The Most Important Subject Our First Graders Learn

By Caitlin Costello, Class 1 Teacher

On the very first day of school, our first grade children were presented with the polarity of two kinds of lines - straight lines and curves. Throughout the year they will see the infinite variety of forms that can be created out of these simple elements.

In some respects, Form Drawing is the most important subject that the children will study in first grade, for it provides a good foundation for the letter recognition that is so central to reading, as well as numerical and spatial relationships that are so essential in arithmetic.  The drawings themselves could not be any simpler. All year we work with only two elements of drawing - straight lines and curves. 

Form Drawing  awakens several capacities in the first grader:

1. Concentration: this elusive quality flourishes in Form Drawing. The forms we draw cannot be done well unless each child is focused and quiet.
2. Eye/hand coordination: the “model” drawing on the board must be copied onto the child’s paper, and, as the year goes on, most children learn to trust their eye’s guidance. This ability to trust in one’s own capacities helps instill confidence that in turn shows itself in other subjects, as well.
3. Understanding the relationship of the part to the whole: the harmonious nature of the form drawings we will do helps both the scattered child, who is drawn too far into the “whole,” and the overly-contracted child, who lives too strongly in the “parts.”
4. Understanding forms that relate to numbers: the simple “geometrical drawings” the children encounter will help with numerical relationships and a whole range of geometrical concepts.
5. Neatness and balance: a Form Drawing cannot be beautiful unless it is placed in just the right way on the paper!

The straight and curved lines that are the backbone of Form Drawing are also the basic elements of our letters. By learning first in Form Drawing the difference between a curve that “faces” right and one that faces left, or where a curve ends and a straight line begins, a child becomes better able to perceive and recollect the forms of the letters. This is how reading and writing begin in Waldorf Education.

Is Waldorf Education Inspiring Scientific Curiosity?

A few weeks ago, middle school students in our marine ecology elective at the Waldorf School of Cape Cod demonstrated a wonderful example of how Waldorf education is inspiring scientific curiosity in our students.

Our middle school grades (Classes 6-8) have the opportunity to take an elective class on Friday afternoons. Many of these classes are taught by members of our parent community.
One of the choices for the Fall session this year is Marine Ecology. Dr. Joy Lapseritis, scientist and member of our parent community, introduced students to the relationships of organisms with the marine environment through experiments and observations.  Over the course of 5 weeks, the class was engaged in asking questions and observing diverse organisms such as mollusks, horseshoe crabs, and marine mammals.  These organisms offered entry-points to discuss animal classification, coastal and open ocean ecosystems, life cycles and food webs, and interactions between human development and local estuaries. 

During a recent class, the students took part in a salinity lab. Salinity impacts deep water currents, which affects everything in the ocean, from seaweed to whales to submarines. The students experimented with how water of different salinity (labeled with dye) separates according to density. They also talked about the importance of water and salt balance for organisms that live in the ocean.

A small body of red salty water remains separate from blue fresh water.

Experiments like this one, challenge students powers of observation - an important component of critical thinking. After taking part in a lesson such as this, students are often asked to draw illustrations to accompany their written text in their main lesson books that they create. They have time to reflect and speculate about the results of the experiment.  

Dr. Lapseritis was struck by the curiosity and creativity exhibited by the Waldorf School students during the salinity lab lesson. She has used this salinity experiment in other school outreach lessons, where those students were very concerned with following the procedure exactly and finding the “correct” answers or observing exactly the same result as everyone else in the room.  While the Waldorf middle school students were great at following directions, they also showed exemplary scientific curiosity in the variability between the results from one student to another, and explored beyond the constraints of the protocol.  They freely experimented with what they could do with the simplest of lab materials - water samples of various salt concentrations - and made their own discoveries.  

Students compared their results with each other, discussing what was different and why, then created new protocols to explore further.  

“I realized midway through the lesson that I was nervous about the experiment going as I had planned,” confessed Dr. Lapseritis.  “But then I realized that the students were doing exactly what a scientist should: they accepted the results they were observing, generated hypotheses to explain their results and then came up with new questions, new experiments!  Although I had structured this elective to focus on process and observation, and learning to ask questions rather than find answers, the students have already learned to do this and they taught me so much!”  

Waldorf Education: Producing Creative Scientists

Fifth grade students may not be ready to write research papers but they are ready to make their first steps in that direction. Our Fifth grade students had their first introduction to group research work this Fall. Some liked working in groups and others were challenged by this work. When asked about this, Fifth grade teacher, Mr. Schofield says:

“I feel an obligation to introduce my fifth grade students to group work. I feel Waldorf Education can potentially produce individuals who are creative scientists and mathematicians. That is what I am trying to achieve.”

- Mark Schofield, Class 5 Teacher

Our fifth grade curriculum has North American Geography as a topic for grade five. Mr. Schofield, thought the idea of studying biomes (ecological communities) went nicely with their study of plants this year and animals last year.

Students were organized into groups of 3 or 4 students and asked to choose a Biome and research it. The assignment was to draw a food web for their biome. The students picked the desert, the plains, the tundra and the boreal forest biomes.

The project had strict parameters on the research. Students read 2 or 3 books on their biome and were asked to do research based on those books. Once the research was completed and the projects were ready, the teams of students presented their projects to classmates and their parents. Students were encouraged to engage visitors and tell them about their subjects and their work.

Classmates and parents came ready with questions to ask the student teams and all who attended were impressed with the students’ ability to present what they learned.

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