In which we expand our joy of homeschooling....

My lovely, patient, obliging, ever ready student loves, loves, loves to read.

As part of our Waldorf inspired homeschool journey he is reading through all of the volumes of The Library of Pioneering and Woodcraft by Ernest Thompson Seton. We just started Botany and he is so excited and teachable.

I wanted to share two of the goals from "Woodcraft is Lifecraft"...

4. The Great Central Fire.

Represented in our law, and in our ceremonies. Only the re-creation of the sacred fire has power to thrill us and strike chords of primitive remembrance. When people gather around a fire they shed all modern artifice and return to the essence of self, revealing the naked soul. Since time immemorial, humanity has seen in this blessed fire the means and emblem of light, warmth, protection, friendliness, and council. When people have met together in peace and shared the warmth of the welcoming fire, it forges a lasting bond of union overcoming wide divergence in attitudes and perspectives. This fire is the symbol at the center of Woodcraft. We shall not fail to use its magic powers.

8. An heroic ideal.

Woodcraft offers an heroic ideal, an image of a mature human being, physically strong, mentally alert, spiritually attuned, dedicated to community service. Anxious to learn, willing to teach, inspired by vision. Prepared to share with others, with courage, intelligence, power and wisdom. Cognizant of the past, unafraid of the future, profoundly aware that action is only possible in the present moment. Able to use this moment to the best advantage, equipped to listen, communicate and actively respond as needed. By presenting an heroic ideal Woodcraft gives each individual the inspiration to set and then strive towards personal goals. Woodcraft is dedicated to exploring knowledge, increasing tolerance through understanding, and improving global environmental conditions.

"Maturity, not scholarship is the first aim of education." Woodcrafters... 

~Ernest Thompson Seton

Tell me, what could be better than that????

from http://www.etsetoninstitute.org/the-woodcraft-way/

Six hours later...

My son has gotten so excited about his nature journal.  He carries it around with him every where he goes and correlates every bird observation he makes to the evolution of dinosaurs.

So, I had to make him a nature satchel.  I started yesterday afternoon and worked straight through (except for chores and dinner) and by bedtime (my bedtime) I had finished the bag.  I used scraps of fabric I have had since he was a baby and had just enough to piece together a fun bag.  I used some nice weight, choco-brown linen I had on hand and lined it with two layers of washed, stiff duck cloth.

The outside flap has reptiles; one side panel, frogs; the other, turtles; the handle has insects and the back panel has a strip of fish (from the inside lining fabric).  I also added a pocket with a Luna moth under the front flap just in case he finds some rocks.  He has a whistle, a compass, his paint brushes, water colors, a jar covered in wool for water and tonight I am going to make his color pencil pouch.  He showed it to his friends today with pride.  I was so happy that I could create something that he loved so much.

 

I told him how my mom used to sew things for me and how I always felt so special when ever I would wear them because I knew she made them for me.  I used to feel so safe and comforted falling asleep to the sound of her old Singer sewing machine whirring away at the dinning room table.  I remember just sighing knowing that she was sitting there so close.  He fell asleep to the sound of my machine while I sat in my sewing room creating something special just for him. 

I hope he remembers his bag the way I remember the cool, Burda, lemon-yellow jumper my mom made me in seventh grade, the one with the chrome hooks on the front.  My mom is from Germany and her sister sent her the Burda magazine regularly.  I remember when it came, we would pour over it at the kitchen table and dream about making something different and fashionable.  It was my mom's little glimmer of home.  I remember feeling so lucky that she could sew and that she would be willing to sew something for me!

Here is a picture of the outside in pieces.

The green, tropical fish scene is the inside lining.  I made little pockets out of scraps of fabric I have been hoarding for years.  

He loved the wave pocket, it reminded him of his days surfing with his dad at the Shores in California.  I used duck cloth to make a pocket for his paint brushes and magnifying glass.

I also made a batting lined pouch out of the insect fabric to carry his water colors.  I'll post the pictures of his little jar with wet felted wool and the pencil & paint pouches later.  

I can't wait to show his bag to my mom.  

The fruit on the tree....

It is a cool, overcast morning.  It is 60 degress F, the air is moist and the sky is grey.  It feels colder than 60 degrees, brrrrr.  After we finished our chores my son and I quietly walked out into the world. We try to find all of the new growth around us as if we are on an Easter egg hunt.  We bend, stoop, gently move mulch and dead leaves all the while  calling out "look here", "oh my, this wasn't here yesterday" and "wow".  It is like a song we sing to each other every morning.  It is almost comical how we unconsciously use the same exclamations on every outing.

