It Takes a Community

The Village

Tie Dye * Dairy Palooza * Geography

This fall, four families, including ours, have decided to join together for group activities. Each mom takes a turn leading a project or learning session. So far we've each had a chance to lead a session and experience three other mom's leading. While planning my own session to lead has been a little stressful (Always wanting to please kids of a vast age range and their parents!), the month has been great. I have thoroughly enjoyed going to someone else's group to relax while someone else takes the helm!

Colors

Lead by Example

Children Do What They See Their Parents Doing

My daughter loves to create beadies (creations using string and pony beads). She has followed many patterns as well as made some up on her own. The other day she asked if she could lead a class on how to make a lizard.  

As we planned her class, we discussed many details. What age should the kids be? Could a younger child come if a parent promised to stay and help? How long should the class be? Should we limit the number of students we could have at one time? What project should she help them make? Should we charge for the class? Should we include photos with our email invitation? After all the decisions were made, I helped send out an email to our homeschooling community.

Six students participated in my daughter's class. They all made a lizard and then took home instructions and beads to make a firefly at home. The class was a success. The kids had fun. My daughter was proud. I think she learned a lot about the process of teaching a class. A teacher's time isn't limited to the 90 minutes of teaching, but includes a lot of preparation, thinking ahead and even thinking about things after the time is over (What surprised us? What could we have done better? What worked best?)

I'd like to think some of her inspiration has come from seeing dad teach her computer programming, or mom teach her yearbook class, or all the parents in the homeschooling community teaching classes on history, writing, math and more. So a big thanks to all teachers in our lives who "showed us by doing" and inspired her to "do what she saw".

Found Poetry

I cut out several words from magazines. Then I put them onto single sided laminating sheets, put colored paper behind it and recut them out to make them durable. I decided to color code the words. This is not part of regular found poetry, but I thought we might want to use the words for something else in the future, and I thought that maybe if the kids looked up the words, they might learn different types of words like adjective, adverb, article, noun, etc. Once the words were created, the kids could play with them, move them about, and make poetry on the spot!

Before I was done with the words, my daughter asked if she could make a poem. I reminded her that we had just gone on a trip to see the salmon run and spent the day at the river. Could she make a poem while thinking about that day?  Here is what she created:

A River

Frost arrived

All sleep

We play

One traveler's favorite voice

The only change my daughter made, was the apostrophe on the word travelers. She wanted to indicate that the children's playing voices were one traveler's favorite sound.

Then, a few days later, the kids and I watched a short video I took of the salmon attempting to jump up the large waterfall. We watched in silence, while we all thought about the sounds, visions, feelings and memories of that day. Then we all dove into the pile of words and picked out what we were thinking about. I asked for a set of three lines from each of us. My daughter gave four. Then we put them into an order that we felt made sense. Here is our group poem:

Wish for a River

natural adventure

open exploration

and great kids

launch area

electric bounce

wet, fresh season

happiness, warm, good

uncommon, extreme, and charming

all unique

we wish for a river 

I love that we were able to make a poem within 5 minutes without fear or hesitation. We had fun. We worked alone and together. The colored words looked pretty. We ended up with a nice poem.