Colour Month Continues...

Not much to add for today's post.  Plans are underway for Niamh's 2nd birthday (wow - that came around way too fast!).  In keeping with Colour Month, we have chosen a rainbow theme, inspired in part by THIS lovely entry on the wonderful Chocolate Eyes blog.

I am so admiring of Mamawestwind's beautiful Waldorf-inspired toys and hand-made crafts that I have been motivated to try my hand at a few ideas of my own.  So here are some photos of what I have been up to today.

Story sticks (or rhythm sticks, or even both!):

 They are made from pine dowel and painted with non-toxic water colour paint.  I'm currently finishing them with a natural beeswax polish.

Once I have perfected the finish, I may think about making some for sale.

 While not a complete believer in every aspect of the Steiner-Waldorf method, I am very much convinced of the need to fill a child's life with simple, beautiful things, imaginative stories, thrilling experiences, secret hopes and tiny treasures.  This is one area where the traditional Montessori approach falls short, in my humble opinion.  Fairies should live at the bottom of every child's garden.  I hope to incorporate as many fairies, elves and gnomes into Niamh's life as she wishes to have fill her up.

I can't wait for them to visit.

Lazy Saturdays

I love lazy Saturdays.  I know I should feel guilty - a whole day wasted when the garden needs doing, the house needs cleaning, etc, etc...  But you know what?  :-P~~~~ to all that.  :-P~~~~, I say.  Sometimes, the world needs lazy Saturdays.

It wasn't too lazy.  I think a load of washing or two went into the machine (and amazingly, even got hung out to dry AND brought in again), the garden got watered and the crumbed lamb cutlets and cauliflower-potato puree we had for dinner were made from scratch.

Niamh also got a new job (mostly because I had made some more coloured rice, and needed to justify it).  So here she is, playing with her new pouring job.

First, she needs to use a spoon to get the rice into the funnel:

The funnel had a very narrow neck, so if it was over-filled, the rice wouldn't pour through.  But you could use knock the spoon on the funnel to help unstick the rice:

The yellow funnel has a wider opening, so you could spoon more rice in at once:

Bah - just use your fingers:

I love this photo because it really shows her concentration:

 Then pour it all back into the container:

Then, some reading from our old favourite, Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox.  She reads it herself, these days:

Later, we made music with Daddy:

 All in all, a quiet, lazy Saturday.  Just how I like em.

Colours and a Grumpy Day

It's funny how the word "colours" seems to conjure up images of happiness and joyful times - as indeed colour is part of those things.  But even when there is colour, there can also be grumpiness.  Take yesterday, for example.  Despite getting up to some fun colouring activities, it was just one of those days for both of us.  You know, the kind where you wake up too early (or, cough, are woken up too early by your darling offspring) and instead of just dealing with it like a mature adult, you spend the day punishing them for it by being a grumpy, grouchy example of everything you hate?  And they respond to your horrible attitude by becoming the very thing you need to yell at...

Funny how you get what you create, isn't it?

Maybe it's just me who does this.  I see so many blogs of wonderfully happy home-schooling families doing amazing things, and I sometimes ask myself...where are the bad days?  Do they have them?   If they don't...how do they do it?  And if they do have them, why don't they say so???  I can understand not wanting to air dirty laundry...but way to make the rest of us feel inadequate, you perfect people!  ;-)

As I have stated previously - and no doubt will again, and often - I am far from perfect.  And that imperfection extends to motherhood, I'm afraid.  Some days, I think I'm not too bad at all.  Others...oh boy do I suck at it!  I think what makes those "FAIL" days feel worse is that I know better.  I know what I'm doing, what I'm saying, and the effect it will have.  And yet, I still struggle with the very simply act of just shutting my damn mouth.  It's like the wonderful Naomi Aldort says (and I paraphrase her here): Your mind is like a computer filled with old tapes.  Something triggers those tapes to play, and you just open your mouth and spit it all out without stopping to think.

