Drawing with water

We have been spending a lot of time outside this spring and the kids have been engaging in a LOT of water play. Probably because I went kinda nuts with the garden this year and that calls for dragging the hose around the yard twice a day. I don't mind though ....I can work in the pottery studio with the garage doors open and watch the girls spraying themselves and making their own muddy mess in the gravel driveway. Cammy has gotten pretty creative with it. Today she started drawing with the hose. She started out drawing simple forms like squares and circles which was great....I have struggled to get her engaged and excited about form drawing all year with no success. Turns out I just needed to change up the medium. She likes drawing her forms with the hose.
Here is her triangle and square. These later turned into a magnificent castle complete with a nicely placed oyster shell door.




Trying to refresh the castle picture....."Mom...it keeps disappearing!"
Aha! Time for a lesson on absorption and evaporation and permeability and the list goes on. Learning and living at its best. Gotta love it.
She struggled a bit with a heart but I thought it came out pretty well. I love seeing her really getting into a creative groove and finding her own way to learn.

She was very proud of her square. She has pretty good control of the hose after experimenting with every setting and (accidentally) spraying inside the garage and the upstairs office (the window was open) and spraying mom and sister repeatedly. She likes the jet setting best for drawing with, but the fan setting makes the best rainbows. Who knows maybe she has a future as a firefighter.

Simple moments to cherish from my week

A curious little fairy encounter with Karma...what a character!
A sweet sleeping beautiful baby!
Cammy rockin out and dancing with the broom in the kitchen while doing her chores.
Wow! Cammy is so beautiful here. I can't believe how big my girls are getting.
Crazy Karma sitting in the water play table on the porch.

Welcome to our Fairy Wonderland

Welcome to our fairy wonderland. My oldest daughter Cammy is all about fairies. This year I built the girls a fairy house of sorts. I used Karma's old crib sides for the main structure and secured them to a shady tree. Then I cut the wisteria and grape vine back and wove a nice domed top for the house. It is actually big enough for me to stand up in. We had an old column off of a porch that was all painted up....it kinda looks like a chimney. We also added a piece of old broken fence and even made a walkway complete with stepping stones and secret passage going behind the house. Cammy has added her own touch by painting a door and she has filled the house with large seashells for dishes among other natural things. I had done this once before when we were renting a home but I used twisted crepe myrtle branches that time and let Cammy weave yarn and other things into the sides of it.
Here is little Karma our resident fairy upon occasion.

We have set up a little oasis for weary traveling fairies to rest at when their wings are tired from a long flight.
We caught sight of a fairy one morning but she flew away before we could catch her in the butterfly net.
Cammy has put together an edible fairy garden on the back porch in the shade of the umbrella trying to entice a fairy friend. Karma has been having tons of fun watering the garden and making the little ceramic animals play in the mud. Everything that we planted is actually edible : chives and lettuces. Karma is a bit confused with what is edible in the yard right now. I am having to keep a close eye on her. With seeing us pulling up radishes and picking herbs and lettuce...she is trying to pick and eat leaves off of just about anything right now.
We also found this old abandoned castle. We aren't sure but it looks like trolls might have stormed the castle because part of it is broken and it is empty, there is no furniture or anything in it.

Spring brings change: change is good

I haven't been blogging much lately because it has been a very rapid transition into spring: lots of orders to fill (a good thing) but lots of tugs in different directions ie. children, pottery, homeschooling, teaching at the preschool, new store consignments, spring shows, the garden, holidays, and the list goes on just as it does for every family. We are all tugged in many directions all the time. I love it when I am able to find that alone time out in the studio, just me and my clay. A couple of years ago my mom gave me a great T-shirt that said in big black letters across the front "I NEED MY GARAGE TIME". I have been finding myself spinning my wheels out there thinking about what is working for our family and what direction we want to go in. I love teaching Cammy from home. I also really love the times when I teach a larger group. I volunteer often at the preschool and sometimes with the church but transportation has been a problem with being a one car family. I am really looking forward to opening up a classroom in the city again. I miss teaching more kids. I have no real desire to become a public school teacher and be chained to a set of requirements and curriculum. I much prefer a more organic form of teaching. I like being able to just go with where a child's mind wanders. I find myself in awe sometimes when I watch my own daughter in her quest for knowledge. I love it when she asks "Hey Mom, I'm really getting interested in dragons lately can we start learning about that next?" She is telling me what she WANTS to learn and NEEDS to learn for herself now. Why should I constrain her or put up fences and gates of set standard curriculum. It is a much more time consuming approach to teaching . It would be much easier to just follow a yearly standard curriculum or school in a box approach. I don't fit in that box and I don't want my children to fit in any specific box. They will find and fill their own organic form. I am just honored to be there to help nurture and guide their interests and to present inspiration and challenge their minds bodies and spirits. When her interests change I often find myself a little sad because I didn't get everything in or didn't get to some special project that was going to be the highlight of that topic. I also find myself thrilled to meet the next challenge. I thrive on that energy. I know I will spend a couple of late nights scouring my book shelves and the internet, but it's worth it. It's like a reward in the end getting to help her expand her knowledge and view of the universe.
I am excited and scared at the same time to be teaching on a broader scale meaning to more children again. It is going to be such a change of pace for our family. I have gotten so used to our flow at home and spending so much time outside....It will take some adjustment. We are also going to put the youngest Karma into daycare at one of the schools where Mark and I teach. She is very active and social and absolutely loves it, but it tugs at my heart that I will be away from her so much. Hopefully we can pull her back out a few days a week once we see how things are working at the new classroom. I need to find that inner strength and courage to run with it. I know that I will find a lot of support in the community as well. Much love and light to all who embrace the role they play in teaching the children of the world.

