Home school projects, spiritual school lessons

 This week we finished up our home school unit on volcanoes by making paper mache volcanoes that we "errupted" with baking soda and vinegar (and some elderberries for color).

paper mache volcano erupts

We then began a unit on weather, which allowed us to make windmills.

paper windmill

But the most interesting was (or is, ongoing) our arts and crafts project on dream catchers. This was a little more time consuming. We gathered willow reeds from down by the Hondo River, tied them in a circle, let them dry for a few days, and have been wrapping them with some yarn I've had for years. We garnished with some beads resurrected from a homemade bead curtain from many years ago. We have an abundance of feathers...chicken, turkey, duck, guinea and some found feathers, which added the finishing touches.

craft dreamcatcher

my son's dream catcher

The kids were looking forward to hanging them above their beds. Legend has it the dream catcher allows good dreams to pass through, but catches the bad dreams in the web. The morning's light takes the bad dreams away, clearing the dream catcher for the next night.

So we hung the dream catchers. And my five year old son was up early into the night with some weird night terror thing...angry outbursts, non-responsive, and I was up with him, wondering if we had angered the spirits with our crafty dream catchers?

This comes at an interesting time as I am beginning a Shamanism training course, so naturally I am thinking in more spiritual ways. Perhaps our dream catchers are a mockery to the spirit world and the Native American Traditions. Perhaps people should not mess with things they do not fully understand. I suppose we can re-make our dream catchers in ceremony, following specific rituals, with all natural materials, which might appease the spirits. Of course taking down the current dream catchers will cause my kids a lot of strife and me a lot of stress, so we will see how the rest of the week goes.

I think I will ask the spirits for forgiveness in a sage cleansing ritual, and hope last night was a one time event. We had so much fun making the dream catchers...surely this is all an innocent misunderstanding. Maybe I need to reconsider. As a student of magic, perhaps I no longer have the luxury of making psuedo spiritual tools. Consider my hands slapped, and now I will have to learn the true and honorable way to make a dream catcher......Or something like that......

Volcanoes

We are working on a science unit with the kids on volcanoes. So, being in the land of dormant volcanoes, we decided to take a field trip.

First we tried to find a road to Ute Mountain, a large shield volcano, which is behind our house. That proved more complicated than we anticipated, so we headed deep into the southern San Luis Valley to explore other neighborhood volcanoes.

The first dormant volcano we visited was Mesita Volcano, which was turned into a quarry for scoria and volcanic rock, but has been abandoned for some time. It was fun. We got to walk around and pick up the super light lava rocks.

Scoria pile at Mesita quarry/volcano

The center of the volcano and mined area

Collecting lava rocks. In the background on the left is Ute Mtn, and on the right is San Antonio Mtn (shield volcanoes).

We found another small dormant volcano up near highway 142 and the Rio Grande river called Culebra Volcano. We did not explore the remnants of the blown volcano though as my ears were too cold from our last expedition. (Beautiful day with a cold wind.)  We plan to return when the weather warms a little more.

We headed over to Antonito to pick up some locally made tamales and drove around in the valley near San Antonio Mountain, another very large shield volcano.

At home we are working on paper mache volcanoes that we can "explode" with baking soda and vinegar.

paper mache volcanoes

I think we are all enjoying these home school field trips. School without walls...is awesome!