I could go on.  But rather than dwell upon failure, I will chalk it up to a learning exercise I needed to go through.  What is failure if not an opportunity?

Anyway, not everything here has been a trial.  Here are some some photos of the good things we have done in the past few days of "Colour Month."

Painting with watercolours:

 Trying out some of Mama's watercolour pencils (you draw on the paper first, then wet them with water to get a paint effect):

Let me just add - when it comes to people touching my paints, or messing around with my precious pencils, I am possibly the most anal person on the planet.  But perhaps is a rare moment of selfless clarity, I decided to let Niamh choose how she would like to return them to the tray.  Let's have a look at the colour-sorting skills of a nearly 2 year old:

No wonder she thought my little colour sorting activity the other day was boring.  Okay, so she's put a purple in with the greens (steady, Mama....breathe...), but really.  Not bad, eh?

Yesterday, blowing coloured water with a straw:

Then, the coloured bees from the bee box had a trip to the vegie garden:

Where they met a real bee:

 Exploring the inside of a flower to see where the bees go:

The bees, the bath frog (Froddy) and Niamh at the park, where we made a fairy door at the bottom of a tree:

I guess what I have taken from the past few days is that, when compared to colours, I am like a tray of pencils.  Sometimes, I am a jumble of mixed-up, messed-up colours.  Sometimes, I am like a rainbow.  Let's hope the sun comes out again soon.

More on Colours...and some science thrown in at the end...

I hereby dub July, "Colour Month."  Okay, maybe as a choice of name, it is a little counter-seasonal.  It is winter here, after all.  (Counter-seasonal...is that a word?  Words?)  Anyway, since winter here in sunny Western Australia is hardly dull, drab or grey, I think Colour Month is a fitting title.  And grey is still a colour...

Following on from yesterday's revelations on how to make colour a more interactive, tangible experience, today, we had great fun with the colour pink.  Borrowing THIS wonderful Montessori-inspired idea from the brilliant Totschool blog, I made Niamh a little water activity.

Here, she is using an eye-dropper to drip water I coloured with pink food colouring onto wax paper:

 A bit hard to see, but I had drawn some little circles onto the wax paper, with the aim of getting her to try to drop a single drop into each.  A bit ambitious for a first try with the eye-dropper, maybe, but it did give her the idea...although it was instantly WAY more fun to make BIG pink puddles, rather than little ones:

 It was fun to make little dots onto pictures:

You'll notice she is not wearing an art smock (but is wearing her PJs - really, sometimes that battle just ain't worth fighting first thing in the morning), and we are using a glass for our pink water and not a paper or plastic cup.  I really wanted her to a) engage in having fun without all the cumbersome bulk of the smock, and b) to work with real materials in order to learn both care for her clothing, and her tools.  If the glass had fallen, so be it.  If things break, we clean up the mess.  (The glass is still in one piece, by the way.  Even 1 year olds can learn to be careful with things that break.)

She loved, loved, loved this activity!  It was enormous fun to watch the water beading on the wax paper, and to break it up into smaller and smaller beads just by giving it a little push with the eye-dropper.  It was hilarious to suck the water back up into the eye-dropper (complete with slurping noise - think spaghetti, but pink).

Dyeing our fingers pink in the droplets was fun too:

 Next, we experimented with different kinds of paper and a paintbrush, as well as the eye-dropper:

On plain white paper, you could paint the dots into stripes and blobs, which was lots of fun.  Or just make really big, wet, pink puddles:

On paper towel, the drops made blotches which spread out:

It was just as much fun for me as it was for Niamh, I assure you.  We spent nearly an hour just playing with pink water, an eye-dropper and a paint-brush.  How's that for cheap entertainment?

After I finally won the day's "Ye shall now be dressed," battle, I was thrilled when she immediately asked for more painting, but this time, "a different one."  A week or so ago she had started to paint a little wooden jigsaw puzzle (a great idea - you buy the puzzle in plain wood, along with paints, then decorate it yourself - you can find them Here), and I suggested we finish it.  She agreed.

