Week 2: Welcome Fall; Pioneer Measurements

This week we welcomed Fall with poems and songs and a new seasonal nature table, although the weather hadn't indicated a change of seasons yet (unless you consider the wildfire, our Southern California fall seasonal event). Our two days were packed full of learning opportunities as we continued to learn more about pioneer life and apply it to our lives as modern-day "homesteaders" forging new territory in education. We read stories about school days in rural pioneer areas and about milking time on a pioneer farm. We learned the various methods of measuring pioneer-style and compared measuring things according to thumbs'-width, by hands and arm-span versus feet and inches. We measured each kid's height and then the kids worked with partners to make a table and record measurements of various classroom objects with both pioneer measurement and standard measurement. We expanded on this on day 2, including mathematical notation, as we measured our new straw bale garden beds and made a diagram of an individual straw bale in order to plan our planting (which will happen as soon as the weather cools!) We also extended our science lessons on properties of matter and crystals with experiments in making hand-made butter and ice cream!

Laurun volunteers to take a "pioneer measurement" in our new Straw Bale Garden as students record standard measurements.

Singing the pioneer-children's butter chant,
"Come, butter come!
Come, butter come!
Peter standing at the gate,
waiting for a butter cake,
Come, butter come!"

Yummy fresh butter--well worth the wait!

Making Steve Spangler's "Rock & Roll Ice Cream."
It really worked!

We explored how salt crystals affect the melting/freezing point of ice crystals and made it possible for our ice cream churns to roll within moving ice.














Quiet time in the Pottery Studio: Read, Write, Draw, Create!  Some students chose to make each other or their teddy-bears "friendship bracelets."

Our First Week! HLS Launches "Homesteading and Sustainable Living" Theme

On September 17 we enjoyed our first wonderful day together at Highland Learning Studio! We embarked on our Fall Session theme, "Homesteading and Sustainable Living," with stories, games, and a variety of hands-on activities and collaborative projects. Our group of eight kids ages 7 to 11 had a lot of fun and of course learned a lot.  Here is an overview of the day:

After a brief arrival and exploratory period, we all joined together for our Morning Circle. I read the poem "A Conceit" by Maya Angelou, a simple message about the power of joining hands. Then the kids played a good old-fashioned cooperative game called "Knots," in which everyone randomly joins left then right hands and has to work together to get untangled without letting go of any hands. Try it next time you have a group together!

The kids listened to me read aloud a story about waking up in a pioneer home from the book , A Pioneer Sampler, by Barbara Greenwood. After examining a detailed illustration of a pioneer home notating the daily activities of each member of the extended family, the kids then drew and notated their own homes in their Main Lesson Books.

After lunch on the back porch, some free time and then Quiet Time, we worked together on a crystal-growing experiment. How did this tie in to homesteading, you ask? We made rock candy, which was popular during the 1800's! Some students made their own models of crystal formation using pattern blocks as we discussed the geometric atomic structure of crystals, and how (unlike pattern blocks), the unit cells of crystals repeat themselves in all directions. We referenced pictures in a few books and looked at a few real crystals up close. You can bet that all students wanted to experiment with making a super-saturated solution with sugar crystals! We first tried dissolving sugar in cold water, and observed that we were able to dissolve a lot more sugar crystals more easily in hot water. After making our super-saturated solution, we designed a way to capture crystals on a string. After measuring, cutting, tying knots to paper clips, and placing the strings in the solution, we discovered this method wouldn't work because the strings floated. We ended up using wooden sticks to submerge in the solution and now must wait days, even weeks, for the sugar to crystallize, and change back from a liquid to a solid.

Our next Morning Circle on Friday included an improvisation game incorporating the students' names into a percussion piece that we will expand further into a musical composition. I then read aloud the comedic book, Diary of a Worm, by Doreen Cronin with Pictures by Harry Bliss. This naturally flowed into the students writing and illustrating a journal entry in their Main Lesson Book, a habit I hope they'll continue at home.

Our collaborative hands-on project for the day involved harvesting a worm bin! We battled the chickens for the goodies as we separated the hard-working worms from their castings. Some kids were glad to have the alternate assignment of warding off the chickens, but most of us delighted in digging in the rich compost which we'll use to enrich the soil of our sustainable-living homesteading vegetable garden.

 

The week wouldn't be complete without some student-directed learning! With Lydia's paper-constructed roast-pig-on-a-platter as inspiration, the kids collaborated to create, rehearse, and perform a skit involving adventurous princesses invited to a ball hosted by a prince and his guards . . . . This involved much give-and-take agreeing on roles and coming up with a non-murderous conflict (Yes, we need action! How can we do this without killing anyone?). The prince's stately ball and banquet was devastated by an earthquake followed by a fire, but nearly everyone survived. And the princesses did NOT need to be rescued by the prince or his guards.

 

Somewhere we also had time for a few math games, too, and lots of student read-alouds from the Gross Me Out Science book by Ralph Retcher and Betty Lou Poo (yes, it's available on Amazon).