Can you figure out what wonderful plant is unfurling here?

Rhubarb, Rheum rhabarbarum

Narcissus in the herb garden

Chives, Allium schoenoprasum, peaking out of the dead leaves. 

  

The haze in this picture is light reflecting off of the cold frame glass.  We moved this cabbage into the cold frame in early September.  We also planted carrots and lettuce in early September as part of our homeschool work.  We planted late and thought we would just see what would happen.

We made a primitive hoop frame for the cold frames and covered them with plastic that we had found on a roll in the basement.  It was thick and heavy, I don't what its original purpose was but it worked great over the frames.  It was a bit stiff, this year we are going to try double-hinged glass windows over the top of a few of them instead and compare the difference.  Eliot Coleman recommends the plastic tunnel over the cold frame, it makes sense that it completely encapsulates the frame in an envelope of air, but a guy at the Vermont Solar Festival last year got great results with double, opposite hinged panes of glass.  He would open one panel in the day and close them both, overlapping on themselves at night.  We always find and pick up discarded windows at the transfer station (where we take our trash every week - it is like a smorgasbord of great treasures and the perfect place to catch up on all the town news).

The temperature inside of the frames was always about 20 degrees warmer (give or take) than the outside temp.  Snow fell in December and that was the last we saw of our carrots and lettuce.  By January the frames were covered in snow, we couldn't even see them anymore and by late January I stopped scraping the snow off the top of the plastic.

The snow melted away a few weeks ago and we pulled back the plastic tunnel.  There were small, greyish-green carrot tops and very green lettuce.  The picture above was taken about a week after we removed the plastic sometime after the vernal equinox.

Here is a picture of the box about a week ago.  The lettuce gets bigger every day and the carrots in the center of the box that get most of the sunlight are big and green.  I set the frame over a chunk of chives and a few dandelions too.  The chives are up and ready to eat.  Without the plastic the temp stays about 10 degrees warmer than the ambient air around it.  We also found that three of the four cabbage plants I scooped up and stuck in the frame just for the heck of it came back too.  I had heavily mulched that frame because we were nursing our Swiss Chard for as long as we could so the cabbage were nestled in deep straw. I packed straw around the outside of the frame between the wood and the plastic too.  So we may get some early cabbage this year!

We started our nature journal yesterday.  I am using the Ana Botsford Comstock book, Handbook of Nature Study, as my guide.  I have also been inspired by my girlfriend Jenny.  She has turned me on to so many great books, like Edith Holden's journal and Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book, and so many more that I could make a list.  I love the beauty of teaching my son from these books.  I love the Burgess books too.  I feel that I yearn for the innocence and magic conveyed by these authors and this time in pedagogical history.  Rudolf Steiner, Beth Sutton - who wrote the Enki curriculum fits that category, Charlotte Mason,  and many, many more.  I studied history, art history and social sciences in college.  I went back to get my teaching credential.  My focus was in special ed when "special ed" was the term they used to describe children with unique learning styles, behavioral issues or learning disabilities.  I had some amazing teachers in my day.  One in particular was Dr. Kent.  I wish I could remember his first name so that I could give him the proper honor he deserves here.  He was an elderly man and started teaching in the public school system way back in the late 1920's.  He had such a different perspective of teaching, more so than any of my other professors at Delaware State College.  His stories were magical.  He had high expectations for us as future teachers and set an amazing example.  He was one of the first African American students to attend his college in Ohio.  His philosophy of being a teacher was very Charlotte Mason/classical ed with a sweetness and compassion for his young students.  He cherished the young mind and believed in play, in music, in art and poetry.  He embraced individuals and honored the quirks and idiosyncrasies of his students.  It has been more than 18 years since I sat in his class and I can say that he was a great teacher.  His style of teaching and the classrooms that he created have all but vanished from the public school landscape and what a shame that is for the millions of students that spend most of their life within those walls.

