One of my goals for summer is to engage the kids with writing projects and this one was a winner.
We watched a wonderful writing workshop on Read-Aloud Revival with poet, Caroline Starr Rose. She gave us a wonderful challenge to write a poem about color so we did. They had a week to write it with my help or a sibling's help and Monday we read them together. We wanted to publish them so I read lots of passages about color from the earth~
They watercolored what their poems made them think of~
The next day we read a story from Wildlives about Winter the dolphin along with other things~
Then chalk pastel-painted these beautiful underwater scenes with Winter in it~
Another Wildlives story was about an elephant named Ning Nong which involved a rescue from a tsunami. We took this opportunity to learn all about them, compare them to hurricanes, and celebrate the season of summner~
They sketched in nature journals for this reading~
A New Plan~
Even the best plans need an adjustment when kids come up with their own learning ideas. I had planned we would spend the summer alternating Wildlives book with Ocean themed books and topics and it was going famously until...
While watching The Waltons Monday evening, there was a Native American Cherokee and his story to find his family's ancient burial ground. It was on the Walton's property which caused much angst and the man described his family walking The Trail of Tears. As the episode came to an end one of the kids said, "We should learn about Native Americans!" I didn't say a word. Remember, I already had our plan!
I woke up the next morning and decided what in the world could be more important than chasing a spark they were interested in. It's what makes learning valuable and meaningful!!! SO I found a study to give us a spine and went with it. Can you believe, the first day was about The Cherokee??!! It was a sign. :)
I gathered all the books I could find and these two posters to give us a place to start.
I read, we watched some videos, and copied a beautiful Cherokee blessing then watercolored~
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I never require the younger ones to do all the coying so I was quite surprised to see Calla's blessing.
So proud of her!!!
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Here a few of the books we have been reading this week~
Everyone chose something to sketch in the nature journals we had read together~
I also purchased a few items from Walmart pickup that might spark a Native American craft and just sat it out on the table. It worked like a charm, and they have been crafting every since~
Our read-aloud even before we began the NA study was Island of the Blue Dolphins and truthfully I had not even put together that it was about a Native Ameican girl but it has been the perfect story for the unit! There are wild dogs (wolves) in it so we did a wolf study yesterday with these books~
And chalk painted these beautiful howling wolves~
We have quite a healthy stack of wolf books because someone in our family LOVES them so I strew them out for an interest led reading time~
SJ reminded us about the White Wolf documentaries on Disney+ and we watched all 3!!!
AND May I share something you would never guess we LOVE but WE DO!!!
LATIN!
We are all doing it together and we LOVE it!
I can't really even describe why except-- we love the teacher and he makes the lessons so enjoyable. One even recognized on her own how much we are learning about grammar while learning this new language. It is exactly what we moms know but don't expect the kids to recognize but they did and I am SO thankful! Today we only did math and Latin then cleaned house and watched The Waltons. It was definitely a FUN Friday!!!
Happy weekend everyone!
