How We Inspire Students to Appreciate Diversity

“We went to Cape Abilities farm for a field trip with the sixth grade. Ronald inspires me because he taught me that anything is possible if you try.”

- K.T. Fifth grade student at WSCC

In Waldorf schools, every child is gifted and talented and the curriculum is designed to bring his or her talent to light. Waldorf curriculum exposes children to a wide variety of subjects and encourages them to develop in a well-balanced way. 

Girls and boys take woodwork and learn to knit, and everyone plays a musical instrument. These diverse experiences help children to discover and develop their own talents while noticing that each person’s gifts are different. This approach encourages the appreciation of many types of skills in addition to academic skills.

Our sixth grade class is reading Sharon Draper’s book, Out of My Mind, which is the story of an intelligent 11-year old girl who cannot speak, talk, or write and her journey through these challenges. The class teachers brought both the fifth and sixth grade classes to Cape Abilities farm to broaden their real world experience while reading this story.

The students visited Cape Abilities Farm just before the holidays to be immersed into the daily happenings at the farm. The children helped unwrap trees, decorate kissing balls, and pick tomatoes alongside the farm staff. One student reflected:

“My field trip to Cape Abilities farm was great. I found the trip very inspiring… Two workers really touched my heart, their names were Ronald and Henry, both of them were so nice and they both loved their jobs.”

- J.D. WSCC Fifth grade student.

Waldorf educators believe that the curriculum brings to light each child’s unique talents while developing appreciation for other’s gifts and talents that may be different from their own. The goal is to send forth into the world children who appreciate the diversity and myriad of talents that human beings share.

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.