I read the first section of the Comstock book in preparation for our lesson.  She writes; " Nature study should be so much a part of the child's  thought and interest that it will naturally form a thought core for other subjects quite unconsciously on his part...it is legitimate and excellent training as long as the pupil does not discover that he is correlating...and if later his teacher had asked him to write for her an account of some part of it, because she wished to know what he discovered, the chances are that he would have written his story joyfully and with a certain pride..." (p. 16) and "If questions do not inspire the child to investigate, they are useless.  To grind out answers to questions about any natural object is not nature-study, it is simply 'grind'..." (p.22)  I only quote this because that is exactly what happened in our little room in the middle of the forest yesterday.  We watched the chickens, we looked at the feathers, we talked, I told him about the feathers as if it were my story.  A fire grew in his eyes and he took off.  We had been reading Edith Horton's journal so he had an idea of how he wanted to create his and drew pictures and wrote descriptions and couldn't wait to share his journal with his friends at oration day.  He even said to me, "Look how much I wrote!  I didn't copy it or have to be told and I tried to use all the big words I knew so I would sound like a palaeontologist." 

That is beauty in motion.  That is why I homeschool.  That is the fruit on the tree.  He loves to learn, it is enough, he is doing well, I am a good teacher.  

That is the question I ask myself and agonize over as a homeschool teacher/parent "Am I enough?" and the answer is YES!

The farm

We enjoyed two warm days of sunshine and now we have rain.  April showers bring May flowers, it is all a part of the cycle of life.  So, my pictures capture the overcast skies but, that is the beauty isn't it?  

The chickens are doing well and ready to emerge from the coop my husband and brother built last fall.  The ground is thawing and we are now able to dig the post holes for the permanent yard we want to put up.  

We plan on moving our flock around the pasture this spring and summer behind the grazers but for now we need a yard for them to play in.  We love our little coop, we built it from scavenged wood and windows.  The frame and siding came from a shed we took down on the property and reassembled farther back in the yard.  We did buy the feeders, hinges and chicken wire though.  We built the nesting boxes out of the old bread drawers from this kitchen and used the drawer runners as legs.  The hens didn't lay in them open but, instead went under them.  So, I built a little box to fit on top from left over wood from the barn.  We put the coop at the back of the yard facing south, it is very sunny and perfect for our girls and guy.  So far we get about 8 eggs a day.  Our flock is currently 9 hens and 1 rooster, his name is Rex.  We let the kids name them this summer.  Spotty, Whitey, Cat, Katie, Bander, and Smokey are the original girls.  We adopted three geriatric girls, Petra, Juana and Maria in early November.  Juana and Maria were renamed by my niece, Lauren, at Christmas.  She calls them Katie Kate and Katie Kate Katie.  She also named our Rhode Island Red Katie, and wanted us to call her Katie so I think it is safe to assume she LOVES the name Katie.  We have been getting one giant egg a day, looks like a duck egg with deformities in the shell.  I read that it is a sign of an older layer.  We all change when we age don't we?  The book recommends culling her from the flock, but there won't be any of that here, she is staying.  I just love her for laying her eggs. We had to separate Petra from the flock and put her in the hospital cage.  It is always a good idea to have a back up small coop for the sick birds way ahead of time.  The flock picked on Petra and started to pull out her feathers.  They became so aggressive that she had sores on her wings and was getting roughed up regularly.  That started when I went to the hospital.  I think the protein balance was off, too much scratch.  We give them scrapes from the veggies too and half of a cabbage a day.  I keep Petra's hospital room right next to the coop and they talk back and forth all day.  Once we get the yard fence up I will reintroduce Petra.

Late last night when I couldn't sleep I read through the book "Smale-Scale Livestock Farming" by Carol Ekarius.  We were inspired by Joel Salatin's book a few years ago and now that we actually live on the land we want to be good stewards, there is so much to learn.  It was a quick read and I liked the author's voice.  I liked the formulas for animal units per acreage and the little stories about "real" people on their farms.  The book gives you basic, light information on every thing from the roots of grass farming to marketing , animal husbandry, goal setting and planning, it is definitely worth checking out of the library.  I am kinda nerdy so I like the worksheets, balance sheets and budgets.  There is even a few pages with details about butchering chickens. So now I am going to sink my teeth into "Grass Productivity" by Andre Voisin.  There is a lot of beef in that book.

We have been reading so much about making our own soil for the raised beds we just built.  We used the left over wood from our barn to build them.  It is locally milled, rough sawn pine. We moved in on May 25 last year with our seedlings in tow.  We had an unusually rainy - cool summer and with the hard pan soil, rocks and huge granite shelves we had a lot of water pooling on the surface of the garden.  This year we built 14"h x 12'l x 4' w raised beds.  I have re-read Michael Guerra's book "The Edible Container Garden" to add food in pots and last autumn when I took the class with Dave Jacke I bought "Perennial Vegetables" by Eric Toensmeier.  We have been very busy reading in the evenings, walking the land in the days and talking a lot about our goals and our dreams while doing our chores.  It feels magical.  An Edible Forest with animals all around.  We are doing our homework now for the greenhouse.  I just treated myself to Eliot Coleman's new book "The Winter Harvest Handbook".  Since we have the E-Classic outdoor wood boiler we will have access to heat for the greenhouse too.  Baby steps for sure.

