The Lament for a Lost Stick

Can you remember what it was like to be so deeply satisfied by finding just the right stick?

The one with the exact curve that lights up your imagination and transforms it into a broad sword, a broom, a wand, or a cane. 

The one that fits your hand so perfectly and is just the right length and width. Ahh, how satisfying to the core. 

And finally, it's river day! This stick of all sticks accompanies you across the grassy fields, down the winding path hidden in the trees, follows you down the steep path and through the rocky woods until, at last, you arrive at our spot at the eddy. Finally, the adventure can really begin! 

But oh no, what's this? Now it's floating in the water, farther and farther away from shore, after an accidental throw while tossing rocks. Quickly, the search begins for a longer stick, a branch-anything to try and reach it! But the whirlpool grabs it, and it soon disappears. 

Sentries are posted to watch as it travels along, popping up and bobbing back from the whirlpool, closer and then farther, closer and farther again.

Everyone tries to help save the day as tears and heartbreak overcome the stick owner. Dozens of commiserating stories, offers of replacement sticks, and pats on the back are gifted to the saddened owner.

Lunch comes and passes, heartbreak begins to lift just a smidge, and then suddenly, the stick is spotted again! and then lost again.

As the group walks the sandy shores, someone notices spring onions growing, another the burnt rocks from an old fire, and then, hidden under an old log is a marvelous stick; twisted and burnt, thick and sturdy, with a most unusual shape ... clearly, it's a fossil! A dragon's head! A new game begins with the (new) best stick of all sticks. And the soul is deeply satisfied again.

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Not every river walk is this eventful, but whenever we are outside together, something rises in my awareness, reminding me how important and vital this time is to our class, each student, and their overall education and well-being. Students are lucky to live life together, to have time to experience the highs and lows and support one another through them. 

Now, the students often bring up this story to encourage others or remind each other that sometimes good things happen after unexpected or sad situations. This kind of practice through play is a part of our school life in and out of the classroom; it's as essential a subject as math or literacy.  

Here is an interesting read on why play is so essential to education.

Roses

 

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as "rootless and stemless." We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.” ― W. Timothy Gallwey

Curriculum Overview

First Grade Curriculum

Morning Lesson  

Morning lesson focuses on two areas: block study of the core academic subjects of the year and building capacities such as spatial awareness, rhythm and timing, adaptability, memory, problem-solving, and self-control. Morning lesson consists of mental math, singing, rhythmic whole-body movement, speech exercises, and focused desk work. 

Fairy Tales

Consider this - the fairy tale Cinderella is over a thousand years old. The oldest known printed version is in a Chinese book written sometime between 850 - 860 CE. And who knows how long it was told orally before that? Because fairy tales hail from oral cultures, they retain a certain perspective of the world:

For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known … Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. …

-Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

I read this as confirming what we know about the young child - they are deeply connected to everything around them and have difficulty separating themselves from others. That is why very young children sometimes burst into tears when they see another child hurt - they cannot separate their experience from the other child’s experience. They know the world from the perspective of the pre-literate. Fairy tales speak their language. 

Writing and Reading

Reading has two aspects. One is decoding and fluency - learning the sounds represented by the letters and using that knowledge to sound out words, eventually stringing those words into sentences, and so forth. Another side is sublime. It’s poetry and eloquence, and how we can wrestle with a writer’s thoughts and feel we’re connecting with them, even though we’ll likely never meet them. Literacy learning in first grade uses the following tools:

• oral storytelling

• introducing letter symbols as pictograms

• beginning with capital letters

• reading memorized verses from the board and lesson books

• playing with phonemes

• recognizing that phrases consist of discrete words

• recognizing phonemes as parts of words

• recognizing that each letter represents an associated sound

• learning common blends

• learning common word endings

• memorizing common sight words

• read aloud 

• writing using phonetic spelling

• inventing words and investing them with meaning based on the sound and articulation of the word

Numbers

Math in the first grade is active and full of wonder. The focus is on building skills and cultivating mathematical thinking. For instance, counting is a skill, but it is also an activity that can be mined for many important mathematical concepts. 

Counting, from a mathematical point of view, introduces [children] to the idea that tens are important, that rules are important, and that numbers have a structure.

