Week 2, Block 8
It’s been a pretty good week. I don’t know that Puggle has made much progress on the folksong (it’s another mournful one:-) ), but I certainly have:-)

I put that down to the recent innovation of blu-tacking the words to the front of the TV cabinet. (Funny how ideas stick with you:-) Sometime in the last year or so I started seeing a number of posts about fridge learning. I thought it was a reasonable idea, but then forgot about it. Now I’ve ‘re-invented’ it, by sticking things on the TV cabinet:-) ) Bilby is very distractable when she nurses, so it’s difficult to read books—but things on the cabinet are very do-able. Currently I have our folksong, our weekly poem, and our latin song. I’m thinking that it’s probably going to be a good idea to also print out the weekly painting (although, probably better to do so in colour!) to add to the display. I’m considering adding days of the week, and the weather in some format—although I may leave that till next year.

The other innovation this week has been in response to various discussions on Waldorf education. There are many things I find problematic about it overall, but it definitely has some appeal. There’s a focus on rhythms, nature and art/crafting that speaks to me strongly (actually, the latter two are part of the reason I’m a CM fan:-) ). In one of them, someone mentioned Circle Time (which once again reminded me of something I read a while ago, and considered implementing, but didn’t at the time. Cindy starts her school day with Morning Time to do a certain portion of their Ambleside schedule, which always struck me as a fairly workable formula. I’d only figured on doing it once we started with Shakespeare—and I guess, once I was working with more than one child:-) But, here I am, re-inventing the wheel!) So we’ve started ‘Circle Time’ (although, it’s hardly a circle with just the two of us as Bilby is usually asleep… so I’ll need to re-name it). We roll out one of the mats, light a candle (nice way to use some of the fancy candles we have:-) ) and sit around to recite the poem, sing some songs and do some reading. Puggle seems to be really enjoying it—possibly because he gets to blow out the candle at the end:-) We’ve also managed to read a number of our intended readings:-) I think one improvement will be to include all the relevant books in a basket, then we can move the location outside (although, without the candle!), which would also be a nice touch. Currently though, we are still using printouts for a few things.

The latin song is another addition. We had our last latin lesson for now earlier this week (and wouldn’t you know, now Puggle starts counting to ten in Latin at the drop of a hat!) I’d like to maintain our position (basically some pronounciation), so I figured we’d continue to sing the songs we’ve learnt—and learn some others. In the next while (or next year possibly) I’ll add some french songs into the mix as well. So for now we have Parva Casa in Silva (In A Cottage, In A Wood) from the Minimus website on the TV cabinet. (Puggle has really enjoyed singing ‘In a Cottage, In a Wood’ at each KinderClassics lesson, so it seemed like a good choice:-) )