P is for Peace

February first marks the half-way point through winter and with a burst of sunbeams midweek, we felt the first stirrings of spring.  The big, blue sky was too great a temptation, so we took our classroom outside. 

We found a cozy spot nestled in the trees by a little creek and used a tree stump as a desk.  Since we're working on the letter P, I thought it was a good time for Thich Naht Hahn's Pebble Meditation. 

P is for peace, pebble, pocket, and practice.  If you're not familiar with the pebble meditation, check out this video beautifully presented by Plum Village brother Thay Phap Huu. 

We began by finding four pebbles near the water.  Then we sat down and took a few centering breaths.  The first pebble represents a flower.  I got us started by saying, "Breathing in, I am the flower.  Breathing out, I feel..." and let Amelie express how a flower feels.  She said, "pretty."  We repeated "flower, pretty" a few times taking care to breathe in that pre-Spring air, then we drew a pretty flower.  "I am a pretty flower," Amelie smiled and wrote the words, "flower" and "pretty" on her picture.  Then we moved our first pebbles to our right side.

The second pebble represents a mountain. I read from the mindfulkids pebble mediation cards: "Mountain represents solidity, stability.  There is a mountain within yourself because when you practice sitting and walking, you can develop the capacity of being solid, stable."  Then we said, “Breathing in, I see myself as a mountain.  Breathing out, I feel solid.  Mountain.  Solid.” After drawing a picture of a mountain and writing the words, "mountain" and "solid" on her picture, we moved our second pebbles to our right side.

The third pebble represents water.  Water can reflect the sky, the clouds, and the mountains.  Reading from the pebble meditation cards, I said: "Still water is within you. When the water in you is still, you are calm, you are serene. You see things clearly as they are. You do not distort things. You do not have wrong perceptions. It is wonderful. Breathing in, I see myself as still water.”  Together we said, "water, still" a few times and sat still just enjoying breathing together.  Then Amelie drew a picture of still water and moved the third pebble to her right side.

The fourth pebble represents space.  This one was a little more difficult to grasp.  I explained that space is just the big, open sky above us and asked Amelie what she thinks it would feel like to be the sky.  She said, "Like a bird flying."  I think she was spot on.  Space is openness and freedom.  When we have spaciousness within us, we are free.  

I read, "People without space around them cannot be happy. Be like the moon traveling in the beautiful sky. It has a lot of space. Freedom is what we want, and space is inside. We have to touch the space inside to be free. Without freedom, no one can be truly happy."  Amelie drew a bird flying in a big blue sky and then we said, “Breathing in, I see myself as space. Breathing out, I feel free.”  After breathing in the cool afternoon sky, we moved the fourth pebble to our right side, laid back on our blankets, and smiled at the sky.   

"If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. If we really know how to live, what better way to start the day than with a smile? Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind." - Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Because the sunshine was too beautiful to resist, we decided to take this lesson block slow and extend it another week.  Stay tuned for more about our P words from the Fry's 300 Instant Sight Words: put, people, play, please, present, pretty, pair, part.  We'll be practicing peace in every step.

Midweek Balance

It's easy to get swept away by the busyness of our daily lives.  As parents, our schedules are crazy, our to-do lists are long, and our days are too short. By mid-week, it's easy to feel frazzled or even overwhelmed.  The weekend feels so far away and there is still so much left to do. But our kids mirror our energy, so it's essential for us to cultivate a little inner-Om.  Midweek is good day to set our intention to restoring balance.  

We began day three of the letter O with oatmeal but before we put it on the stove, I had Amelie make a letter O with her fingers in the dry oats. Feeling the shape of the letter is as essential to understanding it as seeing it. 

After breakfast we moved into the classroom for Circle Time. Because rhythms create balance and harmony, our Circle Time always consists of the same elements: a song, a verse, a blessing, meditation, "Creative Infinity" (finding something in our inner-world during our short meditation to "bring back" to the classroom), and sharing.  Today Amelie shared the piano composition she worked on before breakfast and some stones from our basket.  She wanted to compare and contrast the shape, size and weight of the stones so we got out our little scale and had an impromptu science experiment.  She recorded her findings in her Science Journal and we were both surprised that the smallest stone was one of the heaviest.

Then we popped open the laptop for five minutes of mindfulness with Susan Kaiser Greenland on mindfulness together.  Today's exercise was "zipping ourselves up" and listening deeply.  We're both enjoying sharing these practices this week and they help center our attention for the Morning Lesson.

Next it was desk time.  Today's O words were: of, old, on, one, or, and other. She traces each word once before writing it twice on her own.  Then we spell each word by singing it:

o-l-d "old"
o-l-d "old"
o-l-d "old"
that's how we spell old!

For story time today, I read from a book we have on loan from a dear friend, The Lady of Ten Thousand Names: Goddess Stories from Many Cultures retold by Burleigh Muten.  In the spirit of our letter of the week, I read "Oshun - the Great Mother."  This is a creation story from Nigeria and her name means "The Source." More than that, however, it is a timely story about the importance of honoring and balancing both the male and female ascpects of our human nature. 

When the gods sent to prepare the earth for human beings neglect to invite the goddess Oshun to their planning mettings, their effrots are thwarted.  Upon reporting this sad truth to Olodumare, the the Supreme Sky Being, Olodumare says, "You have upset the balance.  A team of men cannot create harmony on Earth without a woman.  Without Oshun, no plan will unfold."  To restore balance, they have to give up something they love and ask for her forgiveness. Oshun forgives them, but only after they share with her the secrets of the Universe.

Through archetypal stories like this, Language Arts integrates with Social Studies.  We also use art to demonstrate understanding of the story and to answer questions on content, sequence, characters and moral -- and keep a Main Lesson Book where Amelie draws pictures from the stories read in the classroom.  She writes the letter of the week on the left page a few times and then has 15-20 minutes to draw something from the story with crayons and colored pencils. Today she drew the goddess Oshun in colorful clothes, as expressed in the story, with big arms wrapped around three of her children. 

More valuable than anything we can tell our kids are their direct experiences. So for our Afternoon Lesson we got outside for Earth Science, O is for Organic.  Fresh air is calming and even just a few breaths can restore peace when we're fragmented.  Our plan was to collect all things organic and bring them back for a collage craft. (Crafts help with eye hand coordination, fine motor skills, reinforce core subjects... and they're fun!)  

Because immersion means retention we also set our minds to seeing oes everywhere. Amelie enjoyed learning that she can see her breath because it's warmer than the air outside and comparing organic things (rocks, leaves, branches, dirt, flowers) to non-organic things (rubber tires, plastic tubing, asphalt).  Then we brought in all of our samples and made a pretty collage.  


After dinner, Amelie read two of her favorite stories, Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You by Dr. Seuss.  At bedtime tonight, I'll read Oshun - the Great Mother one more time.   Mid-week Wednesdays are for centering and creating Om in the home.  Tomorrow we'll tackle five more O words and then it's off to the city with daddy for some fun.

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.