Ever feel like a cat with a shiny object in your own home and within your own homeschooling rhythms? Look, a shiny toy!  Oh, look over here, another shiny toy!  I do!  It can be especially hard to get back into the swing of things after the holidays.  I know some families in the U.S. are starting back to homeschooling this week and some are starting back next week.  We ourselves started on Monday, so I wanted to offer a word of encouragement and a plea for Operation Shiny Toy.

Turn off your computer.

Turn off the phone.

Do not schedule things during the time when you are homeschooling.

Do not say yes to events during the time when you are homeschooling.

Plan what you are doing; work at night to make sure you know what you are presenting the next day.

Commit yourself that the housework, emails and phone calls to make, the housekeeping and cooking (unless you are doing practical work in school!) can wait and you must finish your homeschooling time first.

Write down an outline to the flow of your day and homeschooling time.

Jump in and do it!

On Monday we woke up and started school with Continue reading →

Lisa over at Celebrate the Rhythm of Life  wrote an incredibly important post about Waldorf School and Waldorf Homeschool, relaxed Waldorf Homeschooling, and the pillars of Waldorf Education whether in the home or school environment.  It is an important read, and I suggest you don’t miss it.  Here is the link: http://www.celebratetherhythmoflife.com/2011/12/as-person-who-has-straddled-worlds-of.html

She talks about including the other major pillars of Waldorf Education:  speech, singing and musical instruments, drama, movement (oh yes!  my major place of push on this blog!) and handwork.

Yes, yes, yes!

And what I realized is that I have addressed all of these components on this blog, with perhaps the exception of drama, but in a rather scattered manner  – perhaps mentioned in with summary posts of what we did in a certain grade, or in conjunction with a book review or something else.  I think parents are attracted to Waldorf homeschooling by all of these pieces, but then become at a bit of a loss as to how to integrate it all into their busy homeschooling lives.  I hope in the future to have more organized posts on each of these pillars, and how to make this accessible for homeschoolers.

I think a major thrust of where I am headed personally is this education being about the future health of our children through using and engaging the twelve senses throughout the curriculum.  I recently heard Douglas Gerwin speak, many of you probably have as well, but his drawing of the twelve senses as a  lemniscate and where these senses fit into the curriculum across the grades set my wheels turning.  How we use these eight pillars, as Lisa and other Waldorf trained teachers have described them, within the context of the twelve senses, is a major place of discovery for the child and the foundation of health, and a  major piece of where I think I am headed in my life’s work.  It is a slow unfolding for me.

The other counterpart to this within the home environment, I feel is PRACTICAL WORK.  Steiner lectured and wrote about practical tasks for the students quite a bit.    We have such an opportunity for this in the home environment, even more than in the school setting  perhaps. Continue reading →

The three artistic pillars of Waldorf homeschooling are the same as those found in the grades of the Waldorf school:  drawing, painting, and modeling.  Yet I so often hear that “all we can get through is the Main Lesson” and that doesn’t seem to include  drawing, painting, or modeling, unless the child is drawing and summarizing on the second or third day  of a two or three day rhythm.

I know this is the time of year many homeschoolers take stock of what they have been doing during the school year, and make plans or tweak plans for the rest of the school year.  Therefore, my plea is for drawing, modeling and painting to be the vehicle through which you teach, and to always include exercises in the fundamentals of these three areas as part of the Main Lesson as you see fit during the week.  Many of the exercises for drawing, painting and modeling are in fact the metamorphosis of archetypal geometric forms and how one moves between these forms.

In drawing, we have form drawing and freehand geometric drawing, but we also have artistic drawing and how we change the things we see, that are three dimensional, into two dimensional shapes and transform these shapes.  For example, how does one draw a sphere (circle in two dimensions) and change this to an oval and then to an egg shape and so on?  In drawing, we also have the added dimension of color.  How do we move within the color wheel to create color bands, shades of coloring?

In painting, we have a series of color exercises without form that eventually help led us into the creation of paintings of scenes and portraits.  We can take a shade of red, a shade of yellow and a shade of blue and create variations of every color the eye can see.

In modeling, perhaps the most unexplored practical territory in Waldorf Education, we also can work through series of archetypal geometric shapes.  How do we move from the sphere to a three-dimensional oval to other shapes?  In this medium, we have the added challenge of warmth to stimulate that which we are working with, and we have the other dimension of the possibility of three dimensional asymmetry or symmetry within the modeling material.  One book that has changed the way I looked at modeling is Hella Loewe’s “Basic Sculptural Modeling:  Developing the Will by Working With Pure Forms in the First Three Grades.”  You can find it on the AWNSA website.

Many blessings to you!

Carrie

I promised I would write a post about “the hidden curriculum” of life that we talked about at the recent course regarding sensory processing and modulation that I attended.  Those of you who have beautiful children struggling with issues along the autistic spectrum know how very literal these children can be, and that sometimes presents problems in social situations.  Idioms can be problematic, and so can things like reading social cues that are not direct.

There were some interesting books and products mentioned at my course for the mentoring of the older child (mainly upper middle school and up aged), and I wanted to pass them along to you. I got a chance to look at some of these products, and I thought they were really interesting for EVERYONE, not just children along the spectrum. Continue reading →