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Feb. 27, 2009
First Day of this Late Winter Co-op
As a co-ordinator, I did OK today, though I did forget one of the folks would be out sick, and had to scramble a bit to get a substitute to cover. As a Mom, I left our lunch on the kitchen table (I thought B had packed it, he thought I'd packed it, I told him not to over-estimate my memory on co-op days where vital things like food was concerned!) But as a co-op teacher, I had a great day!
The little kids were so excited to get their recorders, they were translucent green or orange. M called it a power music recorder. I had to keep saying "Left hand on top," then I realized they were mirror imaging me, so I turned around whenever I needed to demonstrate how to hold it so that when they copied me, their hands would be left hand on top.
Nature study went so very well that I was surprised! They were delighted to collect leaves, we found a gall, but lost the acorn (we were looking at the pin oaks.) (And the children had handed the acorn to me, thinking I'd get it inside better than they would. I told them about my lunch and to carry their own cool nature stuff next week, they clutched their leaves tighter after that.) Then when I told them that we'd be finding things out together because I didn't know very much about trees, that really tickled their funny bones. We verified that yes,the oaks were pin oaks, the leaves were the right shape, and the branch structure too. From what we remembered of the acorn, that was right also.
The kids also picked up some beechnuts with husks
 I found an illustration of them in the Handbook of Nature study, right after the oak tree entry. (I found the on-line illustration at project Guttenburg) The geometry was intriguing: the husk is roughly octahedral, like a white block in a wedgits set. The nut was roughly half of an octahedron, with trianglular-ish faces. The kids played with seeing how many nuts would have fit back into the husks, none of the husks still had nuts in them.
Are beech nuts edible? I wouldn't let the kids experiment.
Some of the kids loved the identification books from the library, some loved having new to them mostly blank notebooks to record their drawings in, some wanted to hear a Thornton Burgess story, so they came over to the story corner for a read aloud, instead of drawing or looking through the reference books.
I know we have some white pine, and a dog wood that will probably bloom
before co-op finishes on Good Friday, but I have to find 3 more subjects
to study that we have outside the church. There is a lot of moss, and
lichen, maybe I can make a week out of them too, that will leave only one week, we'll notice something cool by then.
It went much better than I thought it would, funny, with my nerves, it can't help but go better than I thought it would.
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Posted by Anonymous 
Mar. 3, 2009 - Untitled Comment
Peace to you,
Renae
http://lifenurturingeducation.com/