St. Patrick

I went to the library in search of, among other things, a book or two about St. Patrick -- this was both in preparation for St. Patrick's Day, and also for S to read for his Grade 2 saints...

The requisite section of the stacks was very picked-over. But, there -- right in the middle of an otherwise bare shelf -- it was: Tomie de Paola's Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland, exactly what I had scoped out for S at the beginning of the school year, and about which I had promptly forgotten. Gratefully, I scooped it up, along with Petook: An Easter Story for T.


I offered to read the book to S, but he wanted to read it himself. For our MLB, we printed out a map of Ireland. S dictated his summary to me, and then recopied my sentences. (This was a compromise, since he would otherwise have refused to write anything.)

I thought he'd give me something about one or two of the legends associated with St. Patrick. Nope! What caught the attention of my little dog-lover was this: "Als er ans Boot kam, sind die Jagdhunde still geworden." (When he [St. Patrick] came to the boat, the hunting dogs became still.)

And, check out that border! It's green and orange, and S researched to learn that these two colors mixed together make brown. So, the middle line is brown. As far as he was concerned, he was just making a nice design... how's that for some unintentional form drawing?


And, to celebrate the day, we made this "Dark Irish Soda Bread". Of course, I substituted ingredients. :-) Instead of buttermilk, I used homemade yogurt. And, per the wishes of my bakers, we left out the caraway seeds. I thought the outcome was just so-so, and was disappointed that the loaf was so (relatively) small. For me, the recipe was on its way to the recycling bin. However, the bread got very positive reviews over dinner. So, I guess I'm keeping it...

Straight lines

Today we tried some straight lines. Or, as was the case this afternoon, we talked about drawing light sabers (!).

This form was actually surprisingly hard! It was a challenge to not only make the lines the proper length, but to maintain the spacing.

Initially, S threw in the towel after just a few iterations, saying he couldn't do it. But, you should have seen him glow once he figured out the mental geometry to make this form happen successfully.

Here are two of his samples, following some practice:

Form drawing: a spoonful of "sugar" helps the medicine go down...

S and I made our first attempt at form drawing about a week ago. We walked the form, traced it in the air, traced it on our board, etc. Our session was nothing remarkable.

Feeling guilty about "falling behind" with the schedule I'd sketched out for our "school year," we capitalized on T's naptime this afternoon to give form drawing another go. I set up our easel, selected a variation of the form we'd done already (two letter "C's" facing each other), and drew this on the board. To make our drawing more special, we took out our blue beeswax crayon!

We began with a (to be very honest) humdrum story to go with the form. And, we traced and drew. Then, another story came to mind, a short one about a bear who'd eaten a lot of ice cream, and therefore had a round tummy. His bear friend was in the same situation.

So, now we were working with two ice-cream-sated bear tummies. What a difference! Suddenly, S had much more interest in drawing the form. The amazing thing was that the form visibly improved over our various iterations of it.

And, once his interest waned with the form I'd presented, he veered off onto his own path, happily creating his own "form" to draw and repeat. Once his board was full of this new form, he then -- on his own accord -- drew a border for it with the side of his chalk.