Om Gnomes

Five little gnomes went out one day...

... over the hills and far away.

Mother Gnome said, "Om, Om, Om, Om."

But only four little gnomes came home.

 Four little gnomes went out one day,

Over the hills and far away.

Mother Gnome said,

"Om, Om, Om, Om."

But only three little gnomes cam home.

 

Three little gnomes went out one day,

Over the hills and far away.

Mother Gnome said,

"Om, Om, Om, Om."

But only two little gnomes came home.

Two little gnomes went out one day,

 Over the hills and far away.

Mother Gnome said,

"Om, Om, Om, Om."

But only one little gnome came home.

One little gnome went out one day,

Over the hills and far away.

Mother Gnome said,

"Om, Om, Om, Om."

But no little gnomes came home.

Mother Gnome went out one day, over the hills and far away.  

Mother Gnome said, "Om, Om, Om, Om...."

... and all of Mother Gnome's gnomes came home!

Gnomes by LittleRedWhimsy on Etsy

... a little shop for little people with big imaginations!

Kindergarten Ecology

We are on spring vacation... so our lessons have been informal, our goals have been to relax and restore, and our days have been full of sunlight and friendship.  

Learning comes in infinite forms... and breaks from our regular schedule always remind me that, even without formal schooling, kids are always learning.  Sometimes, it's the lessons we don't plan for that have the most meaning.

In other words, Om School never really takes a break.  When your heart's compass is set strongly towards the ocean, everything you do, intended or not, flows down that river.  Something I desire deeply for my girl is for her to feel her connection with the earth, to know that she is connected to every other living thing, and to see that each drop of dew, every blade of grass, and all the creatures who walk upon it are sacred.  I think that the deepest peace a human heart can feel comes from loving and being loved in return.  Learning to feel to feel love from the natural world might just ensure that that deep peace.  It's there, always loving us, always providing for us... no matter what -- every day the sun shines down on us and the earth beams back.  We stand in the middle often too asleep to know that we are being held in that embrace.

When we awaken to this love, to our hidden connections with all things, we realize that it is up to us to care for the earth as we care for our children, our closest friends, and our families.  The earth truly is our mother and we should cherish her -- not just so we can use up her resources at some later date in time -- but because she is sacred.  

With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd (and turning forty this year) it's a perfect time to turn our attention to the environment.  I'm working to develop a thematic unit on ecology and will post resources here as I find them.  A great starter reading list can be found here: Children's Nature & Ecology Books and Elementary Education Resources: Kindergarten is a great site for developing your own lesson plans, games, and activities to get your kids involved and caring about the environment.  

Still, I think stories and picture books speak to a young child's heart more than scientific information... and I've been meaning to get this book for months now:  The Last Wild Witch by Starhawk.  You can support an independent book store by purchasing it at 100Fires.com: Extraordinary Books (and More!) for a Healthy Planet.  

This PDF, "The Last Wild Witch Teaching and Discussion Guide", is a fantastic guide -- full with discussion questions, language skill-builders, art projects, music circles, and science projects.   

The following video, a promo for the book, is a treasure by itself and a lesson in global responsibility.  Listen for the last lines, as the children realize, "Maybe we're supposed to do something... Maybe we're supposed to save the forest..."

Deep peace to all.

Healing Garden, Sacred Space

I'm working to create a healing garden... a little sacred space... a quiet area for peace and introspection... a place for sitting and breathing and imagining.  We've planted both medicinal and culinary herbs and started a fairy garden full of butterfly attracting blooms.  Today I bundled bushels of lavender and hung it all around the patio.

I'm a big fan of sacred space and have tiny little alters all about my house.  Last year I cleared out the bay window in our bedroom and created a mini-shrine room for meditating each morning.  We use our fireplace hearth for a nature table where we bring symbols of the seasons indoors to celebrate our interconnection with the earth.  A picture of the Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts, presides over my kitchen (next to some Jade which is for good fortune) and we bring her fresh rosemary or lavender each morning as an expression of gratitude.  

I have an alter-in-a-jar that I take with me to teach yoga to help us unite body, mind, and spirit and to sense the cosmos within.  It's just a silver candle plate with a white tea light but in each of the four directions I place a symbol for each of the elements.  For earth - a small stone, for water - a shell or a river rock, for air - a feather or an acorn top, for fire - well, the candle! ... and for spirit I keep a dried flower because to me it represents kindness and that comes from within.