The horse was feeling her oats today too.  She ran up and down the field bucking and snorting.  Her head held high.  She is very spunky for a Belgian.  She ended up having an abscess in her hoof so the vet came to the farm and cut it out.  We think she got it from the sand in the field. Her hoof is packed with Ichthammol and wrapped in duck tape.  Man that stuff really holds.  She weighs around 1,400 lbs in the rain and even in the mud that tape is still there.  

The woodpecker is back.  I think he is a Yellow-Bellied Sap Sucker?, not sure yet, will update later.  He has a small red patch on his throat and head.  I didn't see any yellow on his breast and his wing feathers are speckled with lots of white.   Maybe you would know?  He sits on the old antennae on our roof and taps out his song on the old hollow aluminum post to attract the females .  He was here last year too, we were so excited when we heard him again.  Watching and listening to him I was reminded of our beloved homeschool reading books, "The Burgess Bird Book for Children" and "The Burgess Animal Book for Children".  They are our read aloud book for nature studies.  I love the narrative; Mother Nature talking to the animals, teaching them about each other.  Most of all I love the drawings my son does and the stories he tells about the animals.  He has learned so much about animal identification from those stories.  They have filled his heart and imagination with the knowledge and love of all animals.  And while you are at it, read "Among the Farmyard People" by Clara D. Pierson too (check out the entire series).  www.YesterdaysClassics.com has so many lovely books.   We love our Enki/Charlotte Mason/WTM curriculums, it is such a blend of beauty, wonderment, and great literature.  It is a gift to me to teach it.

Peace, on a rainy day on the farm surrounded by life.....

Sacha

I spent the day with Sacha.  We have been doing basic ground work in preparation for her future as my work partner, my shoulder to lean on.  I plan on ground training her this summer so that we can harvest some of the fallen trees off the land for our outdoor wood boiler.  She plays a part in my dream to wean our family off of petroleum....I also have fantasies of her pulling us through the snow in a one horse open sleigh, hey!  Maybe even hauling the buckets of maple sap back to the barn?  I have a million ideas not to mention all that compost-able black gold.  But for now it is the quiet work, the bonding that is important.  She is a little reluctant to work because of her long winter's nap.  She came to us in December and I was so caught up with the holidays and my health issues that she spent all that time eating, walking and getting tons of treats.  So, needless to say, sassy girl is a little spoiled.  She is responding well to my training, walking quietly, stopping on command, backing up and just learning to be patient.    We love her, she acts like a big, lovable, playful dog. 

Digging through my old homeschool papers I found this poem.  It just fits my life right now, what a gift it was to find it today.  I am always in awe of how the perfect inspiration appears at just the right moment, my heart was open to the message and it touched me deeply.  Thanks Kelly.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

And try to love the questions themselves

Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you

Because you would not be able to live them,

And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now

Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it

Live along some distant day into the answers."

R.M. Rilke

Peace

A new beginning, a golden mare....

I have only just started reading blogs and now I find myself writing one.  I have been so inspired by the words and images of others I hope that I can create something half as wonderful as the pages I visit whenever I turn on my computer.  I am walking through a familiar neighborhood. When I enter I feel as if I am peeking into a window, a kitchen, a studio, a barn, into some one else's mind and finding a smile.  I have tea with Stelladanza and through her find inspiration for my art and my life.

We have been on this new journey in this part of the world for a little over a year.  We have found our farm, Peacefield, deep in a forest at the end of a long dirt road.  We sit above the hollow near the river's edge and hear the sound of rushing water, it is new music to our ears. We are learning to work the land by hand with dreams of an edible forest, saving seeds and sharing food.  We homeschool our child and enjoy the dance of life everyday, we try in every way to remember.  We feel truly blessed to be here.  We are humbled by the beauty.

I was inspired to write this today in the hopes that by the week's end we will share our farm and field with Sacha, a beautiful 3 year old Belgian mare.  My beginning, my dream of farming with a friend, a shoulder to lean on.