You'll note the art smock this time.  She was wearing a fairly new top and, well, the "mama-hates-a-washing-challenge" panic button over-rode my higher philosophical ideals...  Glass and pink dye smashed all over the floor is one thing.  An impossible washing challenge is something else entirely.  Ah, sweet, merciful, human fallibility...thy familiar embrace is a warm, numbing comfort.

When the painting was done, she immediately requested MORE drawing.  Here she is drawing some stripey balls with crayons:

The balls are actually in black on her left, and the stripes are separate on her right.  I love it.

After the artistic frenzy (seriously, 2.5 hours doing nothing except drawing and painting!), we headed to the park for a picnic and some fun with her favourite thing in a whole world - balls.

Running down the hill (she is "very fast"):

 Rolling the balls down the hill:

Uh-oh, better catch them!  (I love the look of concern - those balls are getting away from her.)

 I asked her, "Who goes faster, you or the balls?"  A rather stern look in return.  "The balls."  Duh.  Obviously, mama.  "Do you know why?"  Another look (you know, the one you get when you're an idiot), "They're round."

Wait...is that...physics...coming from the mouth of a child not yet 2??  Dagnabbit.  How dare she learn naturally!  I was probably in high school before I had that one spoon-fed to me.

Later, we made a slide for our fairy stick people to play on:

(I might not know physics, but I can ram a couple of sticks through a leaf.  Take that, science!)

Roll on, Colour Month!

A Colourful Life

A new day under bright skies got me thinking about colour.  So much of it in our lives, and so much taken for granted.  The miracle of sight, for one.  The gift of language, which helps us interpret and label what we see and enables our interactions with others on many kinds of meaningful level.

It begins so easily.  The sky is blue.  The grass is green.  These apples here are red...these fish are orange...  Semantics on a simple level...and yet, still I wonder whether we end up over-categorising to the point where we forget just how amazing it is to have our eyes filled so beautifully every day.

I never had to teach Niamh her colours.  She taught herself by playing with balloons.  Isn't that a lovely way to learn?  To have your world filled with bouncing, joyous, tangible colour?  No flashcards necessary.  No three-period lesson required.

How to make your world blue:

Or should that be, how to make blue your whole world?

Colour must be amazing, for children.  They haven't been jaded, yet.  Imagine what it must be like to be holding blue?  To be bouncing on yellow?  To run with red!  I think Niamh enjoys colour on so many more levels than I remember how.  To hear her excitement when she eats an orange, "I eating orange!" has made me realise she really IS eating orange.  It's not just a misplaced indefinite article (yes, I did have to look that up).  Orange is exciting, zingy, sweet and juicy.  It smells like a fresh morning.  What a fabulous way to experience a colour beyond a name, right?!  To her, purple and pink are more than just "favourites," or semantics, or categories of a vast spectrum - they are necessities which make her world important and which make her Niamh.


Without thinking all the above through, I made her a colour activity.  I got it from a lovely website...but stupidly didn't think to remember WHERE I found it.  I am so, so sorry I can't cite where I found it, but as soon as I find it again, I'll add the link here.

Here she is trying out her new puzzle:

A close-up, so you can get the idea of what she was doing:

You know what?  She LOVES the cards.  She really loves them.  She takes them around the house and shows them to her toys.  But as for the activity?  Categorising colours into little bowls?  I'll let this photo speak for itself:

Yes.  She is crawling away.  She was there maybe 3 minutes.  You possibly can't see it in the photo, but she is taking the card of the yellow ducky with her to show to HER yellow bath ducky in another room.  And yes, she is still in her PJs.  We are going through a bit of a "I want to wear pajamas all day" phase at the moment...

At first, I have to admit I was a little - and I am a bit embarrassed and ashamed by this - annoyed with her.  Irrationally annoyed.  Like she was rejecting me somehow, because I'd made her the activity and she found it uninteresting.  I don't profess to be any kind of rational, higher being, by the way.  I am certainly human, and sometimes stupidly so.

