Yesterday my first grader asked what the sky was made of, and today she wrote this poem:
Little Blue Sky
Little blue sky,
How are you up there so high?
Come down to me,
We will play games.
I love you,
Little Blue Sky.
This very short article by Betty Staley has so much truth in it that it should be required reading for all parents:
http://ijoanjaeckel.blogspot.com/2009/01/b-e-t-t-y-s-t-l-e-y-to-educate-future.html
Read and enjoy!!
Note: If you have a Kindergartner, a child under the age of 7, form drawing is too awakening for your child. They do not need to start form drawing until first grade when they are seven years old. This post is for those parents who have children ages 7 and older, or for those parents who have a six-year-old and are trying to understand form drawing for the following year.
Form drawing is one of the those subjects that is very special to the Waldorf school and Waldorf homeschool environment and completely foreign to the public school environment. I have had many Waldorf homeschooling mothers tell me they do not like form drawing and this is unfortunate because it is such an important subject. In fact, I would like to convince you today that form drawing is so important there should be at least 2, but preferably 3 blocks of form drawing throughout your school year in grades one through four, and also continue form drawing once a week throughout some of your other blocks. Form drawing and numeral literacy should be a large backbone of the early years.
From the book “Form Drawing: Grades One Through Four” by Laura Embrey-Stine and Ernst Schuberth:
There are many sound reasons which support the feeling that form drawing is good for children. The simplest and perhaps most straight-forward reason is that it develops the fine motor skills as a preparation, and later a support, for writing. It strengthens eye-hand coordination, giving the eye practice at being a coachmen for the horses, the hands. Form drawing also works in the other direction: the movement of the hand also educates the brain. Furthermore, it is part of the evolution of art and, as such, develops the aesthetic sense and a feeling for form. It also teaches thinking but in a non-intellectual way; it trains the intelligence to be flexible, able to follow and understand a complicated line of thought. The more human beings are trained to think flexibly, the greater the world is strengthened in intelligence. Finally, form drawing really supports the development of the whole being of the child, guiding it in a healthy way with certain types of forms brought to the child which are appropriate for his age in the various grades.
Form drawing should be very active – it is not about putting the form on paper at first, not until the very end; it is about getting the form into the child’s BODY. The form should be expressed in an imaginative way through a small and simple story and then you do everything possible to get it into the child’s body – draw it in chalk on your driveway and walk it, hop it, skip it, walk it backwards, draw it on each other’s skin and guess which form it was, draw it in sand and in rice, draw it with both hands onto two sheets of paper taped down, draw it with a crayon between the big toes on a large piece of paper, shape it with beanbags and walk it on the floor, model it in salt dough or sand or beeswax, draw it in the air with your nose, toes, elbow or chin, build the form out of sticks if it is a form conducive to that. Then, at the very end, have the child stand and draw the form.
We followed this progression of forms so far this year:
Form drawing is a great therapeutic activity and an important component of Waldorf education. Please consider bringing it to your homeschool.
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
Julie recently wrote in a comment on one of my First Grade posts regarding her first grader who is in public school. Her oldest had been in a Waldorf school, and the public school experience was going fairly well for her first grader, but as a parent she was missing some of the beauty and depth that Waldorf brings to the educational process. She wondered what resources were available without buying an entire curriculum to bring some of the Waldorf magic into her home. This is a great question, Julie, and I am happy to be able to give some suggestions to you and everyone else out there wondering the same thing!
First of all, I think a place to start would actually be your physical space. To me, if my child was in public school, I would want to make a big effort to have a very special Nature Table to celebrate the seasonal changes. A little book that may give you some wonderful ideas is “The Nature Corner” by M v Leeuwen and J Moeskops. The other thing I would consider is to have open-ended toys available for play. Since a school environment is fairy directed, it will be important for your child to have time to just play. Play is the work of every young child. A good source of ideas and how-to’s for making some open ended toys is the classic, “Toymaking with Children”, by Freya Jaffke.
Secondly, I think festival preparation would be very important for your child’s soul life, so just figuring out what festivals you would want to celebrate, gathering ideas, and then sitting down with a calendar and counting two weeks or so before the festival and writing down what you would like to do each day to prepare to celebrate is something wonderful. A good festival book such as “All Year Round” or “Festivals, Families and Food”. The Wynstones series of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer have great verses, poems and songs to learn. They are available through www.wynstonespress.com or other Waldorf booksellers. The book “Earthways” by Carol Petrash could also give you some excellent ideas for seasonal craft ideas that may fit into any festival celebration.
