Daily Archives: May 5, 2009

Wonderful Words From Marsha Johnson!

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This post is NOT by me, but by Master Waldorf Teacher Marsha Johnson, who lives in the Portland area.  She wrote this wonderful post this morning, I so encourage you to read it carefully, consider it, weigh it in your heart.  Please do go and join her Yahoo!group waldorfhomeeducators.  This is an excellent post, just excellent.  Please read Marsha Johnson’s wise words and enjoy!

“One recurring thread that emerges again and again in the various home schooling groups is the embracing of Info-Mation as Edu-Cation. This is an approach that relies on the passing along of facts and figures to the children, rather like filling up a blank sheet of paper with a long list of data. This kind of education is one that many parents themselves were exposed to as children in lower schools and is yet embraced by many institutions of higher learning.
I have jokingly referred to it as Information Vomitus. Particularly in graduate school, one absorbs mounds of information and must regurgitate it accurately within a time period, and those who can do this are considered ‘smart’.
As a species, some of us just love this habit. We have game shows where we love to quiz people on obscure and odd facts and see who can answer the most questions correctly. There are board games that focus on this aimless ‘art’, like Trivial Pursuit. That name does make me laugh at least the use of the word trivial. Small and meaningless.

As parents, we tend to veer unconsciously towards teaching our children in the way we ‘were taught’. This tendency is really one of the most dangerous and damaging stage in the life of the homeschooling family.

Why do I say this? Because the children of today, the millennial children, the Shining Ones, are very different than the previous generation of children, those born from the 1950s to the 1990s, when the Information Age really began to dominate. The idea was strewn about that one could improve a child’s IQ with exposure to this Factoid Education and that children were really blank slates whose minds could be sharpened and very soon after this time period began we started seeing massive testing of children as large population groups and lo and behold, a lot of stereotyping also began to show up in the statistics. All sorts of rather wicked and demeaning conclusions have been drawn from this kind of erroneous practice.

When we begin to ‘school’ children, and some are so anxious they start right away as soon as Baby can focus her eyes, we reach back into our own educational experiences and most often pull forward this kind of teaching that involves a lot of child sitting-parent speaking.

With a sense of humor here, often the children quickly teach the parent that this kind of education isn’t going to persist for too long. As children are naturally good and sweet and want to make us big people happy, they often accommodate us with love and grace, and put up with quite a bit of this kind of dreary boring presentation.

But some don’t. They rise up and run about and wiggle away, dancing, singing, going outside, done-with-that!, let’s have snack happy attitude that is probably the most logically kind response possible.

The type of education that really fits the developmental stage of the child most closely, from my own point of view, is Waldorf education. Within the very ‘bones’ of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophies we find the most wonderful comprehension of how children are, what children need, and why we must approach the education of the child with an imaginative, artistic technique. A warm and inclusive attitude. A whole-child, integrated program that moves smoothly from moment to moment to create a kind of living-dream, wherein the child floats, soars, rests, and grows.

And this is probably the very opposite of the Info-Mation protocol, which calls mostly on the forces of the nerve-sense pole, the head, the hearing and memory and goes down dry as a desert rock in late summer.

Will you provide an education that inspires your child and yourself? Can you take a subject and find the Alice-In-Wonderland Rabbit Hole that will allow you to enter in a playful and unexpected fashion? How much of the school time is spent sitting and listening, or writing or copying? How much is spent moving, doing, trying, inventing, creating, cooperating, considering, digesting?

I am struck again and again by how passionate and devoted parents can be to a style of learning that would, well, invoke passion and interest in someone 35 years old or older? (smiles here) But a six year old is in his first decade, not the fourth, and taking the dry factual program to this tender age should really be some kind of crime.

Destroying a child’s imagination and tramping through their fairy land of fantasy with the bulldozers of ‘real life’ is actually a crime against childhood. We are surrounded by immense pressure from commercial marketers, manufacturers, media moguls, and those who want to benefit from premature aging. It is unbelievable, a very sophisticated and invisible force to destroy childhood and create an endless period of ‘tween’ and ‘teen’. Did you know the average age of video game players is actually 29 years old? This means there many older and younger right around 30 years of age who devote most of their free time to staring at screens.

One of the easiest ways to judge how a lesson is being received is to keep a close eye on the recipient. Rather than lose your adult self into the lovely land of facts and transmitting these facts, say a few words and watch the child. Allow for pauses and wait a bit. Does the child keep her attention focused on you, do the cheeks pink up, do the eyes sparkle, doe he sit forwards towards you, hanging on your words? Or does she fidget, grow pale, look down or elsewhere, try to rise and leave? Observe the child closely during the day, during play, during rest, during active vigorous exercise. Learn the color patterns of the child’s skin, the facial and body gestures. Configure your lessons in such a way that the child’s response is one of delight, close attention, desire to participate, and shows a healthy age appropriate expression.

Young children naturally move and use their bodies to learn. Incorporate this into each lesson and every day in your home teaching. Sitting is only one of many types of positions that the young child assumes in the natural exploration of the physical world. Adults tend to sit for the vast majority of each day in both work and play. There is much to be gained from moving often and finding physical ways to enhance the learning experiences.

The old saying `give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime’, is a perfect mantra for teaching the young human born in the early 2000s. Consider subject matter from the child’s point of view, figure out what you can do in your lessons that allow the child to use the three elements of self: head, heart, and hands. One of the greatest errors in current educational practice is the sole focus on the head learning, forcing young children to sit at tables for long days, wearying their spirits and graying their outlook. Early academic fatigue syndrome is rampant in our country and fortunately, almost 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner illuminated a brilliant pathway of education that is more relevant today than ever before. Living artistic age-appropriate lessons, every day, naturally engaging and guaranteed to engender a life long love of learning.

