practicing, remembering stuff we used to do

Friday we had a little practice for the whole thingy of me and the 2 little boys getting up and doing our own thing while everyone else sleeps. It was fine! I had them at the kitchen table and while I made some pancakes, they played with the bucket of cars. I made and drank my coffee, and we all sat in there. They were loud and happy and I was...trying to wake up....and the bigger kids slept.

I am going through our stuff and picking out things that I want to specifically use and play with for schooltime with everyone. We have alot of toys mixed all together and I have a few really good toys that I want to play with that I am going to put on our homeschool shelves. A few specific books, and I am going to be piecing back together our Music Box.

Our Music box is a white toybox which housed our recorders, xylophones, fisher price baby piano, dancing ribbons, colored bean bags, french color circles, and some percussion/shaky maracas and tambourines. We also had masking tape in there for when we would play crazy chasing games and freeze tag and stuff--we would put the tape on the carpeted floor in the old house to mark "boundaries" for various games. One fave was this game that I made up, where one kid was the CAT and the rest of the kids were the MICE (started back when I babysat 2 kids, then progressed...but it is best if you have 3 players minimum). The CAT sits in the circle made out of masking tape --could be a hoola hoop or something else of course---and when I play the crazy mouse running music on the real piano, or the xylophone, the little mice have to RUN past the Cat without getting tagged. Cat cant leave the circle or else it didnt count...sometimes it was a blast, sometimes it was all tears and "you cheated!!" and sometimes we tried to play it too long. Short intervals of this was cool, though!

We used to do what I called Circle Time, which involved us gathering around, doing a few little rituals such as saying what day it was, taking turns moving the calendar, talking about the weather that day, and then playing some singing games. I made up some songs about French colors, and we played some little rhymey games like jumping over the river, which was two different lengths of string that the kids had to LEAP! over, one at a time, before the river got wider! It was all fun. Then we would take turns doing crazy dances for each other and we would clap for each other's dance. Sometimes i would be sitting there with my coffee and the little toy piano in my lap and I would ask each dancer "What kind of song do you need today?" and they would say "A scary one!" or "A gentle one!" or "A super happy one!" and then I would play that. Then they would be like "How do you DO that?" and so I could slip in a little major and minor key talk ;) and ask if they would like to try.

I got some of these poems and ideas from some waldorf-styled books. One is called Seven Times The Sun, the other I will have to look into again, but it is where we got the "Stepping Over Stepping Stones" song.

We used to study one flower fairy a week at a time and Greta did memorize the Song of the Daisy Fairy. Sigh. We lost our Flower Fairy book and we need to buy a new one.

We also did "Car Wash" which was this elaborate silly thing where I would shake the dancing ribbons and they would all go through the ribbons and we would pretend it was WASH! RINSE! HOT WAX! RINSE! BLOW DRY!!!

Alot of this was when we were all much littler...but now Greta is to the point where she will play with us just to be a sweet big sis, and the rest of them still really like it, so I want to revive circle time, even if it isnt until 4pm (it used to be our morning thing, right after breakfast)