The heart and soul of Waldorf first grade is fairy tales, so a good book with all of the wonderful Grimm’s fairy tales may make for wonderful storytelling time. I personally enjoy the Pantheon edition of Grimm’s fairy tales as my own resource for teaching. You could also look for fairy tales from other cultures around the world at your local library. Please see my blog post entitled, Great Fairy Tales for Waldorf First Grade, for suggestions of what fairy tales may be appropriate for a first grader. Making up your own little stories and nature tales is also so important.
Some other typical Waldorf first grade experiences would be wet on wet watercolor painting, modeling, knitting and playing the recorder, pentatonic flute or pennywhistle. Please be on the lookout for future posts of these subjects. They are very important tasks for soul development and also for future academic success.
Last but not least, however, I would imagine with being in a school setting all day long, your child may just need time to be when she comes home so planning lots of free play in natural areas may be a very important thing to provide for her. Please do see the posts entitled “Fostering Creative Play”, “More About Fostering Creative Play” and “Connecting Your Children to Nature” available on this blog.
Please do look for some future posts on wet on wet watercolor painting, modeling, knitting and music in the home. These are the wonderful things that make the world go round.
If you have questions or topics you would like me to address, please do leave a comment in the comment section. I am open to helping and encouraging you in any area you have doubts about!
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
Many parents are concerned that somehow their child will be “behind” by waiting until First Grade to start learning the letters of the alphabet. The flip side to this is the parents that say, “Won’t my child be bored in Waldorf First Grade? My child taught himself to read at the age of 5 and can read almost anything. Should I just skip Waldorf First Grade and move onto Second Grade?”
No,no, no. I have one of those fluent readers, and I think Waldorf First Grade at home provides so many wonderful opportunities for your little one.
First of all, look carefully at your child. How is their health? What are they like in their bodies? Socially? How are their fine motor skills? Work in the areas in which your child is lacking or challenged. If your child would be happy to sit and read a book all day, I do think it is our job as parents to introduce them to other things and yes, even to limit the times when they read and how many books are out at a time. You would do this with TV, and books can be the same way to stimulate oneself and avoid having to think of something to do out of one’s imagination when one is bored. The boredom is necessary, let your child go through it!
One special consideration is the switch in First Grade from hearing a tale several weeks or a month in a row to a three day rhythm. If you talk to a six-year-old, a fluently reading six-year-olds who is reading chapter books (LONG ones, not just Frog and Toad or something like that), they cannot remember well what they read other than they enjoyed it. That is what my little one used to say to me – she wanted “long” chapter books and enjoyed reading it, but then would say, “I think I need to read it again. I can’t remember it very well.”
In First Grade, presumably your child is still only six and a half or seven years old. He or she still needs the soul-nourishing qualities the Waldorf First Grade curriculum provides through the fairy tales. This is another reason why you should not skip ahead to second grade content – the curriculum is carefully set up to match up to your child’s age, no matter what their academic level.
All that being said, let’s move on to what you can do within your homeschool to satisfy your first grader. Homeschooling provides a distinct advantage for children and gives them lots of time to play, to dream and to create. Many children who are fluent readers will start making up written projects during their free time. This may range from little comic strips to making up stories in a special journal, to writing down little poems or even their own language or menus for playing restaurant. This is ideal because the first readers in Waldorf First Grade are created by what the student has written.
Many good readers of this early age display handwriting skills that are below their reading level and also many enjoy “silent reading” but not reading aloud. So these are two important areas to work on. Have your child read aloud to the dog or to their siblings. Work on handwriting as you work through the alphabet – after you draw the picture that the letter of the alphabet is coming from. Work on vocabulary by writing down a list that your child dictates of all the words that begin with “B” for example, or work on writing a short sentence about the fairy tale if they are interested. At the end of First Grade, many parents do work toward a small writing block with the beginning of punctuation and word families.
But please, above all, do not push. Many fluent readers I know are very happy to just go through the letters in First Grade and work on writing simple sentences. They do continue to read a variety of things on their own time, to listen to a parent read orally to them, but they are not in the least distressed at listening to the fairy tales and drawing the letters. I attribute this to the fact that the Waldorf curriculum is so tailored to the age of the child and what feeds the child’s soul. The child knows this, even if we are the parents put our adult baggage on it and think they should be doing “more”. Please see my post on this blog entitled, “Letting Go.” This is an important lesson for the parent to learn in First Grade.
