wellness - jumping on the trampoline every sunny day: rolling, wrestling, running, jumping LOTS - all on the trampoline; running and biking through the atriums daily, also biking together as a family to parks and picking blackberries.
writing - in the bath in the evenings, we love to write letters and numbers - this is 3-5 times a week, and he loves to do it every time. I write on one side, he writes on the other. He also likes writing cards to his friends, and signing his name to them.
history - he loves being told stories of other people's childhoods. He will ask my husband and I, and also any adult friends he has - in cohousing that's lots - to tell him stories of when we were little. To me, this is history. This is his geneaology, and the history of his friends' worlds - how they came to be who they are.
relational skills - he spends at LEAST two hours every day speaking to/playing with his friends of varying ages - negotiating play, negotiating conflict, negotiating his place in the world. We live in cohousing and there is so much social interaction, and there are so many opportunities for him to flex this muscle, to learn social ettiquette/societal expectations vs how we can be at home, etc.
living skills/financial - Kiernen receives an allowance of $5/week. Among expectations for daily living, he brushes his own teeth, picks put his own clothes and dresses himself, puts his own clothes and toys away, puts his dishes in the sink, keeps his shoes put away, helps with cooking and food prep, etc. In addition to his allowance, he can do jobs to earn extra money: this week he stacked and folded laundry, "vaccuumed" the floor with our mini-sweeper, and cleaned some cabinets off.
math, etc - We count his allowance and talk about what the different money is, and how much of each equals the other (four quarters = one dollar). Kiernen LOVES to build LEGO Star Wars in particular. He can look at the instructions and figure out from the pictures how to build the sets - and he has a fairly decent attention span for doing this for his age, IMO.
ecology - Kiernen helps me work in the garden - we go out and pick strawberries and kale on a regular basis - he has his own strawberry bed, and he even helps me weed it. He knows about feeding the soil and feeding the worms in the compost bin, and we talk about how the worms make the good soil to feed the plants.
creativity - This week we painted, we played dress up - Kiernen LOVES his costumes, and he will wear different costumes almost daily. He invents great worlds while playing, and he narrates them as he plays ("This is Chapter Three...").
ethics/values/spirituality - We talk almost daily about how people feel when certain things happen/why we don't hit/say mean things/call people names; how it feels to be hit/called names/taunted. We talk about death, as he has an older brother he's never met and has died. We talk about why we don't litter or steal or why we like to do nice things for people.
Global ecology - We love to recycle. We love to talk to trees when we're near them. We love to thank the trees for the apples and the plums and the air we breathe. We talk about clean air and clean water and how important it is, we visit farms and meet the chickens and goats. We love and care for our bees.
This week we discovered local bees on our sunflower. We were so happy! We watched them for awhile, just crawling all over them. (Our bees are a half hour away on a blueberry farm).
I don't quite know where this fits, but this week we also went to Derby Reach (near our house) to throw rocks in the water with friends.
The kids set up some elaborate play with the rocks (I'm not remembering if they were meant to be food or candy now).
Then we saw this amazing sight: a REAL tugboat, pulling a whole load of wood - THREE in a row!!! We talked about tugboats, and the ones he'd read about in his books, and the load they were pulling, and where they might be going.
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