I think it's important for kids to have sacred space too... quiet places for them to imagine and create... hallowed ground where they're able to recognize that they are of this earth and not separate from it... commercial-free zones where they can touch the elements and connect with themselves and the world around them.

We're a fast-paced world and it's up to us to create space that encourages us to slow down, to step back, to let the laundry wait and instead just... sit... and breathe.  It's not just adults that are effected by the stress of our busy lives.  Kids not only feel our stress but have stress of their own.  Taking time to nurture their spirit and their creativity creates happy kids.  It's a pretty simple equation.

What you put in your sacred space depends, obviously, on what is sacred to you and your kids.  We're working on a fairy garden.  To us, fairies capture the spirit of childhood.  My daughter loves playing like this, making up stories, and acting out their little voices.  So far we've converted a bird house into a fairy house by opening up the little round door into an arched doorway, we built a fairy swing with found wood and garden twine, we put together a fairy picnic table with stones and a glue gun, and made a little fairy bed with tree bark and reclaimed prayer flag. We've been making stick stars and decorated a new one for the fairy garden yesterday.  Our inspiration came from an AMAZING mama's blog, Ordinary Life Magic (here's the tutorial: http://ordinarylifemagic.com/blog/?s=twig+stars).

Stars have long been a symbol of magic and mysticism  and, for many reasons, they feel magical to me.  Venus, the planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, creates a five pointed star with her orbit around earth every eight years.  From ancient Greece and Babylonia to Egypt and beyond, the star has been used as a symbol of a Goddess for centuries.  Pythagoras used the star as a symbol for his school which pursued knowledge in mathematics, music, religion, and more.  During the times of the Hebrew Scriptures, the star was also an important symbol representing a secret name of God.

Lavender is a symbol of devotion and is said to have been the color of the Buddha's aura.  The name lavender comes from the Latin lavare, "to wash," since it was often used in bath and laundry waters.  It's been used for centuries as a medicinal herb and is said to relieve  stress, anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, headaches, migraines, insomnia, depression, colds, digestion, flatulence, upset stomach, liver and gallbladder problems, nervousness, and loss of appetite.  It's smell is calming and breathes a soothing scent into the air where I've tied it in bushels around the patio. 

Sacred space can be as small as the space between breaths or as big as the Temple of Artemis.  Regardless of size or location, what matters is that we create them... and the most important thing we can bring to our sacred space is ourselves.  I'm so grateful for this little healing garden that we're creating.  Hopefully, I'll have more luck with herbs than I had with veggies last year... but regardless if my organic healing herbs grow or medicinal recipes work, the space itself has already brought a little more Om into our home.

 fairy by Little Red Whimsy on Etsy

O is for Om

This rainy, winter Monday was about restoring balance and getting back into the rhythm of our home.  It was about feeling the world around us and, under a cloud covered sky, connecting with our inner light.  

We began our day with a talk about Martin Luther King Jr. followed by a quiet art period.  Amelie loves doing art in the morning and it gives me time to review the day's lesson.  I've read that art promotes activity in the brain and I believe this.  She seems to do better paying attention to her morning lesson when she's had some time to paint or even color with crayons before breakfast.

After a hearty meal we moved from the kitchen to the classroom -- our Om Room.  We start each school day singing a few verses of a Native American song, "Earth My Body" as we set up the classroom:

Earth my body
Water my blood
Air my breath and
Fire my spirit

Then we sit cross-legged on our zafus and I light a candle while Amelie says a seasonal verse with a little yoga stretch at the end.  We've been welcoming back the sun since before the Winter Solstice with:



The sun is born again today
We greet the sun's first morning ray
We sing and celebrate the light
The sun is born in the longest night
Welcome light!

Then we ring our school bell -- a calming meditation chime -- three times.  When we hear the bell, we pause with our breath, find our center and bring our full awareness to the present moment.  At this point I usually say a little blessing -- something short asking Mother Nature to help our hearts know wisdom -- and then we sit in stillness for five breaths. 

Next is my favorite part, going to our Creative Infinity.  Before we open our eyes and "come back" to the classroom, we look around in our inner world and find something to bring back with us.  Today Amelie brought back the Cheetah of Loving-kindness and I brought back patience.