I would love to hear from those of you who have homeschooled a fluent reader through Waldorf First Grade and your experience.
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
These were some wonderful fairy tales we have shared in First Grade:
For the Alphabet, (since everyone asks this!), this is what we have done/will finish by the end of the school year:
A- Angel (fit in with my container story, not a Grimm’s tale)
B- the BEAR from Snow-White and Rose-Red (Grimm’s)
C- the CAT from The Master Cat (otherwise known as Puss in Boots)
D- the DOOR of the DWELLING of the DWARVES from Little Snow White (Grimm’s)
E- the eeee sound from KEY in The Golden Key (Grimm’s) not my favorite, you may be able to do better!
F- the FISH from The Fisherman and His Wife (Grimm’s)
G- the GOOSE from The Golden Goose (Grimm’s)
H- the HOUSE from Hansel and Gretel (Grimm’s)
I- the “I” that the Prince was from “The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing” (Grimm’s)
J- For JACK from “Jack and the Beanstalk”
K- the KING from “The Princess of the Flaming Castle”
L- Long Legs Longshanks from “Longshanks, Girth and Keen” (Slovakian tale and I had to include it because it is my favorite tale!)
M- the MOUNTAIN from Semeli Mountain (Grimm’s)
N- the NAIL from “The Nail” (Grimm’s)
O- the hole in a shape of an O from “The Gnome” (Grimm’s)
P- the PINK from “The Pink” (Grimm’s)
Q- the QUEEN from my container story
R- RUMPELSTILTSKIN from “Rumpelstiltskin” (Grimm’s)
S- the SNAKE from “The White Snake” (Grimm’s)
T- the TROLL from “The THree Billy Goats Gruff”
U- the UMBRELLA my Fairy Queen has in my container story
V- a VALLEY, also from my container story
W- WATER from “Iron Hans” (Grimm’s)
X,Y.Z – the Three Wise Men from my container story – see Donna Simmons’ work for this inspiration, the reasoning behind it and the drawings!
We will cover some more fairy tales during a writing block toward the end of the school year.
For the Qualities of Numbers-
1 – pick a sun from any tale (we did “Brother and Sister” – Grimm’s
2- “The Two Brothers” (Grimm’s) (this is my other favorite fairy tale)
3- “The Three Sons of Fortune” (Grimm’s)
4- “The Lion” from the book “Active Arithmetic!”
5- “The Star Money” (Grimm’s)
6- “How Six Men Got On In the World” (Grimm’s)
7- “The Seven Ravens” (Grimm’s)
8- “Eight” by Dorothy Harrer
9- “The Gnome” (Grimm’s)
10- we did not do a story
11- we did not do a story
12- “The Twelve Hunstmen” (Grimm’s)
We have also done all the Fairytale Stories from Dorothy Harrer, including The Prince Who Couldn’t Read, The Secret and Magic Name of the King (also great for the letter “I”!), The Princess of the Golden Stairs, The Soldier, the Huntsmen and the Servant, Three Sisters, The Fir Tree.
Nature Stories:
All of the ones by Dorothy Harrer including The Lazy Gnome, The Lazy Water Fairy, The Four Seasons, The Rainbow, The Prince of Butterflies, The Snowflake, The Stag, The Lion, and the Eagle, The Four Brothers.
I have also found a Slovak tale regarding “The Twelve Months.” Excellent!! I have also taken our local animals, found them in Anna Comstack’s “Handbook of Nature Study” and taken some of the characteristics I wanted to highlight and put them into a little nature story.
Other Favorite Fairy Tales:
The Fairy Tales collections by Virginia Haviland are really wonderful and you can get them so cheaply used. Other favorite fairy tales include “The Castle Under the Sea” (www.mainlesson.com); The Three Princesses of Whiteland (J. Moe) and Soria Moria Castle (PC Asbjornsen); many of the Grimm’s fairy tales not covered in the alphabet stories; many Irish fairy tales; tales from Czechoslovakia such as Budilinek and Zlatovlaska the Golden-Haired; some of the Russian tales such as The Little Humpbacked Horse and Wassilissa the Beautiful.
