Sheep and Beeswax

I love the materials from Donna Simmon's Christopherus and M-6 and I are having fun with the Quality of Numbers main lesson from the First Grade Syllabus. We started the day with a little story of a roman shepherd and how he counted his sheep on his fingers. He saw how much easier it was to keep track using sticks and M and I noticed how the space between our thumb and index finger looked like the V in the roman numeral 5. We warmed beeswax in our hands and helped soften it with the little flame. We'll use those beeswax numbers to play matching games between the arabic and roman numbers.

Gentle, gentle, gentle is my theme for the early years. No need to rush. My goal is to instill a love of learning and I go about that in an eclectic way, to be sure. I collect curriculum for fun and pick and choose what works best for my kid's learning styles. I also enjoy studying different educational philosophies and implement what I like and discard what I don't. Waldorf, for example, strives to bring beauty, rhythm and nature into the child's life. I absolutely love many aspects of Waldorf, but completely discard the spiritual dimension of it's philosophy as it is counter with my belief system.
I love homeschooling. Not every day is blog worthy, but today was a good one.