Jumping into Dreams

OK! so I have not blogged in a while. Our family has been struggling with choosing a path. We are loving our homeschooling but are finding that we are really being tugged back to the city where we used to live 45 minutes away all too often to teach. Now I know that lots of people have long commutes but it doesn't make our family very happy seeing as we only have one car. My days are spent here unable to go to libraries or parks or playdates as of late. Don't get me wrong....we really have it made in the shade out here. We are only four blocks from the river and community docks and there is a beautiful little lake in the community that we walk around quite often. But I get kinda stir crazy sometimes. I have been combating this pent up creative energy of mine by really loving on the land. I have been spending hours in the yard and garden this spring with my hands in the earth ...making things grow. In part out of frustration at our situation and also because I really was loving the land and needed to put my energies into something more. Earlier this winter I found myself in the front flower bed reworking the stones that border it. I was trying to make a spiral in the flower bed but found myself making multiple branching paths over and over again not quite satisfied with the layout each time. It is still unfinished and I have moved on to other areas of the garden transplanting overgrown daylilies and other bulbs that had grown up into the bushes. It has dawned on me this week how significant this compulsive gardening and path making really was/is. Recent events have revealed and opened up a pretty clear path. We are embarking upon a huge cosmic leap for our family right now and I am so excited and scared at the same time. Mark and I have dreamed of opening up an art center some day. We have been fortunate over the years to have had the opportunity to share our creative energies throughout the community. Now thanks to our partnership with Lovebird Studio in Wilmington, NC. We are thrilled to have been given the chance to teach and share our creative musical and artistic gifts with even more of our community. I have been homeschooling my children for almost a full year now and really enjoyed it. There is nothing better to me than seeing my daughter loving learning and finding new ways to keep her journey on the search for knowledge as creative and engaging as possible. This being said I really miss my interactions with other families and children. I have built up quite a stockpile of teaching materials and resources over the years and cannot possibly use all of it for just my two children. I am really looking forward to sharing my creative energies and knowledge with other families again. We really want this to be an opportunity to feed a lot of young creative minds and it will take a real community effort to pull this off.

Getting rid of the dryer

Ok! So I'm a few days behind in keeping up with my One Small Change challenge for the month. I'm behind on a lot of things but this is an important one. If you are just now learning about it One Small Change is a challenge posted by Hip Mountain Mama to make one small change in our daily lives that positively effects the planet. It could be to recycle, compost, use natural cleaners you name it. She challenged anyone willing to post about it to make one change every month for the year. For the month of January our family got rid of our microwave. We had lived without a microwave for years until we bought our current home and it came with one. Having been here for two years we had gotten into the habit of nuking our food which I have always found to be a little disturbing. I was glad when this challenge came along because it gave me the excuse (I didn't really need) to get rid of the large radioactive contraption in my kitchen. So for the month of February I am vowing to discontinue using our dryer. We have a clothesline strung on the back porch already (we used it quite a bit last summer) and we also have one of those wooden drying racks. So I ask myself : Why do I continue to use the dryer?....it eats up massive amounts of electricity! The answer; I was being lazy. There are no excuses for this one. Millions of people around the world have no electric dryer for their clothes much less and electric washer. I live in the southern USA where the temperature year around is mostly pleasant. We have sunny days here every week. I can dry the clothes on the wooden drying rack if it is raining. This does drive my hubby crazy though because it is quite inconvenient in our kitchen but so what if we have to walk around it. We will be saving money by not using it, we will be using less electricity, we will be setting a good example for our neighbors and children, we will in our own little way be helping our earth. I don't quite have the where with all to completely give it away to a charity yet but I think in the mean time I might get creative with some duct tape and tape the front door shut so I won't be tempted to use it. Maybe I'll even let the girls draw on it with some markers.