Fairy tales are great fun, and I hope this list helps you as you put together a wonderful experience at home for your First Grader.
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
It is hard to believe we are almost half-way done with Waldorf First Grade at Home. I have a few friends with six year olds in their second year of Waldorf Kindergarten who asked for pointers for preparing for First Grade.
Here are a few of my thoughts:
1. Now is the time to be working on the skills you will need to be showing your child in First Grade – this means being able to draw with block crayons, working with beeswax for modeling, being able to play the pennywhistle or recorder, woodworking, gardening and knitting at least a knit stitch. Now is a great time to practice one night a week after the kids go to sleep whatever new skill you are working on.
2. Start reading through the Grimms Fairy Tales and mark the ones that resonate with you and ones you think will resonate with your child. Look at fairy tales from other lands – for example, Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian – and really see what lives in those tales and what lives in you.
3. Breathe deeply into that three-day rhythm and see if you can start bringing it to yourself. Memorize a fairy tale for your six year old kindergarten year by reading it every night for three nights and tell it to your child. Your Kindergarten aged child should not be working in a three day rhythm, but it might not be bad to practice after your child goes to bed with the story. The first day you tell it, the second day bring the artistic piece in and the third day the academic piece. Think about how you would do this!
4. Think about what festivals you want to bring to your child and start planning. You can start small with the new festivals and add a little on every year, but at least think about which festivals resonate for your family. If there are festivals that are traditionally Waldorf and make you uncomfortable, explore that!
5. Start making up lots of stories. You will need this in First Grade. Some mothers write a “container story” (more below) to carry the alphabet stories along, or weave a large story with lots of different forms in it for form drawing. You do not have to use gnome stories for math. Think what would appeal to your child and also carry the moral qualities that they need to hear in a subtle way. Waldorf Education is all about the morality of the child as he or she grows into this wonderful human being.
I used a container story for my alphabet fairy tales. It is the story of a princess who is not allowed to wear the crown until she turns seven and undergoes a training period of meeting 26 loyal fairy subjects. In this process, she discovers that the fairies are becoming besieged by trolls within the kingdom and what her father and the fairy queen know is that the princess alone has the power to defeat them (and of course, this is through love), but the princess must discover this for herself. The Grimms tales are all there as each fairy subject has a tale that highlights a letter of the alphabet, the three day rhythm is there with the artistic and academic piece off of the fairy tales, and of course the container story with the moral is there.
6. Look at your own inner work – what do you need more of? Less of? Where are you in your life? Are you lost and depressed and feeling chaotic or are you happy? If you are not happy, then change it!
7. Look at your physical space of your house and work hard this year to find a place to put things, a cleaning rhythm you can stick to. This is important. Make sure clean-up is an important part of your child’s play. Make sure your child has opportunities to see you work and do work themselves.
8. Look once again at the overall tone in your home. Is it peaceful? Fun? Is there joy and laughter? Or is it aggressive and stressful?
These are just some questions to ponder as you prepare! Please do keep in mind that First Grade is just the bridge from Kindergarten,and to put lots of activity in your lessons, in your festival preparations, and to know when to go outside and play and when to buckle down a bit. Also remember, First Grade is a time to just START explaining things, whet their appetite through imagery and art, but leave the dry, textbook explanations behind as this does not speak to a child’s mind or spark their learning process. You are creating First Grade through experiences, not through a bunch of words! Stop explaining so much and DO!
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
Teaching a Waldorf-inspired first grade at home is so much fun! For those of you who are new to Waldorf homeschooling, Waldorf first grade is for children who are close to the age of seven. This works in conjunction with Steiner’s observations of child development according to seven year cycles, so yes, a six year old is still typically in their second year of kindergarten at a Waldorf school. Academic work is not directly taught until the first grade. At home especially, I encourage parents to view first grade as a bridge between the kindergarten years and the other grades to come (more about this in a minute).
The Waldorf grades work in conjunction with “blocks” where subjects are taught daily for a certain length of time – from three weeks to a month, for example. This is called a “main lesson.” The children have main lesson books that they draw summaries of their lessons into and try to showcase their best work. Main lesson work is considered work of the HEAD and typically involves good morning verses (memorized), a seasonal circle time that is very active (also memorized verses and songs and may include playing a recorder or pennywhistle), and then the main lesson on whatever subject the student is learning about. The teacher memorizes the material presented and the students write summaries in their books, so there really are no textbooks or worksheets involved in this active learning method.
