Remember that we are only starting with kindergarten so we mostly are using our themes in crafting and circle time songs and stories and in our gathering walks. I will post a linky at the bottom and hope you will share what you are doing in your home school as well, but please don't feel limited to kindergarten material.
This week our theme was mushrooms. The previous week it rained and rained all week and we found so many. I knew we wouldn't find as many this week but the tiny creek just across the road usually has a least a few growing alongside in the moss and on decaying logs.
We actually find quite a few. I took a picture of each variety we found and the girls picked just one of each to bring home so we could try and identify them in our mushroom book.
Back home, the girls wanted to draw each one and I wrote the name in beside of it. We found they actually are pretty difficult to identify, as there is so much variation. But Kaiya and I had fun trying. Most importantly we talked about how some were edible but many are poisonous and, while it is OK to touch any mushroom it is never OK to eat any mushroom growing in the wild.
This particular mushroom we couldn't identifying but it smelled very strongly of bleach. So much so that we looked it up first just so we could throw it out!
Painting mushrooms.
Another day we used this tutorial to make very nifty acorn capped mushrooms. We made some with cords long enough for necklaces, some shorter so we can hang them from our Solstice tree and some with no chords so I could make....
...this. The 'mossy' mound has been lightly needle felted and I've used hot glue to anchor the 'mushrooms' on. Zoe's gnomes love it very much!
With a bit of preparation (drilling holes in the acorns and pre-cutting the twigs) this was a really fun project and one even Zoe (4) enjoyed.
On Thursday we practised our hand sewing with this tutorial. We didn't insert the little lid as suggested, as we were using very small spools, so they came out a bit more rounded. Not that that matters one bit.
This activity was a little beyond Zoe so I made hers and another for River. Kaiya had difficulty stitching and holding down a hem, too, so she made hers with a raw edge. It was the first running stitch she'd done, she used a whip stitch while making her apple.
While they played with their mushrooms I put together an easy little booklet to hold the pictures of all the mushrooms we had found (that I'd had printed and picked up earlier that day). I left a little room at the bottom of each photo for the name of the mushroom and put in a few extra pages for future findings.
I store my ideas and findings for school on a Pinterest board, which you are welcome to check out here and verses here.
I couldn't find very many stories and verses on mushrooms. We used this Tippety-toes verse and read Children of the forest. Children of the Forest actually is a great book for this subject because of the part where the family is gathering mushrooms for the winter and the father admonishes one son for not paying attention while he is showing them which mushrooms are good for eating and which ones are poisonous.
And that was our week! I hope you will share yours. I will make a tab at the top of my blog so we can file these resources away for future reference. I was thinking Saturday would be a good day to share so that we can gain inspiration for the coming week.
Hope you all have a beautiful weekend!
