October Kindergarten 2

Here's an overview of what our Waldorf inspired October kindergarten homeschooling looked like during our second year of kindergarten (age 5-6).

We went on several field trips this month. One was to a farm with a pumpkin patch during a special agriculture education day event they were hosting.

October Kindergarten

Our rhyme this month from Nursery Rhyme Literature Pockets is "Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet". Besides the standard stuff about spiders, there was also a discussion about what kinds of things are appropriate to sit upon.

We did our monthly story from Cuentos para ver, oir y sentir. The story for October was about the magic of autumn.

Autumn wonder and magic are waiting to be discovered in the forest.

A boy floats up on a cloud and sees the trees changing, then drops down in a forest to meet a squirrel and gnome.

Week 1

This week for October kindergarten, she was interested in getting out the Froebel gifts that we did monthly last year. They are a free choice toy now and she can get any set out whenever she wants.

In our ongoing story, Sam and Papa looked up how to become friends with a dragon. The book said dragons love apples, so they brought apples to wear the dragon was staying at the Crystal Palace.

Super Sam and Papa offer apples to the dragon to start a new friendship.

We started monitoring the daily weather with a sun or cloud stamp and thermometer. For math, made a mirror book using acrylic mirrors and tried the investigations from Moebius Noodles. For reading, we did the lowercase letters i and j.

For social studies, we did more in the "I Am Special" book, as we will every week until it is done. I allow her to do two pages per week although she would happily do the whole book in one day!

We spent some time playing outside riding her scooter around a chalk drawn track. We also played with a ball throwing, bouncing, and kicking. While at the playground, we saw the Thunderbird airplanes in town practicing for the Fleet Week and Air Show event.

We started the Primary Prodigies level in our music curriculum. I started using Musiah to improve my own piano skills, and I want her to have completed Primary Prodigies before she does it.

We had a field trip to the Baltimore DIY Fest where Daddy did a presentation on silkworms.

Week 2

This week our nature table features zinnias and a little pumpkin. We looked up some pumpkin recipes to try this month. On one of our nature walks we found a gigantic leaf that made a nice hat.

Sam went to the orchard with the dragon to pick more apples. The dragon met some more gnomes to befriend.

Apple harvest with the dragon

We went to the Fleet Week event in the Inner Harbor and toured the Jamestown boat and Coast Guard tall ship. The sail powered ships tied right in with our weather studies. She loved making wind socks this week. We also made a wind chime using an old blueberry box and extra screws. We enjoy monitoring the weather with our sky stamps, thermometer, and rain gauge.

We are finishing up trees and weather and transitioning to a study of fish and other animals. An excellent book to help with transitioning topics was Trout Are Made of Trees. We welcomed two goldfish into our home.

We attended an agriculture education day at a farm in Anne Arundel County with a large pumpkin patch and small corn maze, or do you call it a maize maze?

Extra Week

Our Waldorf Essentials curriculum provides four weeks of activities per month, so about four times a year we end up with an extra week. This time I chose to move it to the middle of the month so the gnomes would still have their week 4 harvest festival and Halloween at the same time as ours.

She visited grandparents. We attended library programs to make a straw rocket and paper airplanes. We did the letters m and n. We made fish observations. We did a color mixing STEM challenge to make a watercolor rainbow starting with the three primary colors. We looked up what indigo is in a book about rainbows and also a book about dye plants.

Remember how she loves worksheets (even though I would rather see her play more)? We started the Following Directions book and Lollipop Logic book 1. Again, she would do them all in one day, so I have to ration them out.

Week 3

The lonely silkworm on our nature table spun its cocoon. We still have two mini pumpkins and a craft we made with wax paper sealed leaves in a frame, but otherwise the space is being turned over to fish! In addition to the two goldfish, we now have three guppies.

Returning to our Waldorf Essentials stories, Super Sam put the garden to bed by harvesting crops and saving the seed babies.

The gnomes harvest the rest of the crops and put the garden to bed.

This coincided exactly with our final harvest and digging up the summer bulbs to put them to sleep for the winter in our basement. She was reluctant to go out and do the digging, but after we got started she loved it and didn't want to stop pulling weeds! Why couldn't she do that a little earlier this summer? (I know why -- awful mosquitoes.)

We did the letters o and p (for painting pumpkins!) and continued the books we've been doing. We also added The Never-Bored Kid Book, ages 5-6. She has been playing the piano a lot. In Primary Prodigies, we learned about steps and skips.

Oh, and I suggested she decorate the "p" page with purple, pink, polka dots, or plaid, but she insisted on coloring it yellow.

Our STEM challenge this week was to make a paper and straw rocket that could fly at least 5 feet. She enjoyed making and playing with a black construction paper spider to go with our Little Miss Muffet rhyme this month.

We had an awesome field trip to the National Arboretum where we saw the bonsai and full grown coniferous trees. We read The Peace Tree from Hiroshima the night before our trip and had fun searching for it there.

Week 4

This week we made pumpkin fudge with cinnamon from tree bark and maple syrup from tree sap. We did the lowercase letters q and r, and painted a pumpkin with glitter glue.

Sam had a party with his forest friends and told them about when he met Jack Frost last year (November week 3). It's neat to see how the stories tie together over time.

The gnomes celebrate the end of harvest around the fire (made of wool).

In addition to lots of fish books and starting the chapter book My Father's Dragon, all as read alouds, we read some Dia de los Muertos books and talked about Mexico. This tied into earlier discussions about monarch butterfly migration.

For Moebius Noodles Math, we did function machine stamp stations to make patterns. In  Lollipop Logic, we did Jack-o-lantern sequencing.

Our STEM challenge was to build an alien that could stand on 3 legs. We used Crayola Model Magic for the clay bodies and chose pipe cleaners for legs, although we also experimented with Q-tips, which related to our lettter q. We saw a production of the Peter Pan musical.

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