German Wonder Ball

A pile of trinkets and a ball of thick wool yarn, becomes a beautiful German tradition. When a child is taught to knit they are given a ball of yarn with special presents throughout so that every once in awhile as they work through their ball a new price is discovered. Here are the first five balls completed. I then decided to make three more for my nieces and nephew. After we made chains we turned them into flowers, which we then handed out on Easter. Here is Uncle Steve with a flower in his pocket.
Here the children are working away on their balls. The older two boys spent about three days finger knitting. They worked their way through about four skeins of yarn. This was a lot of fun.

The Frog Prince

by Aubrey and Brennen Calapp



Once a princess was playing with her wooden ball.

She threw it so high it fell into a pond.

A frog appeared and told the princess he would retrieve the ball for her if she would agree to take him into her home and kiss him. She agreed.

After the princess was given her ball she ran home without the frog, but when the frog followed her and he father the king heard all, he told her she must keep her promise, so unwillingly she kissed the frog...

only to find he was a prince, who had been changed by a magic spell.

Our Praying Mantises Hatched

We ordered an egg sack from Insectlore. It just sat for several weeks and then all of a sudden hundreds of baby praying mantises began emerging. My children loved watching them come out and also watching them as they eat the fruit flies. About one hundred hatched, but only fifty are still alive for a reason of which I don't know.

Of Bread and Sacrament

I was pondering today, and I don't know if this will make any sense to anyone else, but this is what I pondered-

Through work we sow seeds, care for them and then, gather the wheat from the field we have dominion over. Our neighbor gathers wheat from the field he has dominion over. Together we combine and refine the wheat, and with that wheat create bread. We then sit together, rejoice, feast and break bread. I, as a missionary in my dominion, am in charge of planting seeds, working and nurturing those plants and then eventually helping in the harvest of those who are found ready. My neighbor in Christ, is doing the same thing in the field he has dominion over. When our harvests are made we join them together into a church, which is also called the body of Christ. In our Sacrament meetings the body of Christ is represented by bread. We meet weekly to rejoice in our God, worship him and break that very bread that symbolizes his body. So the church is the bread and bread is the staff of life. The bread group is the base. The church, the body of Christ, the gathering of the wheat that is ripe and has been harvested is also the base. We are not to worship alone at home as a lone grain, but we are to come together as the body of Christ and be the bread. And here we are to partake of that symbol which represents Christ’s body and also represents the unity of the church, which is the family of God.

God is so full of symbolism in all He does and I am barely scratching the surface of it in my studies I think. He is such an awesome God.

Nursery Rhymes

I am student teaching first grade. Friday I was to teach a lesson on "Little Miss Muffet," and then give the students a four page test on this nursery rhyme. I said to the mentor teacher, "Don't the students already know "Little Miss Muffet?'" She said, "a couple of them might."

I sat the children down and told them that today we were going to read a nursery rhyme. I asked them if they knew what a nursery rhyme was...blank stares. They are old make-believe poems in which we don't exactly know who wrote them and so we often say they are written by Mother Goose. Often they have meanings that tie into something that happened in history and they are often mentioned in other books that you will read later on. Has anyone heard of "Little Bo Peep," or "Jack and Jill?" Aah, three eyes flickered, the other sixteen remained bewildered. I asked if anyone could tell me either nursery rhyme. One boy tried, "Jack and Jill went up the hill ... um, then ... there's a picture of him upside down ... and a spider, I think." Well at least he has seen a book of nursery rhymes.

I am concerned that children who don't know their nursery rhymes are missing a very valuable connection to the past, a source for rich language, strong meters, and an understanding of allusions in later quality texts. I had always taken it for granted that people still read these to their children.



I have several very thick collections of nursery rhymes, my favorite is the first book in the "My Bookhouse Series." http://www.amazon.com/Nursery-My-Bookhouse-One/dp/B000H2J34K/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1240153943&sr=1-2 . It is several hundred pages long has all of the traditional English nursery rhymes and has many nursery rhymes from dozens of other countries. It is also absolutely beautifully illustrated. I begin this book when my children are one, reading a couple pages a day and often going back to the most familiar in the beginning. I then read them "The Real Mother Goose," and the second one in this series, of which I have forgotten the name. I also have a couple smaller collections which I read in one sitting to the children. It must work because I just asked my five-year-old to tell me "Jack and Jill" and then "Little Miss Muffet," and with a hint on two words he said both and then my daughter began rattling off several more.

