Yummy cinnamon rolls

http://rosehipsandspiderwebs.blogspot.com/2011/02/by-popular-demand.html

I hope to make these soon.

We've washed one bag of wool so far and have dried and carded a small portion of it already.  However, we could do with some dry weather days so that I can dry the rest.

Springy tried one day at school the week before last.  I'd lost a lot of my confidence.  We've had constant barrages of 'school is better' and all the rest of the socialising dogma that comes with that.  With the 9-year change on top from Springy (who is more melancholic and sulky than sanguine at the moment) I felt quite exhausted because there is so little support (apart from, thank goodness, by beautiful homeschooling friends who gave some much needed esteem boosting discussions).

We have been looking at some non-verbal reasoning tests withSpringy. We've done them on a conversational learning basis. It's quite interesting to note how Form Drawing would help a child note the kind of patterns involved.

The past week of February

Today we played bean bag games, used our feet to pick up stones and pop them into a basket and worked on a number of maths equations including some bar graph questions.

Yesterday we did a lot of Form Drawings.  I love doing this.  I've got a separate book for them at the moment and doing the outlines in yellow to aid Springy (she's in her 9-year change at the moment and everything seems to be a big trauma unless we take it back to something less stressful).

We baked some scones (with cranberries and raisins) and worked on negative numbers using the stairs and the keyboard. We used middle C as zero and worked up and down from there. We also had one stair as the zero stair and then went up and down from there too - it's just to give a quick overview to Springy so she can understand more about temperature etc later on.

For Imbolc we made candles, read Farmer Boy (which resulted in us making some popcorn and polishing shoes with wax), Springy did some maths problems whilst I was working, did some knitting, walked dog, made egg stir fried rice with courgettes and cashews + lots of conversation.

Drawing and Form Drawing

This is a very useful article on drawing at the Waldorf Library:

http://www.waldorflibrary.org/Journal_Articles/drawing.pdf

Today we got up, had porridge for breakfast and Springy went outside straight afterwards and found a pill millipede which she put on her hand, with the hope that it would uncurl and move. It didn't so she went a bit later to watch her wren's nest. She noticed that all the moss in the wren's nest had been pulled out but didn't tell me until this afternoon and it looks like the stoat has been there, taken all the babies and destroyed the nest. There is a stoat poo underneath the nest and we'd seen the stoat yesterday evening going through the flower bed. Springy was upset but we said that that is nature because the stoat has babies to feed too.

We went to the duck pond later and Springy saw some beautiful little ducklings. She was feeding them and they came very close and she was able to reach out and touch them several times which made her really pleased (she got very grubby knees from leaning over). It turns out that our own Mrs Duck is nesting next door to us now - hooray! We hope that she is well hidden and that her babies will hatch soon.