The Main Lesson has a three part rhythm to it that involves the child using sleep as an aid to learning. No other method of education uses sleep the way that Waldorf does, as a true help for memorizing and living into subjects. For example, on Monday, a concept is introduced through a story that may involve puppetry or other props. Tuesday may then involve re-visiting the story and something such as art, drama, modeling, going outside to look for something in the story; essentially expounding on some part of the story that has been already been told. Wednesday then involves a re-visiting of the story with the academic piece drawn into the main lesson book. Some families, for first grade, do a three day rhythm for Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays and then do wet on wet watercolor painting on Thursdays. Some families fit in two main stories a week with two three-day rhythms.
The HEART portion of school may involve foreign language practice, being outside and playing organized games, eurythmy (something special to Waldorf education which has been called “visible speech”), or music. The HANDS portion of the lesson may come in the afternoon and may include knitting for first graders, wet on wet watercolor painting, drawing, woodworking or other types of handwork.
In our home, I chose to do one block a month for first grade so our outline for main lessons for the year looks like this: September –Form Drawing based off of Nature Stories, October – Language Arts, letters A-J based off of Fairy Tales, November – Qualities of Numbers block, December – Quantities of Numbers where all four math processes are introduced and a once a week form drawing block, January – another one week form drawing block and A Look at the Four Seasons and the Four Elements, February – Language Arts based off of Fairy Tales, letters K- Q, March- Math Block Number Three, April – Language Arts based off of Fairy Tales, letters R-Z with a review of AEIOU – (vowels are often taught separate from the consonants), May – two weeks of a Backyard Nature Block with form drawing and two weeks of writing based off the Fairy Tales, one week of review in June and a show of all main lesson book work for family. Many families also will do form drawing on one day of the week during other blocks of subjects.
Our daily rhythm looks essentially like this – A walk in the morning through our neighborhood with our dog, morning verses and the lighting of a candle, finger plays and a story for my Kindergartner, circle time and bean bag games and rope jumping rhymes for both children but more geared to my older child, main lesson work for my First Grader. The HEART portion of our daily rhythm looks like this – Mondays, German tutor comes to our home; Tuesdays, practice Spanish or go hiking with a local group; Wednesday, Spanish tutor comes to our home, Thursdays, practice German; Fridays, special songs for whatever festival is upcoming. After we have lunch, reading books aloud and quiet time, we have the HANDS portion of our day. This part of our rhythm looks like this – Mondays, wet on wet watercolor painting; Tuesdays, bread baking and modeling while waiting for bread; Wednesdays, handwork/knitting; Thursdays, gardening or drawing and Fridays, housekeeping.
Many parents consider learning the letters and sounds of the alphabet and perhaps starting to read a very important part of first grade, along with an introduction to the four math processes. Master Waldorf Teacher Eugene Schwartz (www.millennialchild.com) contends that the most essential part of first grade is really form drawing and math. For many reasons, I agree with Mr. Schwartz.
(For those of you who are not familiar with form drawing, form drawing is a way of working with lines and curves that Rudolf Steiner outlined in three of his lectures as a way of working with children of different temperaments (in Waldorf education there are four temperaments identified). Form drawing is a precursor to handwriting, geometry and also observation of nature for future scientists).
Important and necessary parts of first grade besides the above really do include knitting and other types of handwork, wet on wet watercolor painting and its polar opposite of modeling, drawing and coloring with block crayons and beginning to learn to play a recorder, pentatonic flute or pennywhistle. I personally would also include foreign languages as a necessary part of the first grade but we are a very foreign-language oriented family. Fairy tales and nature stories are the soul nourishment of this age and it is a beautiful year.
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that first grade can be viewed as a bridge from kindergarten and the other grades. This means that while first grade is indeed important with lots to learn and do, it also important in the home environment for first grade to be fun, to know when to take the day off and head to the park and to be sure to allow lots of time for free play and outside play along with time for preparation for festivals. In mind’s eye, the child in the early grades is forming association with subjects through experiences. Everything in first grade should be active, rhythmical, musical, artistic and inter-related. The Waldorf curriculum keeps building and building and growing more and more in its intensity; there is no reason to make yourself or your child insane with heavy, dull work in the early years!
