I was thinking specifically about new parents, and parents of children in the age of birth through seven when I wrote my post “Gathering Grace” recently.
One thing I think about with the children aged seven through fourteen, who really are in the heart of childhood, is that they should be gathering love. Continue reading
There should be warning signs for parents on every child in America: “Warning! This is not a potted plant! This is a human being that needs sunshine, free play in nature and lots of movement throughout the entire lifespan! Warning!”
Too often our children today are treated like potted plants. Sterile, not moving, in a pot, watching only one view because the inherent nature of the human being to move is essentially ignored by our predominate educational system, our medical system, and our society at large.
Children of all ages, birth through twenty-one, need to MOVE. Children birth through age seven should be developing their will, their doing. Movement also is learning. I have read research estimates that 80 percent of the brain is devoted to taking in sensory information and deciding what to do with that information. Almost any long-time teacher will tell you that most children are kinesthetic learners.
We know from current research that school aged children need at least three to four hours a day of true rough and tumble outside play. Heavy work benefits ALL children and ALL adults. We are wired for it!
In a classroom setting, just having ten minute breaks to really move every two hours can completely increase learning. According to a 2006 study in the journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, children with ADHD who take movement breaks for ten minutes every two hours show a 20 percent improvement in “on-task behavior.”
In Waldorf Education, we look at movement to be about a third of our learning time if possible. We play movement games for math, we walk our forms before we draw them, we have eurythmy and Bothmer gymnastics in the Waldorf School setting, we include folk dancing in the curriculum for certain grades, we have drama and gardening.
You CAN do this at home and it will not complicate your homeschool, but enhance it!
Simple ways to start:
Finally, are you moving in your free time? Are you cleaning, gardening, working? Hiking and biking and swimming and skating? Or are you sitting down on your computer? Just sayin’. 
Happy Moving!
Carrie
I talk to so many mothers who have children of multiple ages and who are very concerned as to how to fit in multiple main lessons, or what to do with their children when their ages are spread out between the Early Years and the grades. It can be daunting, and many veteran Waldorf homeschoolers say that you cannot schedule that many main lessons without going insane….but then how to do it?
Let’s start at the beginning. If you have a first or second grader, and the rest of your children are under the age of 7, then life should be relatively easy. You can often think in terms of outside time together, a circle for all, a story geared to the kindergartener, perhaps the main lesson for the first or second grader, nap and quiet time (and perhaps do something else for fifteen to twenty minutes with the first or second grader during quiet time), the work of the day geared toward the kindergartener but including all, and finish with playing outside. My friend Sheila has a lovely post about her rhythm with her fourth grader and her Early Years child here: http://sureastheworld.com/2012/03/18/brass-tacks-my-homeschooling-day/
With two children involved in main lesson work, I think it is still possible to either put them “together” if they are close in age…ie, a first grader and a second grader could both hear folk tales, but work on slightly different academic levels. If the two children needing main lessons are further apart in age, then you may want to have separate main lesson times. Then for other lessons, such as foreign language or handwork, you could combine the children but have them work at their own levels. I think all of that is possible with only two children needing main lessons, even with younger children in tow. I think this is the sort of thing you must jump in and try and switch around as needed. It is daunting when I go to the homes of my homeschooling friends who are not using Waldorf methods and their homeschooling is a lot of workbooks, worksheets, independent reading textbooks, and videos. Waldorf homeschooling is different, and sometimes only by doing it can we wrap our heads around how it will work for our family and what that will look like!
I will have a fifth grader, a second grader, and a two year old turning three in the fall. I am planning my essential rhythm to look like this: Continue reading
If you are coming in late to Waldorf homeschooling or feel overwhelmed and overrun by dogma, I have a solution for you! Please read the lectures given by Rudolf Steiner compiled in “The Renewal of Education.” This set of lectures, given to a group of Swiss public educators only eight months after the first Waldorf school formed, is so accessible. The foreword is written by a favorite Waldorf educator of mine, Eugene Schwartz, in which he compares and contrasts Waldorf Education to John Dewey and Maria Montessori’s work and sheds light on the hallmarks of Waldorf Education: the self –renewal and self-development of the teacher, the balance that feeling provides in education, and the approach of Waldorf education to the holistic child.
Waldorf education approaches the child from four different avenues. Continue reading
In one post I shared my personal form for the rhythm of one of our days of the week, but I was recently thinking about a sample form or list that could help mothers plan their Grades One through Eight homeschooling according to the eight pillars of artistic work of Waldorf Education that we have talked about in the past on this blog. Academic subjects are taught through artistic work in Waldorf Education; this is an enlivening form of education for the child.
