Thanksgiving Gratitude List

We had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner here on Monday.  We seated the 15 children first, these grandchildren who range in age from 12 months to 15 years, told me(or their Mom did) what they were each thankful for.
 I thought the list was so sweet, here it is:

Micah- family
Paul-Emile- love
Gabrielle- God and love
Isaac- our prosperous country
Elora- guinea pigs
Abbie-  water
Joel- Nanaimo bars
David- water in Joel's ear
Lilliane- potatoes
Gavin- turkey
Heidi- chocolate
Grace- animals, family and friends
Evelyn- Mommy and Daddy
Sophie- picking apples with my family
Samuel- telephones, apples and walks
Emma- sugar (Emma preferred to be seated with the adults this year, she even helped me with the dishes!)

via telephone:
Ezra- my house
Olive- my family
Seth- going on a walk
Annalise- climbing the stairs

Week 38 in Pictures (Jane)

 

 

 

 

Ya, well, this week was so busy and full of wierdness that I hardly can express it in words.  So this will have to do for now.  Yip yip.  More protesting here. http://www.saultstar.com/2012/10/05/protest-continues-at-cass

Week 37 in Pictures

Isaac running at CASS Cross Country - it looks painful!  He and Micah both made it to Hiawatha the next week. 

 

The water has dropped again - this is usually all under water -  now we can almost walk out to the deep raft.  Scary.  It feels a little like the aftermath of a flood or hurricane.  Not destruction, but eery.

There were snails everywhere trying to get back to the water. 

 

 



 

Grandpa giving rides on the lawn tractor.

 

 



Story time with Auntie Megan

 



 

We had a birthday gathering for Gavin and Kaylee

 

Happy First Day Not Back to School

 My crush John gives us some words:

“The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”

 
 “It is as true now as it was then that no matter what tests show, very little of what is taught in school is learned, very little of what is learned is remembered, and very little of what is remembered is used. The things we learn, remember, and use are the things we seek out or meet in the daily, serious, nonschool parts of our lives.”

 

“…the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.”

“The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do”

“To parents I say, above all else, don’t let your home become some terrible miniature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your kids alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can.”

 “Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them”

 

“True learning – learning that is permanent and useful, that leads to intelligent action and further learning — can arise only out of the experience, interest, and concerns of the learner”

 

“What children need is not new and better curricula but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go), and to find out what they want to find out.”

Happy first day not back to school.

Week 37

There is something therapeutic and wonderful about making bread with children. We spent hours kneading and shaping and baking. Very waldorf. I loved it.





Ireland House museum in Burlington hosted a fall apple festival:

  This was a cool demonstration on how to make spear heads and start fires by rubbing sticks together. Dangerous new skills....



My favourite part of the week was playing with my orchestra group. This was my second week.

It is HARD and so ridiculously challenging. I kept leaning over to the lady beside me, Anne, to ask her what a word meant or where we stop playing pizzicato. She kindly called out bar numbers when I got lost at the tricky parts.