-Herb Ginsburg, Ph.D. , Columbia Teachers College 

This coming year it will be important for the first graders to experience:

• the number qualities (e.g., 2 as a pair)

• developing a sense of number (recognizing patterns, estimation, etc.)

• Roman numerals and Arabic numerals

• lots of counting 

• cardinal and ordinal numbers

• skip counting

• addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division

• memorizing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division math facts

• understanding the form of tables (i.e. “2 is 2 times 1”)

• instantly comprehending quantity to 10, both visual (such as chestnuts), auditory (such as strikes on the chimes), touch (such as taps on the shoulder)  , and grouping to make a good guess at larger quantities (such as seeing 5, and 5, and 5 and knowing the quantity must be 15)

• understanding standard notation (such as 4=2+2 and 2+2=4)

• understanding the passive and active elements of each process

• understanding fact families

• working with the commutative property

• using known facts to efficiently calculate

• working with the number line to gain an understanding of numbers as movement and quantity

• using math for real-world purposes, such as counting how many days to one’s birthday, etc.

Science

In first grade, preparing for the physical sciences consists of continuing to build real-world experience. Direct instruction of scientific concepts begins at age twelve, when children can make objective observations and work with abstraction. In Waldorf education, we base our work soundly on child development and have developed the strength and support needed to wait for children to be ripe for subjects.  Every school should be evaluated by this yardstick, in my opinion, otherwise students’ time is ill-used and one wonders whom the education is truly serving.

 

Form drawing 

The schedule includes weekly form drawing lessons. Form drawing is a  

subject unique to Waldorf education. It greatly helps children develop the fine motor coordination and spatial awareness needed for writing. Waldorf teachers also recognize its help in forming the will forces

Painting

Painting is about color! Students will begin with simple color exercises. Intensification of colors, cool and warm colors, complementary colors, and secondary colors are the focus.  

Sculpture and Modeling

Ruskin wrote, “Form is a diagram of forces”. Working with modeling and sculpting over the year will allow first graders plenty of time to experience form, while they work with their hands to shape their will.

Technology

Computers are not generally used in the Waldorf setting until high school, with learning to keyboard being an exception in middle school.

Specialties

First Graders are lucky to have each special subject class twice a week. The subjects offered include Handwork, Japanese, Movement, Music, and Spanish. These subjects allow for a wide breadth and depth of skills to be developed and for students to cultivate an interest in a variety of subjects. Our specialty teachers are experts in their subject and shape each lesson to meet the grade and students before them. In fourth grade, Strings will be added.

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Clay

At the All School Meeting, we got to know one another a bit with a warm-up game and then talked about neurology and literacy via a clay project. Here is a brief recap.

Around seven, young children's brains begin growing and developing at an outstanding rate, a pace rarely matched at any other time in their lives. 

Our curriculum this year will make good use of this significant growth spurt by combining the Waldorf curriculum, which in first grade, focuses on experiencing the alphabet and number systems in profound, experiential, and sensory-related ways (often referred to as "swimming in the letters" or "awash in the numbers") with a gradual progression into the deeper study of the English language. This progression is based on years of scientific research on how children learn. 

In first grade, what we do at school together will influence how the brain is shaped, creating pathways and connections for capacities students will use for the rest of their lives. During our literacy work this year, first graders will begin to learn how to use the tool of language together by practicing and fine-tuning its use in more complex and varied situations. This deep study and practice will continue during all of the elementary school years. 

But what does that really mean? 

What that means is we will spend a lot of time practicing the basics, building a solid foundation for reading stamina, fluency, comprehension, and the development of a rich vocabulary.

That means having fun with each new piece needed to build towards a whole and robust literacy. Each piece of our literacy work, like partnering with older students as reading buddies and hearing rich oral stories of fairy tales, will be forces that shape the brain's growth and pathways... and encourage an interest in reading, learning, and the people and world around us.

Fairy tales are used in first grade because they bring pictures of humanity that we can't find reflected so broadly in any other form. Fairy tales offer pictures of morality, justice, relationships, kindness, cruelty being overcome, and compassion. 

Between fairy tales and our work with phonics rules and word families, playing with rhymes and syllables, stretching memory capacities, reading, writing, and games with phonemes and graphemes, that remarkable 7-year-old brain will be shaped and strengthened well!

 But what does that look like in our classroom? 

Stay tuned; We have a great year ahead!