Who needs toys when you have playsilks

I have been in awe lately of the versatility of the simple playsilk. My girls play with this basket of scarves more than they play with any other toy in the house. There is a huge pile of dress up clothes and hats in my oldest daughters closet that goes untouched for the most part except to get tossed to the floor. The playsilks downstairs however go through many transformations during any given day. They can be a river on the floor one moment and the next they are part of a beautiful gown. Sometimes the scarves are part of a shelter other times they are used as bandages for wounds. Little Karma at just a year old loves to wrap up the "baabiees" in them and never tires of hiding under them to play peek-a-boo. They can magically transform a child into any creature or even be a leash or a bridle. They have even been known to transform a young child into an old woman or Rapunzel with her long flowing hair reaching down from the stairs.

Both girls love to play with them....sometimes I wonder why I even bother to buy the other toys. We don't have a lot of money to spend on toys and I am kinda picky about the toys I do buy. I have tried over the last couple of years to get rid of almost every plastic toy we have and opt for high quality wooden toys instead. I have managed to get some really nice wooden toys from time to time at the thrift store...a nice wooden castle, a great collection of wooden cars and rolling animals, wooden blocks and trains. The girls play with these occasionally. The scarves they play with everyday all day.
The inevitable plastic Christmas toy always seems to make it's way into the mix though. How can you make your kid give up their brand new piece of bright shiny plastic? Well, I have found that after about a week or two at most these have lost their novelty and go untouched...eventually making their way into the next bag destined for the local charity or thrift store without anyone missing them or objecting. My oldest just turned seven and I continue to be amazed when I am going through one of my household purges getting rid of "stuff"....just how much of her "stuff" she graciously and willingly puts into the give away bag. I know I probably wouldn't have given up my toys when I was a kid without a little fight.
You can see from this picture the pure joy and imagination she is filled with. She has always had an imagination without borders or restraint. It is a beautiful thing in action.
My beautiful butterfly acting out Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar. What a metamorphosis!

Indoor Camp Fire

I bet this is not what you were thinking! My daughter Cammy loves to choose indoor camping as one of her reward privileges. We have a box full of index cards that the whole family made, we each got to write down or draw fun things to do on them. Some of them are just plain silly like giving her baby sister a finger painting lesson in the bathtub or mixing your own bubble concoction. Others are really sweet like the one my husband wrote: Have a tea party with Daddy. When Cammy has earned enough pebbles in her jar she gets to choose a card from the box. The indoor camping is her favorite by far. She has only been camping once and that was with her Nana in the mountains. Sometimes we do a complete camping tent set up...sometimes we just make a classic sheet tent in the living room. This time we did the latter with a minor adjustment. It was raining outside so we couldn't do a fire in the backyard firepit to roast our marshmallows so I did smores roasted in the oven and we made this little pretend campfire inside and told stories. It was really easy to make. I have a box full of crafty recyclable stuff in the pantry. There was a drink cup holder and some paper towel tubes that proved to be the perfect fodder for a camp fire. Cammy colored the drink cup holder with red, orange and yellow markers and we ripped up a sheet of neon orange copy paper for flames and tucked them into the holes of the drink cup holder. Colored tissue paper would make nice flames if you have it. The paper towel tubes were our logs. I tried to get Cammy to color those as well but she said "Mom they are already brown!"

Spinning in Circles

 Spinning in Circles

 

Our Monday morning chalkboard.  I love to draw a lovely picture full of symbolism for the week of studies and what they are supposed to be focused on. 

We are studying creation stories from around the world this spring.  I chose to focus on the circular form of the earth for a start.  Drawing and discussing the round form  helped us get centered.


We have literally been spinning in circles for two weeks now. I started off the new year with the intention of introducing some form drawing. We started off with two simple forms that are universally recognized among many cultures. We studied the spiral and the circle. I thought it would turn out to be fairly simple, we would draw and practice the forms and we would move on to new forms the next week. These two forms turned out to be more powerful for Cammy and myself than I could ever have imagined. We have been reading about community and the theme of being centered and of the connections we have with others. These two forms fit right into our current studies.

