This morning we read the next story from ' The Barefoot Book of Earth Tales' of 'Why the Sky is far Away' from Nigeria. We learned that in some cultures myth is created to provide an explanation for phenomena that people then found unexplainable and to teach values that is shared from generation to generation and that to enrich the story, imagery is usually used. In this case people were taking more of the sky which used to be a stretch away to eat.We ended up talking about the ozone layer and environmentalism, of not taking more from the earth than you need, not being greedy and of wastage.
When we returned from the playground, I presented the red rods again to Sofiyya, this time using the story of the prince trying to rescue Rapunzel from the tower by building a red staircase. Later, she asked me to build the brown stairs and I used the story of Aurora climbing up the castle tower when she was lured to find the spindle. Sofiyya took out the storybook when I was about to present to her and showed me the page where Aurora was climbing the stairs. She was truly interested and even talked about it later in the day.
I also managed to get Umayr to work with me on addition with the golden beads using the story of a boy trying to rescue his wise teacher from being trapped by an evil, jealous villager by solving puzzles.
I have of course been reading ' Oral Storytelling and Teaching Mathematics' by Michael Schiro. This tradition has of course always existed, and is an integral part of Waldorf schooling; I just wasn't really sure of the way how and am not very creative with coming up with stories. Hmm, I really need to work on coming up with stories now; the kids love it.In fact, to this day, I can recall my lower secondary art teacher who always had a story to tell. I loved those lessons.
All the while, Ihsan was drawing the Asian map which came up surprisingly neat and detailed, on his own. Before that, I have presented the symbolisation of decimals which got stretched into representation by fractions as an alternative and the number line between whole numbers, decimals and fractions and negative numbers when Ihsan looked at me with uninspired eyes, telling me how simple the initial lesson was.During the later part of shelf work, the boys also used scrap to make models of trucks.
For written work, Ihsan did anagrams with names of countries, a quiz on parallelograms and a revision of capitalisation and initials for mechanics. The little ones did counting and phonics revision for their written work session.
After Zuhr, we learned our hadith for the week and did our akhlaq lesson from 'My First Book about Islam' which touched on 'Our Community' and the ummah. From a conversation about how there were people of all races and nations who are Muslims we talked about slavery when Umayr mentioned how Bilal, became the first person to be a muazzin.
In the evening, we took a slow jog down Brickland Road, the kids actually wanted to go the whole stretch and we ended up doing so. They later blowed cattails and played throwing sticks over the bridge, they call it 'poohsticks' from Winnie the Pooh, but since there wasn't much water in the monsoon drain, most of them got stuck. After getting our drinks at the petrol station, they managed to even play on the swing at the neighbourhood farm before heading home. Whew! that was a long but fruitful day and I look forward to what we can do tomorrow.
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