Today we worked on the element earth. If you look under pages to the right, you will see our planned activities, rhymes and the books we will be using. I also tweet the Amazon links for the books in case you’d like to order them, these are also in the right-hand column. I made cards with the rhymes on them, as well as pretty pictures hand-drawn or stenciled on the borders.
Martina spent all day yesterday tossing her cookies, so today was not charted to be a full-on school day. I cancelled her riding lesson even! Here are the things we did do: we took things very slowly this morning; we read a story from Joseph Bruchach’s Keepers of Life. The story was about the woman who lives in the earth. I copied a drawing from the book had Martina color it with oil pastels and use Q-tips to blend.
We took a walk to the houseboat my grandfather built before my dad was born. The houseboat pond is home to a couple of mythically huge turtles. They did not show up today but the couple of normal-sized fellows who did had a nice snack of hamburger buns. It was nice sitting in the sun, tossing pieces of bread over, watching the turtles swim and the dogs romp. We’ve had way too much rain recently and the Vitamin D was a welcome boost.
Eventually we got up and wandered around the houseboat woods for a bit. Martina made a fairy boat out of magnolia leaves and a twig, which she set sail in the back pond.
We saw a tiny little turtle (kindly pointed out by Kyle, a young man who works out here.) Martina tried to catch it but the turtle slid away and into the pond.
When we got home, we moved a few plants outside from our glassed-in porch and sat down outside for a little read. Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back seemed like the obvious choice. We read this and discussed which months would be happening in our calendar during the thirteen moons of the book. We laughed a bit at Peaches the cat who was busily gorging herself on catnip. No wonder the plant always looks like its been pounced on! We have 12 cats!
We came back inside and Martina painted a picture of a turtle with its 13 moons. The painting is now drying in the sun on our inside porch.
I have to say that I am finding it a bit difficult to separate the elements! Here we are studying the earth element by feeding turtles in a pond, in the sunshine with a strong March breeze in our hair. I suppose that inseparable quality is, in itself, is part of the point.
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