This list literally went on for another full page.

Circles were the clincher for Cammy. She embraced the circle wholeheartedly. She said the circle made her think of a hug:) So began our journey with the circle. I had Cammy make a main lesson book devoted entirely to circles. She included a circle picture dictionary with magazine photos of things that were circles with the words written beside them.

Cammy and Karma bubble painting.

We blew bubbles and attempted some bubble painting. We drew concentric circles by tracing cups, bowls, and lids from around the house. We drew abstract circle designs.

Here we drew concentric circles with sidewalk chalk on roofing tar paper.

We painted kinetospheres or energy spheres around ourselves. I had seen this in a book called Wonder Child by Peter Lorie. It's a book about staying connected with the magic that is childhood. It is one of my all time favs. The kinetosphere at the top is one of mine drawn with chalk on a sheet of roofing tar paper. When I was in college I couldn't afford canvas for painting class and I had found a roll of roofing tar paper at the home I was renting and took to painting on it. I love to paint and draw on a black surface much more than a white surface. The tar paper is also nice and stiff and holds up well to many mediums. I found that rolls of roofing paper were much cheaper than conventional paper so I still draw and paint on them to this day.

Cammy was so proud of her homemade paintbrush.

We needed long handled paintbrushes for our kinetosphere project so Cammy invented her own long handled paintbrush with a piece of cornstalk and some pine needles.

A flyswatter has a long handle...why not paint with that too.

Our kinetosphere experiment got very experimental indeed. The picture above is Cammy dipping a fly swatter in some of our paint.

This tickled.

We painted with our feet.
We painted with a sponge mop.

Here is Cammy circling herself with the paint to form a kinetosphere. It took her a while but she really built up her kinetic energy but it didn't stay in the shape of a circle for her. It went everywhere.
Needless to say ....when my husband got home he was slightly speechless.
Below is one of Cammy's kinetospheres. It turned out like a sun.

This kinetosphere was painted with a mop, a flyswatter, a pineneedle brush and feet.

We studied balls and motion and talked about kinetic and passive energy. We rolled balls and bounced balls. We made graphs of what bounced and how high.

For the second week we talked about how the spiral is symbolic of the path we follow in life. We drew spirals, we walked in spirals, we made spiral cinnamon buns,we looked at spirals in nature.

This was one our kinetosphere painting from week one and we just went in with our inspiration from the spiral studies of week two and painted the leaf together.  Cammy is getting the hang of drawing the spiral form without the lines touching.

Making Mittens

I have been trying to teach Cammy some basic sewing. She has been really fascinated with costume design for quite some time now. Cammy's all time favorite toy has always been paper dolls. If she is ever in a book store you can guarantee that she is going to want a paper doll or sticker doll book even though she probably has five already. She draws fairy fashions all day long....pages and pages of them. Every time we are in the grocery store checkout she wants to get a fashion magazine so she can cut the dresses out for making paper dolls. Her most recent fascination has been with a young fashion designer named Claire Prebble.

I came across Claire Preble a couple of years ago online and showed Cammy her amazing costume designs immediately. Claire won first place in the WOW fashion festival in New Zeland several years ago. She got her first entry in at the age of eight. Ever since then Cammy will occasionally ask if we can look at that girls costumes again Mommy? Here is a link to the WOW page you have got to check this out. The costumes designs are incredible. You will never see your fabric scrap bin the same way again.
http://www.worldofwearableart.com/

2009 Winner Children's Section

The Dandelion Clock, Tracey Koole, Auckland

It's been tough going....she doesn't seem to have much patience for it. I am trying to encourage her by getting her to help me make some mittens for her sister and herself. I let her pick through my cloth bin which often contains some old clothing as well. She chose a pair of velvety red pajamas that were too small for Karma anymore. We traced the girls hands to make a pattern. Note: add at least half an inch to the entire edge of your hand pattern to make sure there is enough space to stitch your seam. Cammy got a good start on hers but is obviously having trouble keeping her stitches small and straight. She has never been one to follow a straight path what can I do? Hopefully I can coax her into finishing them before spring gets here. I got Karma's pair finished and she loves them although they are a little too loose in the wrist.

Making a change for the better!