Our history studies start back at creation again this year. As we go through history this time I'd like to incorporate the history of many of these rhymes as we come to their spot in history. I did this study myself a couple years ago, and was fascinated by it.

To close my rant on nursery rhymes, may I say read them to your children, because the three they will have read to them in public school, simply does not cut it.

Last One Standing

So I have seven siblings. We were all raised in California. Guess how many still live here. Yep, just one-me. How lame is that? My sister, Helen, who is just older than me moved to Utah, where four of my other siblings live last week. My Aunt Cathy, Cousin Sarah, Helen, Me(the one with the dorky expression), Cousin Jessica and my daughter Aubrey pose during the farewell party.
The party was also a birthday party for Seth, Logan and their cousin Caitlyn.
My husband snapping shots of me and Brennen, just to prove I don't always wear a dorky expression.
And yet another not totally dorky expression with me and my daughter.
Brennen, hitching a foot-ride from his Uncle Brandon, while Kevin supervises and tests the cake.


We'll miss you Porters! We wish you well on your further advetures.

Trip for Two

Kevin and I took a trip in March to Monterey. We stayed in a cabin/Inn on the beach. It was beautiful and quiet, as no cars were allowed. Everyone was given a golf cart instead. We walked the warf and watched the sea lions as we ate the first day. We then went kayaking on the ocean. Several sea lions followed us and Kevin saw jellyfish. We both got a little freaked out at the sea weed and so we turned back and went to the Inn.

The next day we rented bikes and biked the 17-mile trail. We saw many deer next to the ocean this day. It was beautiful.

The last day we went whale watching, and saw about three groups of whales. One group was circling and playing tag and so were very unpredictable in where they would show up next. I absolutely loved the wind on the ocean and riding over the waves, even though it was windy and the boat rocked crazily the whole time.

The pictures are in no particular order.

Overheard At Our House This Week

Overheard by the resident five-year-old, “If I was a gigantic pincher bug, and someone zapped me and shrank me, I would pinch them.”

Aubrey, who had just finished memorizing her part for a play, and Kamron got in an argument while doing dishes and then Aubrey felt bad. She came and talked to me and I told her she should apologize. She came back in and said, “I apologized, but Kamron didn’t know his lines.”

Since a month is an eternity at this age, I was quite amazed at the one-year-olds’ proclamation, “I wan’ tree. I wan’ Christmas.” To this the three-year-old replied, “I want Christmas presents. I haven’t had any for years and years.”

Aunt and Uncle went to China town and brought back a little Chinese doll. Aubrey was told she could play with it for two months, but that it was gift for their Grandma and would be given to her when they take their next trip to Utah. Aubrey thought about this for awhile and said, “All right she will be a for arrange student and stay with Alex (her doll) until she has to leave, but I’m sure they will not get along.”

Kamron coughed and Brennen says, “I will not get sick, because I wrinkle my noise and blow out with my lips and then shake my head and that keeps the germs away.”

After a vigorous wrestle match that resulted in tears Kamron said, “I was just defending myself, because even though I’m bigger you can still hurt me. I have nerves, you know!” Brennen looking puzzled says, “Why do little nerds make it so I can hurt you?”

Music

I had to find some appropriate music for Kamron to begin learning in his voice lessons today. Our teacher is not LDS and so doesn't know what music is best for sacrament meeting, so I went searching. Have you seen the church's interactive music player on the church website, www.lds.org? How cool is that thing? You can speed it up, slow it down, just play the part you are learning or change the key. Awesome. So I picked out a few I thought Kamron would like and had him listen to them-he chose "Come Follow Me." We'll see if this suits the teacher today. She is, shall we say exacting. I am gratified that she has shown very slight periods of being impressed with Kamron's ability to follow and to match her pitch, while at the same time demanding a great deal from him.

