How Early Reading is Taught in a Waldorf School

By Caitlin Costello, Class One Teacher

Nothing has brought more notoriety to Waldorf schools than the way in which reading is taught in the early grades. Yet it is interesting that no attention is given to how well or poorly Waldorf students read at the other end of their education, when they are in high school and college.

Research, in fact, supports that most Waldorf students become excellent readers, enthusiastic readers, and intelligent readers. The approach to reading is slow, and I hope that you will have a chance to look at the book Seeing, Hearing, Learning by Eugene Schwartz, to see how the health of the child’s eyes is bolstered through such an approach.

On the other hand, the approach is also thorough, rich, artistic, and joyful for first graders. Some of the methods include:

• Movement from the STORY (which is heard), to the PICTURE, to the HIEROGLYPH or IDEOGRAM stage, to the final LETTER. This is one of Waldorf education’s most unique approaches - every time a consonant is learned, the child is recapitulating thousands of years of human progress. By going through the process of letter discovery, the child establishes a far deeper relationship with literacy than one who merely learns to identify the finished product, i.e. reading straight from a book.

• Daily Recitation: Mainstream learning specialists are increasingly urging educators to do more with spoken language as a way to bolster children’s reading abilities; Waldorf schools have been doing that for decades. By reciting and slowly memorizing many examples of beautiful and meaningful poetry, children develop faculties for distinguishing the basic sound combinations (phonemes) that make up our language. Many teachers I’ve spoken with agree that oftentimes children who learn to enunciate well are also better spellers.

This first language arts block introduced half the consonants of the alphabet using a multi-sensory approach. Capital block letters were learned and the children practiced writing the letters using many different materials. In addition to refining our drawing techniques with the block crayons, we continued our work on listening skills, retelling stories from memory, following verbal directions and nonverbal cues for activities.

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!”