Then comes Amelie's favorite part, the Sharing Stones.  We keep a little hand-painted basket of stones we've collected outside and use these each morning for a short show-and-tell.  There are no rules about what we can share -- something from your heart, a concern, a story, or even a new toy.  This ritual gives us a regular time for honesty, open questions, and often times, just plain fun.  It was Amelie's turn to go fist and she picked a pretty painted blue stone from the basket, then shared her set of marbles. 

I try to use everything as a platform for integrating subjects and digging deeper and I think this is rubbing off on her. Without prompting, she sorted them all by color, transparency, and size.  Then she told me about all of their magical properties.  I love letting her use her creativity like this and agree I with Einstein -- imagination is more important than knowledge.

She passed the stone to me and it was my turn to share.  I popped open the laptop and we watched the "I Have a Dream" speech -- stopping from time to time for Social Studies discussion.  I paused at, "their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom," and pointed out this example of our interconnectedness.  If you are not free, neither am I because there really isn't any "you" or "I"... only "Us."

After the speech it was time to get out the wiggles.  We learned a great song at a Spirit Rock Family Practice Day last spring, Now I Walk in Beauty, and we modify it each day to fit the day's lesson.  We've danced in beauty (letter D week), jumped in beauty (letter J)... we've even marched in beauty (letter M).  Today, in honor of Dr. King's dream, we "marched in freedom."

Now it was time for our Main Lesson.  We've been covering roughly one letter per week since August and today began the letter "O."  O is the fifteenth letter of the alphabet and a vowel but before moving into all of the sounds that O makes or diving into sight words, I like to get into the letter or number and really play with its essence.  Understanding the ultimate nature of a letter or number puts it into a memorable context and makes it fun.  

We use butcher paper and begin by writing the upper and lower case a few times.  The letter O is a big sweeping circle and just drawing it creates a visual of completeness.  O is round and whole, it has no beginning and no end.  I think the essence of O is the vibration that resonates when we say the sound and hold it.  "Oooohhh."  It's complete and unbroken and comforting.  Our mouth makes an O shape when we say it.  Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm partial to this sound, but I love its feel.  Saying "Om" feels like being home... when I say this syllable, my heart is transported to that place of comfort.  O is cozy, O is home.  Today had that nostalgic home-y vibration... rain outside, fuzzy socks, a blanket of soft, gray flannel over the earth.  Mmm. Home.

We made a big O on the floor with our bodies, we chanted Om a few times and felt the vibration of our voices coming together, and we imagined how it might feel to hold a big round imaginary O in our arms.  Later this week we'll look for oes in nature and explore more circle symbolism (unity, eternity, and the goddess).  

Next, I asked Am to think of a few words that begin with the letter O.  Her first word was "omnivore." Before I wrote it on the board, I had her get the dictionary and look it up.  We've been practicing using the dictionary and she's getting pretty good at it.

Omnivore is from Latin "omne" meaning "all" or "everything."  This is interesting because "Om" is a sacred syllable representing Brahman, the impersonal Absolute of Hinduism — omnipotent, omnipresent, and the source of all manifest existence. In other words, "Om" means The Universe in all it's magical wonder.  The essence of O is it's all-seeingness, it's wholeness.  The Chinese circle character yuan, literally "round", means "complete, perfect" and I'm sure it's no coincidence that the letter evolved from the Egyptian hieroglyph for "eye."

The next word Amelie came up with was "octagon."  Then we moved on to Fry's 300 Instant Sight Words.  She's mastered about 200 this school year.  The O words are: of, old, on, one, or, other, our, out, only, open, over, one, own, o'clock, off, once, and order.  We wrote these on the board and read them a few times.  We'll practice writing them all week and have a spelling test on Friday.

We usually read a story and then break for lunch at this point in our routine, but today we had something more fun planned for the afternoon... puddle jumping with friends!  So, we ate lunch and then sat back down for five minutes of mindful breathing.  If you haven't joined mindfulness together, now is the time!  They're supporting Winter Feast for the Soul and have made available online short, guided meditations for kids. 

We finished our meditation just before our friends arrived and decided to honor the day with a little service and pick up trash during our excursion in the rain.  I've never seen two girls get more wet than these two did today.  After a whole lot of splashing, it was time for dry clothes, hot cocoa, and the warm smell of cookies baking in the oven.  Later we'd soak in a hot tub.

Today had that nostalgic, rainy day, vibration... whole and cozy, comfy and home.  It was about seeing the hidden connections, feeling the world around us and, under a cloud covered sky, connecting with our inner light.  I'm so grateful for our little Om School and looking forward to the rest of the week.