(In Waldorf homeschooling, a child should be eight for most of second grade, so hence the references below to a second grader is also reference to an eight-year-old – Carrie)

Donna Simmons writes in her “Waldorf Curriculum Overview for Homeschoolers” that:   “The difference between First Graders and Second Graders can be quite startling:  the way they play together, run around the house, behave in group situations…one really gets a sense that Second Graders have arrived!”

Torin M. Finser writes in the  book “School As A Journey:  The Eight-Year-Odyssey of a Waldorf Teacher and His Class”:  “After the first day of second grade I found myself scratching my head and asking:  Where are the real Doug, Marc, Kirsten, Michael, Eben, Susan, Jacob?  Did they forget to show up?  After the second day my inner questioning was more intense:  what had happened to the open-hearted, naive, reverent, respectful children I had enjoyed last year?  Was this some kind of cruel joke?”

He notices that the children had changed, that they were more lively, that they were in constant movement, that they lived in extremes over the smallest thing, and every child now had an opinion about everything!

In “Second Grade”, an article by Manette Teitelbaum in the book, “Waldorf Education:  A Family Guide”, the author writes how “Energies freed from the process of forming the body now awaken the subjective world of feeling – wonder, pity, joy, tenderness and sorrow.  These are the currents of air upon which these new little butterflies will rise, on which they will find their relationship to the world about them.”

A HUGE part, the MAIN part of Waldorf Second Grade is to work on the balance and harmonizing of the child.  For example, the juxtaposition of the Legends of Saints and the Trickster Tales speak strongly to the child searching for a balance between the duality of emotions and actions here on earth.

Donna Simmons notes in her “Waldorf Curriculum Overview” this important note:  “Unless they have been prematurely woken up and have already slid into acting like the jaded child caricatures seen of TV, eight-year-olds are still very open and trusting about the world.  If one takes to heart the Waldorf pedagogical maxim that beauty, truth and goodness should surround the child to thereby aid his full development as a human being, then one will take care to shelter him from societal influences that encourage premature sexuality, intellectualism and cynicism.”

Steiner lectured about this age in the compilation “Soul Economy” in a lecture entitled, “Children From the Seventh to the Tenth Year” given on December 31, 1921.  He discusses the changes with the coming of the second teeth and how the spiritual forces are now affecting the rhythmic movement of the heart and the lungs. “During the first phase (and by this he means the change of teeth until about the end of the ninth year), children want to experience everything that comes toward them in relation to their own inner rhythms- everything associated with beat and measure.”  He discusses how the images formed by seeing everything in the world now acts mainly on the rhythmic system of movement.

He goes on to comment, “With the change of teeth new soul forces  of feeling, linked to breathing and blood circulation, come into their own, with the result that children begin to distance themselves from others, whom they now experience as individuals.  This creates in them a longing to follow the adult in every way, looking up to adults with shy reverence.”

All of these passages highlight important clues as how to best live with and help guide an eight-year-old.  In our next and last post regarding the eight-year-old, we will look at how to peacefully live with an  eight-year-old.

Many blessings,

Carrie