"The first light of advent is the light of stone,
Stones that live in crystals, seashells, and bones."
The story was from Advent: Lighting the Path to Christmas by Annette Fronz. It was about a star that fell to earth and lay in a field and became duller and duller until it looked like any commonplace rock. On a special night, angels appeared in the heavens and the little star came alive, and began to shine brighter and brighter until it was picked up by a shepherd and the star lit the way to the stable in Bethlehem. The star became so light and carefree as it listened to the Christ Child's mother sing to her baby, that it floated back up into the sky where it continued to light the way for others to find the Christ Child.
This past week our lessons focused on Saint Nicholas. This is a great website for all things Saint Nicholas. Among many other things, he is the patron saint of children.
There are many interesting stories about Bishop Nicholas. I got a lot from that website, and I also used this book:
I will be using this book again when we will cover the saints in February for another language arts block.
On Monday, the kids began the day with some outdoor playtime and then we took our walk around the pond to the school room. Once inside, Grant did some math review with his wooden dice, we worked on a tongue twister using words with the "ore" sound, and then he modeled a ball with only the finger tips of his non-writing hand, or his right hand. After that we had our penny whistle lesson. When we finished that, I told some stories about Saint Nicholas.
Grant and I drew a picture of him in our main lesson books.
Mom's Drawing
Grant's Drawing
Once we were done with our pictures, we looked at this picture of Saint Nicholas and found seven of the symbols he is commonly associated with. The symbols include: Miter (his bishop's hat), crozier, (his staff), 3 gold balls, gold coins, money bags, 3 maidens, 3 children in tub, children, ships, anchors, books, and shoes.
We also wrote out a list of all the words we could think of with a "ore" sound to go along with the tongue twister (we came up with more later in the week).
After that Grant read some from this cool book of vintage stories. On Monday he read, The Pancake. He also read Chicken Little and The Three Billy Goats Gruff later in the week.
On Tuesday, we added in some jump roping to our regular "start of the school day" routine. Once we were finished with all of that, I told some more stories about Saint Nicholas.
Grant copied part of a Saint Nicholas poem.
After he was finished with that, he did a Saint Nicholas "hidden picture".
On Tuesday night, Grant set up "school" in his room with some of his stuffed animals and Johanna. He was teaching them how to write the roman numeral II. They all did very well, except for the one that fell asleep (It wasn't Johanna, by the way).
On Wednesday, we worked more on the Jacob's ladder design with our strings. He is getting much better at it, but I think we will go over it one more time next week, too.
I read some more stories about Saint Nicholas and then Grant did a word search puzzle (with a little help from Lucia), and looked at a different ship picture to find as many things as he could that started with the letter "s".
On Thursday, Grant and I did some crawling and bear walk races around the room. Man, he's fast! We also did math review and penny whistle lesson. After that I read some more Saint Nicholas stories, and then Grant and Johanna starting coloring these cut-outs:
We kept things pretty simple on Friday. I read a few more stories about Saint Nicholas, his death, and how he returns every year on the night of December 5th to leave goodies in the shoes of kind and helpful children. We will leave the kids shoes out and see what Saint Nicholas brings them!
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