fall 2006 homeschooling, apples

Now that I'm all caught up with our RDI story, I feel the need to catch up with our homeschooling story! I'll be breif, it'll only take a few posts.

Our homeschooling program this fall wasn't particularly involved. Keeping in mind that I consider this another "preschool" year for both of my boys, and the main "work" that Jacob is doing is Autism Remediation via RDI and Sensory Integration work guided by an OT, I'm not looking to bring academics in any form into the picture until next year, so much of our day was based on play and fun Master/Apprentice type activities. I did a lot of reading through our new Enki Education Kindergarten Materials, much of which I won't be using until next fall anyway, but I wanted to read about where we were heading, and get started on setting up our day in an Enki-friendly manner, since it's such a good framework with which to base our RDI lifestyle stuff around. A lot of the emphasis on Enki is keeping in tune with the natural environment (which feels pretty natural -- no pun intended! -- to me anyway), so we worked in themes in about half-month chunks.

We started the 2nd half of September by working around an Apple theme. We read books about apples, sang songs about apples, went apple picking, did some apple baking, made some simple apple crafts. This is photo of Jacob preparing apples for homemade applesauce from a recipe in the back of the "Apples Apples Apples" book by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. Great recipe, very yummy applesauce! We also made apple pie, apple crisp, used cut apples dipped in paint to make apple prints, etc.