I recently came across Hip Mountain Mama http://hipmountainmamablog.com/

• Shop

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and have signed my family up for the One Small Change challenge. Our family has made many small changes over the years in an effort to be more environmentally conscious but we are not always truly religious in observing these. We recycle but I will admit that there is more that we could recycle...there is paper that makes it into the trash and yes the occasional plastic container of moldy food from the fridge that I'm afraid to touch to clean it out. Lights get left on. The bath water runs too long. All sorts of things need improvement around our house. So when I came across these challenges today it inspired me. Hopefully it will inspire your family too. For more information click on the links provided below and sign up your family.

• One Small Change

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• Community of Change

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  Here is a list of some of the simple changes our family has made over the past couple of years. A lot of these are in effect and some we need to revisit and get serious about implementing them and practicing them all the time not just sometimes. I have tried to be fairly honest about our family's practices. We have a long way to go still.
  
• We haven't used paper towels or paper napkins for more than a year now in the house. When my second daughter was born we were gifted way too many folding cloth diapers and we just started using them for our cloth napkins and rags. We are planning to tye dye them soon. As silly as it is I must admit though that I did buy a roll of paper towels at Christmas so our guests wouldn't feel weird using diapers to wipe their hands.
  
• We compost sometimes
  
• We switched laundry soaps when my second daughter was born to a natural soap called Charlies Soap
• We have tried our best to switch to all natural wooden toys (we gave away three large boxes of plastic toys with the full blessing of our six year old) though we do still have a few that my husband couldn't part with (Luke Skywalker figurine and Catwoman) along with a few Barbie dolls(aargh!) that my oldest didn't want to give in on.
  
• We hung a laundry line on the back porch but I am often too lazy to hang the clothes out to dry and just revert to the old habit of just throwing them conveniently into the dryer....and it shows in our electric bill.
  
• We used cloth diapers with both of our children although admittedly we used disposables when we traveled anywhere.
• We have been in our current home for two years without using any pesticides or chemicals on our garden.
• We have combated any home bug problems with natural concoctions like cayenne pepper or borax.
• I'm sure that there were others but these were the most recent that we have made. Upon talking our family has decided to get rid of our microwave. We lived without a microwave for years but when we moved into this house it came with a small microwave oven and we got back into the habit of reheating food in it or thawing food that way. I have always been wary of microwave ovens....they seem so unnatural. So for the month of January we are disposing of our microwave as our contribution in the One Small Change campaign. What will yours be?
  

Sweet, sweet love

This beautiful and deliciously sweet heart was the accidental result of introducing some waldorf form drawing again. Somehow I found it deeply symbolic of the love I have for my family. In wanting to start the new year off with some more deeply rooted rhythms around the house and a little less chaos I have started trying to implement some more Waldorf form drawing. This week I introduced the symbol of the spiral for our form drawing lesson. We started off the week by making spiral cinnamon rolls. We are starting off the new year with a unit about various creation stories from many different cultures and religions . I chose to introduce the spiral because it is such a universally powerful symbol for the path that we follow in life . I am finding myself being ever more grateful for this opportunity to be one of my daughter's guides on her life path. Yes I am her teacher...but I am able to be so much more than that even. I am loving homeschooling my children because I am able to really dig into a subject in so many more ways than she could ever be able to experience in most public schools. I am able to let her mind go to places that would be shut out by conventional classroom learning. If she is suddenly enraptured with a book about Egyptian Pharaohs in the middle of our week about American Indians we have our way of dealing with that in our house. We just use our time machine. It is my belief that this creative flexibility can be a very powerful learning experience. As for the form drawing I have a deep love of pattern and form and texture. Being a potter and artist I use lots of rich textures and patterns on the surface of my clay. There is something very sacred about being physically engaged with a shape or a line. I am always amazed at the forms that I see in everything....in leaves, shells, the soles of shoes, flowers, the landscape etc. I have done a little bit of this with Cammy in the past with not much success. She is usually able to draw the form but not with the kind of spirited embrace of the form that I am intending to try to imbue or impress upon her. I have simply tried to connect the form to something we are studying. When we were studying the globe and the compass and maps I introduced the cross form and an arrow. We drew a huge compass in the road with sidewalk chalk trying to be as accurate as possible with the directions. We studied the clock at this time as well and drew clock faces incorporating arrows. We laid down in the floor and made arrow shapes with our bodies. we played a game where we laid down like the arms of the clock and posed each other having to try to figure out what time our partner posed us in. My intention and goal was to try to physically engage Cammy with the shape and how it played a role in her life. This leads to a deeper knowledge...a mind, body, spirit connection. Last year was quite possibly the most powerful and trying year of my life. I want to imagine myself wearing a hand sewn super mom cape for having made it through my first year of homeschooling a six year old with a one year old by my side and hers and climbing on the table and into the cabinet There were some incredibly difficult things that happened to our family last year that we have been strong enough to come through stronger than ever and loving each other more and more. I love being a mom I do, I do! With all my heart!

