Liquid Measurement Lesson

Well, since all my Waldorf homeschooling friends are showing their kids liquid measurment lesson I thought I would too! Here is Robin after learning all about cups, pints, quarts, and gallons. On the blackboard is the big G illustration showing the relations. Robin made a copy for his lesson book as he went along. This was actually a pretty fun lesson, and we have been able to reinforce it daily as we started milking our goat, Mocha. She gives us about a quart per milking right now, so we ask things like "If we need a gallon for cheese, how many days do we need to save up?" Of course, right now we are drinking every drop, it is soooo good!

We're Seeing Spots!!

After much waiting and anticipating, Jill's little doe Merci finally kidded with triplets! And they were certainly worth the wait! Just look at those moonspots!!! One little moonspotted doeling (standing), one awesome pinto buckling (also standing), and one darling moonspotted buckling (laying down). These babies are everything we hoped for in quality and color, maybe even more! For more pictures visit our goat blog: http://millersfairywood.blogspot.com/

Books you have read

I found this on my friend Tammy's blog and thought it was interesting. I come from a reading family, so I hope all my friends and family will pass it along!

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE.

4) Reprint this list on your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

*I have read over half of them, and honestly, there are some I haven't read that I knowingly chose not to. But it's an interesting list and fun to see what the NEA thinks about how cultured I am! LOL! Thanks, Tammy, for passing this along.

1 - Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 - The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 - Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 - Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 - To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6- The Bible most of it anyway...

7 - Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 - Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 - His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 - Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 - Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 - Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 - Complete Works of Shakespeare ok, so I haven't read the complete works, but more than half so I'm counting it!

15 - Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 - The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 - Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 - Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 - The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 - Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 - Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 - The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 - Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 - War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 - Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 - Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 - Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 - Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 - The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 - Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 - David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 - Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 - Emma - Jane Austen

35 - Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 - The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 - Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 - Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 - Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 - The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 - A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 - The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 - Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 - Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 - The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 - Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 - Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 - Dune - Frank Herbert

53 - Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 - Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 - A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 - The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 - A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 - Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon6

0 - Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 - Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 - Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 - The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 - The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 - Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 - On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 - Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 - Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 - Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 - Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 - Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 - The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 - Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 - Ulysses - James Joyce

76 - The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 - Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 - Germinal - Emile Zola

79 - Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 - Possession - AS Byatt

81 - A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 - Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 - The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 - The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 - Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 - A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 - Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 - The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 - The Faraway Tree Collection

91 - Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 - The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 - The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 - Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 - A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 - A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 - Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 - Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Turkey

I cant' resist posting a picture of my adorable red bourbon tom turkey! He has just started to display his lovely feathers for his hen, and I was lucky enough to catch it this afternoon.

By the way, that is not my back door in the background! LOL! It is the door to the garage/barn which opens on to our poultry yard. We're not that rustic!

Snowman

We finally did some painting on Friday...It was so fun! Here is my snowman, I will try to get Robin and Elsa's up too.

About Education...

In Our School
In our school
There will be no boring lectures,
No politically-correct textbooks,
No required courses,
No graffiti-covered walls,
No overcrowded classrooms,
No high-stakes testing,
No strict schedules,
And no dress codes…
But the whole world will be an open book
As we run free to windsung poems,
And we will rejoice as we explore
The wonders of God's creations.
~Teri Ann Berg Olsen

I found this lovely poem on my friend Tammy's blog. It really says what I feel about education. What it should be about - especially in the elementary years. As I commented to her, I have always felt that children should be taught to love learning, not to achieve a certain grade or score on a test. The way to teach a love of learning is to instill a sense of wonder in them, and show them how to explore, and then give them the freedom to do so. I remember as a child being frustrated when I was not allowed to learn what I was interested in, or to continue on in studying something that caught my interest. Now, as a homeschooling mom, I have to fight against all the social programming I went through and really allow my children that freedom in their education. When I do, I am so pleasantly suprised at the difference in attitude and the amazing progress that is made. Childhood should be a time of beauty and magic, I am so grateful that I have the opportunity to participate in the unfolding of my children's souls!

Lucy's Fairy House

Lucy made this fairy house when she was 10. That's right, 10! Technically her 4th grade year, I had pulled her out of public school and began homeschooling her with Waldorf influences. It was just what this very creative little girl needed. Lots of drawing and observing, reading together, studying the world around her. It was a magical year! After the Christmas holidays she announced that she wanted to make a fairy house. This was something she had wanted to do since the summer before when she saw the work of an amazing fairyhouse artist at a festival in Sedona, Arizona. Well, the holidays were over, it seemed like an ok time to sacrifice the kitchen island to a craft project! So for the next two months, Lucy gathered, glued, and created an unbelievably fabulous dwelling! The base of the house was made by David out of orange tree branches and hardwood for the platforms. everything else was made by Lucy. In April of that year, she entered the completed house in the Maricopa County Fair under the dollhouse division. This little 10 year old girl won every ribbon and prize there was to win - from first place to best in show for the crafts! It was so exciting! We actually have a special niche in our living room where it is safely displayed, and Lucy still adds to it from time to time. I took the pictures above last week when I realized that we had never taken a set of really great and thourough pictures of it. There are many more pictures of all the details, but Lucy wants to make a blog devoted to her art and will post them there. I'll let you know when it's done!

Lucky Little Winter Visitor

I was just on one of the homeschoolingwaldorf ladies' blogs and saw her little winter ladybug, and remembered that I had meant to post this picture last month. Well, never to late for a little winter cheer, right? This sweet little visitor appeared in our house the night we put up our Christmas tree - early December. We were quite amazed and felt very fortunate for such an unusual visit! In Europe, ladybugs are bringers of good fortune. Maybe we can take it as a symbol of hope for the new year. Already this year has started off suprisingly peaceful for us. We seem to feel a sense of togetherness and purpose. Recognizing the beauty and blessings in our life and taking the time to really treasure those small simple moments is my goal for the new year. Peace and beauty for 2009!

Elsa's Butterfly

Elsa received this enchanting butterfly for Christmas from her cousins, Telleigh and Kaveh. When you give the string a little pull, the butterfly gently flaps her wings...Today we took her outside for some fresh air and let her flutter around in the trees. I think she is as happy to be here as we are that she joined our family!

Little Fairy House

This is what Lucy and Jill were working on until midnight Christmas Eve! A little fairy house for Elsa. It is all reversable, so the roof comes off and reverses to purple, and the house part can reverse to the pretty green that's inside. They also discovered that the roof makes quite a fetching pixie hat! Santa brought the little sugar plum fairy that lives in the house. She was made by mama elf ;-)

Swaps

Ok, so my sister Missy at Fairychild Heirlooms has really got involved in swaps, and she is having tons of fun! I have been a little jealous, but a little intimidated too as I see the amazing things all the ladies are crafting and swapping (not to mention observing how easy it would be to get in totally over my head by signing up for too many!) So I have stayed out of it....until now! How can I resist my own sister! She is hosting such an enchanting swap that I just had to join....

And when Missy found out how much my little ones wanted to be involved too, she charmingly decided to host another swap!
Thank you, Missy! We are so excited!

Happy Birthday, Lucy!

My adorable, creative, amazing girl! You have brought wonder and magic into my life from the day you were born. Always full of ideas, never bored, always thoughtful and helpful. You were a delightful child and now you have grown in to a delightful young woman. I love you Lucy! May your journey continue to be full of beauty and joy...

New Baby Goat

Here's the first baby of the new year! Fairywood Angel Cake gave birth this evening (around 5:00 p.m.) to Fairywood Sugar Cookie, a little doeling!