Real Life Waldorf Homeschool: What Real Life First Grade Art Looks Like (Also, learn from my mistakes.)

I think it's important to realize that your child will not be turning out these beautiful Main Lesson Books right off the bat and to get a feel for what real best work looks like for children. So with that in mind I've decided to show you what we are doing for our art. And along with showing you my daughter's work, I'm going to take you through my work and my reflections of what went right and what went wrong. Okay, ready? Let's go!

Here are our paintings for the letter M. M is for mountain and that's what we painted. Jane decided she wanted yellow fields at the base of her mountains so it could be like California right now. I had practiced this painting before and decided to get fancy. "Hey, let's shroud our mountains in just a touch of mist and fog. That would be cool, right?" Yeah, I went a little over board on the mist and fog. Next time, one little ring of mist will be plenty and I'll remember that. The other thing I will do differently next time is have Jane wait a little longer for the rest of her painting to dry before adding the red letter over the top of her painting. We did it too early this time and her M sort of spread out.

This is our very first block crayon drawing. It's a garden. Above, you can see the retelling for the container story from that week. I'm giving Jane lines to write with right now because without them she writes everything really huge and we only get a couple words on the page. I made these lines a bit too far apart and she still couldn't quite fit all her words on one page. This morning I made the lines closer together and she fit her whole narration on the page.

A side by side. My garden picture on the left. Jane's on the right. She though the mixing crayons were really cool and kept saying, "This is fun."

This is our painting from last week. The blue sky wasn't wet enough when I had Jane add her red. It was supposed to be a purple dawn. Next time I'll check the wetness of her page. We put the blue on first and then added all the hills and it was just too long inbetween.

This was my picture of hills at dawn. I'm not sure where all those white splotches on the hill came from. I kind of suspect some young picasso's got a hold of a wet paintbrush when I left the table. We now call them sheep.

Our Waldorf Week of May 18

I actually made this felt crown several years ago and didn't think it would last a month. It's still going strong and one of the most used parts of our dress up box! I made it stiff by using cardstock as the liner.

I'm really enjoying the rainbow tulle over our nature table this month. I made the flower baby last week, and the flowers are leftovers from my Mother's Day bouquet.

It's a big week for Toby in our Super Sam stories this week. He finds his family! Of course, I had to illustrate it on the chalkboard. The kids were so excited for Toby to finally get his happy ending. They've been anxiously waiting for it for a while.

Here is Max's painting from Monday. He has become very adept at mixing colors and not just getting a brown sludge. I'm impressed and kind of jealous. I don't think I could do this if I tried. 

Watercolor Painting: Letter W - The Fisherman and his Wife

Letter S - the Six Swans Watercolor Painting

Letter M Painting

My first try for a painting for the Mount Simeli story and the letter M. I wanted to show that cave full of gold at the bottom bursting with light, but I think I made it a bit too big. I'll keep it in mind when I take Jane through the painting.

Our Real Life Waldorf Homeschool Monday

This morning I woke up at 6:30 and did my usual morning thing. Pray, read scriptures, check e-mail and facebook. The kids were up soon. We had an easy meal of hot cocoa and toast, got dressed and did as much of my morning cleaning routine as possible. Take dad to work, come home, and put on my nice red apron. I finished my cleaning routine and encouraged the kids to finish theirs. I usually make sure they do, but they were playing so well today, I just didn't.

At 10 am, we started circle. Jane (6) whined. She wanted to keep playing. Max (4) loved it. Then we sat down and I told the story for the week. It's a short one that mentions fairyland. When I was done, the kids begged for me to keep going. It always feels good when that happens. When I'm not on my game, I have to read the story. And the kids don't listen at all. But storytelling, it just pulls them in. I am more and more convinced of the power of storytelling the longer I keep at this.

Then we moved on to painting. Now Waldorf painting on the internet always looks beautiful. But I'm going to get real with you. Today, the baby wanted to paint and I kept having to pull him away to paint with his water on the ground, which caused a lot of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Not as peaceful as I'd like.

Then Jane accidentally knocked the jar of red paint off the table. It shattered and red watercolor flew everywhere. Sadly, I didn't handle this the way I should have. I sighed and angrily asked, "What are you doing?" Thoughts of how expensive that Stockmar pain is, or how I don't have anymore baby food jars were running through my head, more than the heart of my child.

And I'm not proud of it.

I pulled the now-jubilant baby away from the red paint and cleaned it up as best I could, taking myself back to a calm place. Then I joined the kids for painting. As you'll see below, these are not your beautiful Waldorf paintings. Jane really wants more formed images. She'll be happy to move to a less watered down paint in first grade.

 Max should really just work with two colors at a time, but Jane needs all three primary colors. So poor Max always ends up with a greenish brown puddle. It hasn't hampered his enthusiasm yet, though.

And here's mine. That's supposed to be the spring wind blowing. You know...if you couldn't tell. ;)

Then it was time for soup making. Max was done with school. He announced he was going outside and went to jump on the trampoline. Jane cut the green beans, and I added cut onions, potatoes, mushrooms, celery, canned tomatoes, and left over pot roast to the crock pot. Add water and beef bullion and set on low.

We ate it for dinner and it was delicious. Later on I did some math with Jane (we have a Montessori curriculum that the math minor in me loves. Not Waldorf, but I allow myself this deviation.) Then the kids played and at some point we read two more chapters of Magic Treehouse and that was our day!

It wasn't idyllic, or perfect. We didn't create masterpieces. But it was fun and happy (for the most part.) I love this path we're on, even when it doesn't look like those beautiful blogs or books.