Adventures with the math gnomes

We welcomed the math gnomes into our family with a special candle lighting ceremony. Cammy made each of the gnomes their own hand rolled beeswax candle complete with their math symbol decorating it. She also decorated an advent candle for our family and we lit them all. I finally finished the math gnomes for Cammy for her Christmas present this year. She knew they were in the works because she has seen me working on them off and on for months now. We had such a busy fall that all my intentions to introduce her to many of the math concepts through the adventures of these curious little gnomes fell by the wayside. We have been doing lots of math all along but she has been so worked up and eager to do math with these characters I didn't think I was going to be able to contain her. Ever since we did a unit on Medieval and Renaissance times with our time machine she has been asking "Mom, when are we going to start with the math gnomes?" She has them linked in her head with that time era because I had my husband dress up and pretend to be King Equals one day and ask Cammy for her help in solving a dilema on how to divide a cake evenly among everyone who was invited to the royal ball. We did this by folding paper to see how many cuts would need to be made to make enough pieces of cake for everyone. Good King Equals was insistent that everyone's slice be the same size to be fair. Then we cut into an actual cake that we had baked together using the folded paper guidelines. The King was surely going to need more help in the future to count his treasures so he insisted that Cammy help him find the legendary math gnomes. Thinking I would have the gnomes ready right away she was charged with going on an adventure to find these math gnomes that were known for their knowledge of numbers. Needless to say the math gnomes did not get finished that night and we got sidetracked by about two months to be exact. She took a trip back to the present in her time machine and the benevolent King Equals was left to count his own gold and cut his own cakes.

Here are the four gnomes in their cave each with their own math symbol representing the four basic math processes: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Well, needless to say she was thrilled when she saw the little gnomes complete with bags and hats along with a small King Equals by the Christmas tree. She wanted to do math with them that very day but we waited to go on any math adventures for a few days until all of our Christmas guests took their leave. By this time some of the gnomes had misplaced their hats. With my husband distracting her I surprised her and set up the gnomes in the front yard by the twisty wisteria and pine tree. I hung a blanket to make it more cave like and confined because the gnomes lived deep underground. It was very cold and windy outside the day we went adventuring with the gnomes and luckily the blanket blocked a little of the wind.

Here is the yellow gnome whom we have named Times Multiply climbing up through the twisting tunnels of the mine to get to the surface. Below is the blue gnome whom we have named Marcus Minus at the entrance to the cave.
I was inspired by several different Wadorf homeschool bloggers and their own math gnome stories. I took a bit here and there and pieced together a story for an adventure that I knew would fit into our studies. I got a great deal of my inspiration from Serendipity here is a link where you can get her math gnome stories. She has many marvelous ideas and pictures and has been amazing generous in making these available to download.
Download gnomes_and_gnumbers_lesson_one.pdf

Here is a shortened version of the story I came up with for Cammy.
The Gnomes ran out of jewels to gather and count deep in their underground cavern so they made their way to the bright surface. It was a long, winding and treacherous path through the tunnels of the mine. None of them had ever been to the surface before and didn't know what to expect when they came to the cave opening. They had never seen such a blinding bright light as the sun.
When their eyes had finally adjusted they saw before them a vast and beautiful land and they bravely began to explore sure that they would find huge troves of gems. They soon came across a huge pile of colorful gems at the foot of a great tree. The Yellow gnome having spotted the treasure first started grabbing all the gems for himself but the red gnome named David Divide suggested that to be fair they should divide the gems evenly among themselves. The gnomes had never had to count or divide such a vast treasure and were unsure of how to count so many gems. They thought long and hard wanting to be sure that the gems would be divided evenly.
Finally the green gnome named Adam Plus suggested that they use sticks to count how many gems there were. This got confusing very quickly as they laid out one stick for each gem that was counted and they were running out of sticks to count with. The red gnome suggested that they break the stick in half and make the shape of a V (like the shape between your fingers when you hold up five fingers) when they had five gems. The gnomes continued counting deciding that one stick before the V would be four IV and that one stick after the V would be six and so on. When they got to ten they decided to cross two of the sticks to make an X. We laid out the gems and practiced making the roman numerals with sticks that we found around the base of the weeping willow tree.