Having a Waldorf-inspired homeschool means the ability to really create and choose stories that speak to your child’s temperament and experiences, to work indirectly through the curriculum with the things that are challenging to that child, and to be able to provide the child with a lot of time to be outside and dream! Homeschooling is an excellent way for siblings to connect and be together and for families to leave peacefully together. Waldorf within the home is a beautiful sigh of wonder.
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
For those of you who have ever looked at a “pre-packaged” curriculum for homeschooling, there is usually a package of read-alouds that correspond to the grade level your child is in. Waldorf homeschooling automatically has many stories built into the curriculum, but doesn’t always have an automatic stack of read-alouds to accompany each grade. There are some books that have suggestions for books though! One wonderful book is entitled, “Waldorf Student Reading List” by Pamela Johnson Fenner and Karen L Rivers. Donna Simmons also has suggestions for read-alouds within her “Living Language” book, available through her website at www.christopherushomeschool.org.
From a Waldorf perspective, the most important thing to remember when choosing books and stories for the child under 9 is that the child is still one with the world and all things in it. Therefore, most appropriate are not the books and stories where one empathetically identifies with the protagonist, but ones where the archetypal images still prevail.
Therefore, fairy tales are a wonderful basis for read-alouds. Here is a list of read-alouds we have enjoyed so far this school year or are planning on reading this year:
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Russian Fairy Tales – we used a copy from Dover Books
Japanese Fairy Tales – we used a copy from Dover Books
All of the books by Virginia Haviland “Favorite Fairy Tales Told in (Poland, Russia, Norway, etc)” There are quite a few of them and you can find them quite cheaply used on Amazon or possibly at your local library.
Andrew Lang’s “The Red Fairy Book” – most of the tales seem about right, some of the books in these series are best left until your child is much older!
The Junior Classics Volume One “Fairy Tales and Fables”, published in 1938 – we have read the fairy tales and are saving the fables for next year. This volume really has especially wonderful tales from Czechoslovakia that we adore.
Isabel Wyatt’s The Seven Year Old Wonder Book – always nice to read leading up to your child’s seventh birthday, a Waldorf tradition
The Tiptoes Lightly series by Reg Down
Any and all Elsa Beskow books (picture books)
Any and all Jack Prelutsky books (poetry)
The Book of Fairy Poetry by Michael Hague (poetry)
Here are some that don’t especially fit the fairy tale mode but your child may enjoy, depending on their attention span:
Any and all of Edward Ardizzone’s Little Tim series – picture books, rather droll, where Tim goes out to sea on many adventures and everything works out well in the end. Pre-read for sensitive readers because there are bad guys, shipwrecks, etc. Boys especially may like these, but my girls like them as well.
Twig and Big Susan, both by Elizabeth Orton Jones
The Racketty Packetty House
And all Thornton Burgess books, although some parents leave these till second grade.
The Paddington Series of books by Michael Bond
Mr. Popper’s Penguins by R. and F. Atwater
Winnie the Pooh and other works by AA Milne
Okay, and three where you will identify with the protagonist, so not the Waldorf ideal per se, but still lovable –
B is for Betsy by Carolyn Haywood, published in 1940. Betsy goes to the first grade – innocent, sweet and for the adults, totally points out what is wrong with First Grade today (uh, did that political commentary slip out??!!)
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder – save the other ones in the series till later.
and somehow my eldest found the hardback classic Heidi amongst my things so we read it last year in early December and we will read it this year as well. Not really appropriate for a first grader, but it really speaks to my little girl. Heidi does show an ideal rhythm though, doesn’t it? Fresh air, goat-herding, delayed academics …..heeheeheehee. 🙂
There are other favorites I could go on about from Kindergarten, but those are probably best saved till another post. 🙂
Two last thoughts: Please tell stories before bedtime, don’t read! We started with reading and I have found it so difficult to get my kids to accept storytelling in place of reading. Start early with your storytelling, it will serve you and your children well. Many families do reading after lunch before quiet time and tell stories before bedtime. The best stories you tell are the ones you make up yourself!!
The second thought is this: for voracious readers, like my eldest, do not feel you have to get them new reading material all the time. We re-read, and re-read and re-read. First grade (and Kindergarten) should still be about being in the body. Reading books and having to have a new book all the time can be a form of stimulation just like wanting constant entertainment, so if your little one wants to sit and read or thumb through books for hours on end, consider your rhythm and what times of the day reading is okay.
I feel another post coming on…..
Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.
The Parenting Passageway 