Marsha Johnson, Spring 2009”

Thank you Marsha, for these words that I am holding in my heart,  thank you for being here and sharing with us,

Carrie

Homeschooling Multiple Children with Waldorf

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If we readily agree that homeschooling is first and foremost about family, then there is no question that we home school with that in mind, and do not think,”Oh, I am going to have to send my two, three or four year old away” in order to home school my grades child.

I think Donna Simmons of Christopherus Homeschooling Resources puts it very succinctly in her “First Grade Syllabus”:  “Similarly, if homeschooling is about family, we won’t get into a state about how to teach our First Grader when the baby and pre-schooler are around.  We live together, we relax into our shared life – and we make it happen.”

However, there are several practicalities to be considered:

Little ones do need something to do while you are homeschooling the older children!  They are not just going to “hang out” while you completely focus your attention on your older child. 

If the practicalities involves children who are  walking through age 3:

  • Perhaps activities especially for them could center on a few songs or finger plays for them to start the morning and then setting them up with completely repetitive sensory tasks such as playing with water or sand in a sensory table, pushing a small cart, digging, pouring.
  • Little ones may need protection from eating of block crayons and your older children may need  protection of the destruction of main lesson books.   The way you organize your schoolroom and what supplies you bring down when will be paramount.
  • Needless to say, it will be difficult and dangerous to have your small child zipping through your house or outside without you there, so thinking about the physical set-up of your space is very important.
  • You may schedule snack time if your little one is eating solids and  if eating keeps them occupied.  More intense work with the older one may be a great time to nurse the little one.
  • Do not underestimate the power of homeschooling outside if that is a possibility!
  • How about scheduling some of the more intense things during nap time or at night if your older child gets to stay up later than a younger child?  You are home, you can be flexible.  Your home school does not have to function within the hours of a typical Waldorf school.
  • How about enlisting help of another adult – what role does Dad have in your home school?  Is there a teenager or preteen that could be a Mother’s Helper for a few hours each week who could watch the baby or toddler while you are also at home doing something more intense with your older child?
  • There are also many websites with ideas of things for toddlers to do during “Class Times” – these include making “I Spy” kinds of sealed bottles with sand and small objects inside to rotate around and look for;  sticking a lot of tiny  stickers to fill up a small space.  (Okay, these are not especially Waldorf-y, but many mainstream websites have ideas such as these :).   Other ideas for very small children may include playing with fluffs of wool, baskets of sticks and pinecones and silks.  If you have not seen “Toymaking with Children”, this is a great book to check out regarding how to make toys your children will play with from birth up!

If the practicalities are stemming around a three or four year old and up:

  • They may be ready to start on a rhythm themselves of circle time, a story with puppetry or modeling, and some practical work.  Perhaps you could do this in the morning first thing so they feel as if they have done something special for the day.
  • Many families start their mornings with a walk or being outside in nature to really get that energy out first.
  • A special box of toys and things that only comes down when  you do school (where the things in it rotate on a day-by-day basis) is often appreciated.
  • Again, homeschooling outside and being flexible with the times you teach some of the more intense material is helpful.

A special consideration that arises with families using Waldorf is this notion that the younger one must be so protected that if a 4 year old is torturing us to learn to write a few letters we ignore, if our six year old wants a main lesson book, we ignore, a four or six year old cannot hear the older ones’ stories. Rubbish; a heap of rubbish I say!  This may irritate some people, but here is what I think:

Yes, the stories in the curriculum is going to speak most deeply to the child when the child is at that point – in other words, Saint stories will speak most deeply to the 8 year old second grader, Old Testament stories will speak most deeply to  the 9 year old third grader – but if they hear it before then, it is generally okay (Norse myths are rather intense and may be an exception).

Yes,  if a four year old who wants to learn to read and write you should be directing them into other bodily activities, but you may also decide to teach to her to give her a piece of paper and  a crayon to scribble and pretend to write.  If she is extremely persistent and undeterred, perhaps you teach her to write her initials or her name and she may be perfectly satisfied with that and not wanting more after that.  We must respect the intelligence of Steiner’s seven year cycles, but sometimes a four year old really is happy to learn to write just an initial, and then they are totally  happy and able to move onto other things.  Please DO NOT take this out of context and report I am saying you should teach your four year old how to learn to read and write – you should NOT.  But sometimes I feel it is okay to loosen up a bit so the child can move on if they are extremely persistent.  Direct them into their bodies, come up with projects for them to do, but it probably is also natural that in their imitative phase they will want to imitate an older sibling writing.

A six year old may have a Main Lesson Book that he may write in if he feels like it, and when he goes through the First Grade when he is seven he will enjoy the fairy tales and pictorial approach to the letters whether he can write all his letters before hand or not!  And if he doesn’t want to write in his Main Lesson Book that is okay as well.  The point is that the curriculum speaks to where the child is in their soul development.

We have to be careful to make Waldorf work for us in the home environment, not against us!  We have to understand and respect the seven year cycles, but also respect that Waldorf at home is not Waldorf at school. 

While it would be lovely to have the entire circle time, stories, poems, songs memorized, I have also mentioned several times that mothers write things out and place it between two sheets of watercolor painted paper as their “Special Book.”  Donna Simmons talks about this extensively in her work, please see her website and books for more details. 

You can use an open and go syllabus; it is okay!

Most importantly, relax.  You need to know what is taught when and WHY there, but you can tailor Waldorf to your family and to the stages your children are in.  Your children will not be little forever; again, make Waldorf work for you in your home environment and not against you.

You can do this!

Carrie