grades of Waldorf education is to explore the relationships between the different colors and to learn how to work with color.  This is a painting Preston did showing candle light glowing in a dark sky.

We went on a lantern walk to observe the German festival of Martinmas.  The kids and I made these lanterns out of folded watercolor paintings.

This was a game I made up on the spur of the moment to get to know the Roman numerals.  I think he had to match the correct number peanut butter chips to the numeral.

Preston is all about any activity that involves food.  Every time I say, "Ok, it's time to start your lessons," his immediate response is, "What am I having for my snack?"

 

Getting ready for our Number Knights story--we always light a candle for story time.

Our chalkboard that I illustrated with each knight's shield.

On our last day, we formed the Arabic numerals out of cookie dough and baked them.  That was a big hit!

Then Preston practiced writing all the numbers.  After words he put check-marks (which he calls "ching chings") on all the ones he felt he'd written the nicest.  He loves to put check marks on things.

This was a very fun unit for him even though he can already count higher than 100 and could recognize numbers well past 20.  On the last day, I had left all the little peg dolls out, and he spent 45 minutes just playing with them, for instance rolling some dice and then choosing the knight whose number matched the dice.

Yesterday was Preston's first knitting lesson, and he took to it immediately.  This is two rows' worth of knitting.  

Oh, this reminds me, his favorite color is blue.  As in, he will only write with blue.  His blue crayon is half the size of all the other ones in the box.  He was so pleased yesterday when I told him I had ordered him some new crayons and that FIVE of them were blue... because we are going through blue writing utensils so quickly, I decided to stock up.  (In Waldorf education in first grade, we do all writing with crayon, so that's a lot of blue.)  If you look back through the pictures, you will notice that his knitting is blue, his lantern is blue, his chalk is blue, and while he does accept the idea of using other colors in drawing  his pictures, all the backgrounds and all the writing on all the pages of his book is blue.  (And that is true for the numerous other pages that I didn't show here as well.)