Our Visit to the Exploratorium

We spent the day at the Exploratorium in San Francisco today. Everyone of my kids loved it.
The children got to feel what Alice must have felt like when she drank her "drink me" bottle and ate her little cakes as they played with visual perception.

They had fun bouncing metal marbles at just the right angle to get them to go through hoops at varying distances.

The saw the different patterns that differently shaped rods would vibrate in.

A favorite of the older children was the high voltage electricity that skipped through the air from one rod to another.

Sethy's favorite was the water. In this exhibit the children got to place objects in a continuously flowing stream of water which had foam on top and so made foam trails around what they placed. Sethy also decided it was a cool place to drive the car he was carrying in his hand.



There were many more hands-on exhibits, including cow eye and sheep brain dissections. My daughter was fascinated by these, but I must confess that like my son it made my stomach turn.

Visit to a Waldorf Charter School

I got to observe in eight classrooms at a Waldorf Charter School this week and then sit down with the principal and ask questions for about an hour. I was not in any classroom more than twenty minutes. For those who know me they know it is hard for a public school to impress me, but I was impressed. I have been in a few charter schools that are supposed to be following a specific method and for the most part I have found them to be poor quality compared to private schools that follow specific methods. I have not visited the private Waldorf school in the area, but I plan to observe there soon. I have, however, read their curriculum, philosophy and seen videos of their teachers teaching specific lessons. These schools are very different from your regular school. They have different goals, methods, curriculum, and hopes for the children. This charter school has an exemption from the district, so the only rule is that they have to meet all of the standards by the end of eighth grade, but not in any particular order, and the kids have to test yearly from second through eighth grade. This frees them to follow the traditional Waldorf curriculum, which makes the school look much more like a private school.

The first class I walked into was a first grade room. The students were sitting at their desks with their five note recorders in hand (at least they looked like recorders to me, though the teacher had flute written on the board). The teacher would tell the kids a song and they would play it in unison. She alternated these with vocal songs. Every child had a small wooden basket on his or her desk for the flute and for handwork of felt, beeswax and finger knitting. A beautiful chalk drawing was on the board and the students single color watercolors were on one wall.

The chalk drawings and watercolors are characteristic of this method of education and were found in every room. All of the chalk drawings were beautiful and done by the teachers to accompany some lesson. A sample of a full board one is here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBAi29Fy6yg. The students do a guided watercolor painting every month from first grade through eighth. The younger students do paintings of only one color, then as they grow they add another and another until they have finally built up to painting with the whole palette.

In a third grade class I went into all of the desks had been shoved to the side of the room and the children were doing a walking dance in two circles. The inner circle went one way while the outer went the other. They then recited a very long poem/lesson about the history of the Jews. Then they did a math lesson in which they made their circles again and with their steps created all of the ways to make 9. They went forward 9 and back 0, then forward 8 and back 1 etc. When they went forward they counted and when they went back they stepped silently. After they were done with this the eurythmy teacher came in and the children put on dance shoes and acted out a story from Jewish history with their bodies.

I then observed a class at recess. This school has a typical jungle gym and then a garden. All of the kids were in the garden, playing tag, digging or sitting and talking. These students are never stopped in their outdoor play. If it is pouring they still go outside and they dig in the mud if they want to. Rubber boots are provided for each child.

I then went into a 3rd/4th combo class where the students were just talking with the teacher. The conversation meandered. A couple of the boys were finger knitting during this time. Apparently the children had recently gone on a field trip to Sutter’s fort and this was part of the conversation. There was a beautiful chalk drawing of California on the board along with a willow tree. After awhile, a boy asked if they could go run now. The teacher said okay lets go take a run. They asked if they should do the obstacle course or the run first and the teacher said run and then obstacle course and then the students were off. There was an amazing amount of respect for what the teacher said. The relationship was very different and you could feel it.

These teachers start with a group of kids in first grade and then move up with the kids all the way to eighth grade, so the kids and teacher get to know each other very well and in some of the older classes an underlying playfulness, like siblings might have permeated the classroom. For instance, the eighth grade class was on the blacktop practicing a sword fight dance. It got rough at one point and then everyone started laughing. They then went on to a circle tag game, which looked a little like duck-duck-goose, but way more vigorous. This was played enthusiastically by all and often rang with laughter.