Please take this as a “I thought of this in quickly and you might be able to tweak it or use parts of it or come up with something even better” kind of way, not as a definitive end product. 
Anyway, this is what I was thinking: Continue reading
I was going through some papers this weekend and came across an article by Michael Howard that I had printed out called, “Educating the Feeling-will in the Kindergarten” and this quote just popped out at me:
“The defining characteristic of feeling will is the capacity to live deeply into the inner quality of something outside us, knowing and feeling it as if we are within it or it is within us. In the early childhood years a healthy child is naturally inclined to drink in the inner mood and qualities of places and persons. It is one of the tragedies of our times that the ways of the world, including the life of the family and school, can dull rather than foster this natural soul attachment. Tragically, many young children come to kindergarten with a sense-nerve disposition already strongly developed. Their thinking has become prematurely intellectual and abstract, and their feeling life inclines toward strong personal like or dislike.”
I have been seeing so many tiny children yet with so many big opinions. Have you been seeing this as well? Continue reading
I wanted to thank all of you who participated and left comments in regards to the post Donna Simmons of Christopherus Homeschool Resources on Catherine’s blog. You can see the original post here (and do be sure to read the comments, because that is where the discussion really is, including an interesting side thread on forming the space between two siblings who are very close in age): Continue reading
(This guest post is written by a friend of mine who lives in my region of the U.S. She writes in):
As I write this I am enjoying a homemade sourdough English muffin, topped with homemade cheese and homemade strawberry jam. This, my friends, is the real reward of doing a Waldorf-inspired third grade year! We have just finished Grade 3, and what a fun year it has been. Although I have always homeschooled my boys, this has been our first year using Waldorf-inspired methods. I began our year by meditating on my son, Vincent, who turned 9 this past December. My number one goal for him was to get him out of his head a bit (well, a lot), which meant less reading and more physical activity. I also wanted to try to calm his mind and focus him to finish a task. Lower on my list of things to accomplish was to teach him all 4 processes in math, as we had only done addition and subtraction previously. And of course, there is my constant quest as a parent to encourage reverence, empathy and connection in both my boys.
I have written a few back posts about Grade Three, (and will have one on our last Old Testament block coming up), but I wanted to throw out a few things about Grade Three in general for those of you starting to plan. (And other Grade Three mothers, please do chime in with your experiences!)
This is the time of year when many mothers in the Northern Hemisphere are finishing up school and starting to think about summer and planning for next year. Perhaps you only have one or two blocks left before your school ends for the year! How exciting!
I would love to hear what everyone is working on right now and what you have left. Did this school year go the way you wanted?
Sometimes at this point in the year mothers can be really hard on themselves. Learning really occurs all the time, so even if you didn’t get to everything (and that happens in school as well!), it is okay. Children in grades one through three are still pretty little, and many of the concepts touched on in these grades are worked with and deepened in fourth grade, and other concepts are really honed in grades five through eight. There is time, and I think when we homeschool with Waldorf Education, we can be assured everything is in there in due time.
Are you already thinking about summer? Summer vacation is seen as really, really important in Waldorf Education. To read more about this and some ideas of what to focus on this summer, please see this popular post: https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/06/03/a-plea-for-summer-vacation/
I encourage YOU, especially if you are a homeschooling parent, to use the summer to get your homeschool planning and household organizing done.
In our family in the summer, pretty much I work on the house in the morning in small spurts between fun with the children, in the afternoon we go to our neighborhood pool and swim until we are ready to drop, and at night, at least for four nights a week I do homeschool lesson planning or my own work for a little bit before my husband and I spend time together. We also plan “fun days” of going to the lake, or taking in a puppet show, or berry-picking and canning, but we also spend a good amount of time at home. I tend to have my husband run the errands, or I do them around dinner time for an hour here or there. I try to limit errand-running as much as possible! That is my typical summer in a nutshell; I don’t know if that structure would be helpful to you, but in this summer I encourage you to think how you could get organized and prepared for fall. You will be so pleased how everything will be ready come fall!
Here is one of my favorite back posts about summer and tips to survive increased sibling fighting that sometimes occurs in the summer months: https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/07/21/summertime-bickering/
My official view of The July Doldrums (yes, I coined that phrase myself since it seems to happen in my world in July): https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/07/05/the-july-doldrums-again/
And last but not least, a project for parenting, just for you this summer: https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/06/07/a-summer-parenting-project-for-you/
Many blessings,
Carrie
The Parenting Passageway 