I wanted her to complete the activity...more, I realised, after much inner searching, than I wanted her to have fun with it.  My child knows her colours, after all.  Just whack the bragging hat on my head and bumper sticker on my car.  (Mother of the year I am not, nor will ever be.)

So, did I suck up my pride and let her off the hook?  In another dimension, where I have learned humility, yes, I no doubt did.  In this world, however, no.  I did not.  (Stupidly so, remember?)  I tried twice to get her to try to complete it.  But you know what?  As soon as I did, I realised that even my heart wasn't really in it, either.  She's not at school, after all.  She's at home and these are HER toys.  I gave them to her to explore, after all.  What child on earth doesn't want to have FUN with their toys??  So I let her play with the cards the way she wanted.  She knows her colours, she knows which picture goes in which bowl...bah.  Why be precious about it.  I only sat up till midnight printing them out, sniff, sob...

(And to the maker of those cards, I do still love them!  Really!  And so does Niamh.  Just not the way they were intended to be used...)

Anyway, we found a much better way to explore colour:

A park picnic with orange carrot sticks, juicy red apples, green grass slightly damp with late morning dew and a picture-perfect blue sky and fluffy, puffy, pom-pom white clouds.

Later, a sunny yellow slide and the all important "Pinky Football":

 I think the look on her face is enough to know which lesson meant more.

As if to appease my inexplicable need to categorise things today, a little natural filing did eventually come our way - entirely instigated by Niamh, who found many different types of leaves to explore.  Some were only newly fallen and so were soft and pliable.  Some were dry and brown, and it was great fun to scrunch them in our hands and to jump on them.  Some had strong smells - eucalyptus, peppermint - and some nothing discernable other than the lovely scent of damp earth.  I think I am going to have to get my act together very soon and make a nature table.

Pushing her hands through the soft, alluring cool of lush, green clover:

Now she knows better than anyone.  Green is how alive feels.  What a powerful lesson, right there.

For both of us.

A Busy Day

A break in the weather allowed us to get a few jobs done, today.  Niamh, of course, was thrilled to finally be able to get outside again (nearly 2 year old with cabin fever = not fun for anyone).

The vegie patch is going well, for once - thanks in no small part to the aforementioned rain.  This season, we have planted heirloom varieties of pea, English spinach, silverbeet, bean and carrots, as well as some cauliflowers, broccoli and purple cauliflowers.  We also threw in some garlic, leeks and celery.

Here's how it's all looking:

The brassica bed has gone mad.  Great news for the caterpillars - which in turn is great news for the chickens.  Niamh, looking for caterpillars on the leaves of a giant cauliflower:

A pea flower, wet with rain:

Niamh likes to eat pea stalks, flowers and shoots straight from the plant (and she can, since the entire garden is organic):

In fact, most of our crop never even makes it inside and is eaten as soon as it is picked, plucked or pulled.  We have tried to remedy that issue (if having a child who LOVES vegies is an issue!) this time around by planting over 70 pea plants...so maybe we might even get to eat some ourselves this time!

A bit later, Niamh helped her Daddy put in a few new fruit trees.  Here she is spreading some rock dust around, since Perth is on a coastal plain, and the soil here is very mineral poor:

After lunch, Niamh headed out to the front of the house to help her Daddy dig up some grass for a new garden bed.  Lucy the chicken went too:

A few people walking their dogs were a bit surprised to see a chicken in the front yard, but Lucy had a wonderful time.  Next time, it will be Henny's turn.  Niamh pretended to be a rabbit called Little Tail, from her book of the same name:

 A well-earned tickle break:

While those two were kept busy outside, I had a chance to do some work on my latest hobby horse and hobby dragon (pics tomorrow, since this blog is already photo-heavy!).

A trip to the park on bikes, and a relaxing bath with candles later, Niamh is now more than ready for bed, so I should probably oblige.

Needless to say, today was packed full of learning, dirt, muddy puddles and joy.