Buddies ~ May Day

***In September 2011 6 families got together and started Buddies Home School. Each week we meet in each other's home and follow a simple rhythm: movement and music, craft/ baking, snack time, free play and story time. Each part of the session is led by a different family. We are sharing this week's session with you here...***

Officially we are a day late but this week at Buddies we had a May day celebration. For the music and movement part of the session we practiced this little verse, taken from Festival, Family and Food: 

Here's a branch of snowy May

A branch the fairies gave to me.

Who would like to dance today

With the branch the fairies gave to me?

Dance away, dance away

Holding high the branch of may

Dance away, dance away

Holding high the branch of may.

Then we went outside with our maypole (an upside-down hobby horse with long lengths of crepe paper attached to it)

 The children held the ends of the ribbons and I held up the maypole in the middle. We kept it simple, walking in 3 steps and back 3 steps and then walking in one direction and then another.

 It actually worked pretty well :-)

 After that we tried out another May Day tradition: gurning

 hmmm I know who the winner is in my book!

Amanda prepared our craft for us this week: making mayday crowns.

 We used a folded over news paper for the crown itself and the children coloured them with crayons and then stuck on paper and real flowers and leaves.

 and what do you know all of our celebrating the return of summer worked!...

 the sun came out and the sky cleared

 we spent the rest of play time in the garden (yes that is a sofa made of grass in the background!)

Our story was told by Flo today. We decided to re-tell the three little pigs in French as Flo and her kids are french speaking but we also had a little visitor to Buddies who is also French speaking.

 It was lovely and again we were so amazed at of how little importance language is in story telling!

It's simply all in the telling.