I went into a 5th grade room which was doing a math lesson. The teacher was using a Saxon book, but she was reading different problems out loud to different groups of students. These students were writing the problems in their mainlesson book. None of the students have or use textbooks through sixth grade in this school. Instead, the teacher orally delivers all of the material, often in a whimsical manner to the students, who then create beautiful beeswax drawings in their mainlesson books, which is usually just a blank book of some sort. They then write about what they have learned.

I then went in to the sixth grade room. This one was talking about explorers and the teacher was giving the students a very typical public school assignment-make an advertisement as if you were looking for young boys to take on an exploring expedition. This is the only room that I didn’t see a marked difference between the traditional methods and the Waldorf methods. As I watched I could almost tick off the traditional seven steps of “Essential Elements of Instruction” that traditional teachers use.

I then went and talked to the principal and a Kindergarten teacher. The kindergartens were not open to guests that day, but she explained how everything was taught through play and storytelling. They did not usually read to the students instead the teachers told very long, up to a half hour story with expression, whimsy and body movements and then they let the children respond to the stories. They also did handwork and movements, interspersed with play with hand made objects. I also learned that it takes about 2.25 years past the teaching credential to get Waldorf certified and takes about another $20,000.

I now want to go back and observe the kindergarten and I want to see the private school, also. I also ordered a few ideas online and have begun reading some more of the method. I don’t think I could give up reading tons of books to my children, but I do want to learn how to tell them stories from myself also. I think we are also going to dabble with water coloring, felt work and form drawings this summer. I’d love to teach some music in this way, but that would require that I learn how to sing, so that will be awhile. We can do the recorder more though. Did I mention I really enjoy guiding my children to try so many things in their education? It’s so fun for me.

What Have We Been Doing For School?

We've been acting like animals during drama games as we wait for scripts to be handed out.
We have been created dioramas of the animals on the African savannahs.

We have been boarding airplanes and checking out cockpits,
and usig models to see how the planes fly.
We have been making books on Harriet Tubman,
and Abraham Lincoln.


We have been learning to lead horses,
and to ride them.
And we have been hole punching little butterflies and begging for our work to be photographed.

I Made a Rug

I have been wanting to try latch hooking for awhile, but don't have the time to learn it right now. When I saw a crocheted rug, I figured I could do that instead. I love the colors in this rug. I still need to add a nonstick backing. But I'm toally seeing scarf possibilities as well.

New Year's Eve

I was downloading pictures and realized I never blogged about New Year's Eve. It was so fun I just have to tell about it. Our friends from Logan, Utah came and stayed with us for two nights. We all love this family. The adults talked and talked, while the kids played. New Years Eve the adults were talking and watching a movie and we realized we hadn't heard from the kids in awhile. They were all in our room/garage. We went to check on them and they had a full fledged New Years Party Eve going on. They had rolled out a carpet for everyone to walk on and they had gotten a Cd player and then the CD Jars of Clay, which is an alternative Christian group to play rather loudly. They then got a light bright without the pegs which they set on a chair that they spun so that the little circles would flash around the ceiling and walls of the room, which made a cool disco effect. They had written 2008 on a big piece of paper and then ripped it all up and welcomed in 2009 and then danced. I tell you, I am letting this crew plan my next party.

Kevin's Work and My School

I realized I have not updated everyone in awhile on here. We have been blessed with a new job for Kevin two days before his old one was supposed to end. He is now a technical editor for a company that analyzes enerygy usage for large companies and government agencies. It pays pretty well and is a full time permanent position with benefits including retirement that have already started. The best part is that it doesn't look like this company is going to go under or lay off anytime soon (like the last three). They just got a really, really large three year contract. Big sigh of relief. We are so blessed to find this position in this rough economy.

He has also been working on the side for his dad. This is great, but I sure miss having him home by six. It makes it hard for me to do homework, but I'll make it. I am in the last week of my last class, except for student teaching which I am supposed to start in three weeks, but have yet to find a placement for.