Happy Sunday! Welcome back to another "Sunday with Sarah."
Last week I talked about Waldorf homeschooling, gave you some reviews of and
my opinions of some of the curriculum materials that are available for Waldorf
homeschoolers. Just a few of them. But based on the comments and questions I
received from you this week,
I felt like a Part 2 was in order.
So this is Waldorf Homeschooling Part 2. For those of you that don't home
school your children
I promise we'll move on to another subject
next week. What I wanted to stress that I wish I had emphasized in my last
video is that a curriculum, should you choose to buy one or use one, is just
a starting point.
It's just a framework or a springboard. One of the wonderful things about being
a homeschooler is you're not tied to any one thing.
Choose what works for you, what resonates with you, what speaks to you. If it gives
suggestions for daily lessons, something you can imagine yourself doing, better
yet if it's something that gets you excited,
use that. You're not limited to one package.
As I mentioned last week, when we were homeschooling I bought materials from
Oak Meadow and Live Education and Christopherus and the beautiful thing
is you can pick and choose from them and there are lots of guides to crafts so
as you get more comfortable and confident in your ability as a
homeschooler, use all those materials. So last week I didn't want to to suggest
that one size fits all or that you even need a package curriculum, which
leads me to a story I wanted to share with you: a big lesson I learned in
our two-and-a-half years as a homeschooling family. When I started I
came from a background as a Waldorf teacher and I was trained as a Waldorf
teacher and when we decided to homeschool I really felt like I wanted
my children to have the same curriculum and experience they would receive in a
Waldorf school. So I started out by doing what I knew and I created a mini-Waldorf
school at home.
Everything from lazured walls, the kind of painting technique that's often
used in Waldorf classrooms, we had wooden desks and a big chalkboard and
I expected my students, which included not only my two sons but my
first grade
niece at the time, they had desks and I'm embarrassed to tell you I even, in the
beginning, expected them to raise their hand to go to the bathroom. As I
mentioned last week, we started out using Live Education. It's a wonderful curriculum,
it's very true to the philosophy of Waldorf education and really presents a
curriculum, grade by grade as Rudolf Steiner designed it, to meet each child
at its developmental age but it's a very much Waldorf school at home and
labor-intensive if you're teaching more than one grade. If you're teaching one
child I think it could work wonderfully but having three different students of
different ages and different grades, I found myself preparing three different
lessons each night and was staying up way too late doing it. After a few
months I was getting really burnt out and my kids seemed less and less happy.
Around Christmas time I thought, "Something has got to change here." We were
losing our joy in learning. And I started to let go and I discovered the
more I let go of
how I thought things should be, the more relaxed and happier we all became. We
started taking more field trips and what I learned was sometimes the field trips
would spark an interest. For instance, we went to a talk at a local arboretum on
owls and eagles and it was so interesting and we got really excited
about owls and eagles. The naturalist who gave this presentation told us there's
so many bald eagles now in Maine
and just keep your eyes open, look up and you're sure to see them.
And well sure enough we just started seeing eagles everywhere, including an
eagle that swooped down on our lawn that had a big snake in its mouth.
We were so excited, we went to the library and got books about owls and
eagles. Then we wrote poems about owls and eagles,
we learned a Native American song about an eagle,
we learned to play it on our recorders. These are the kinds of ways that
subjects are approached in a Waldorf school in main lesson. One subject is
studied for two, three weeks, sometimes a month at a time but the arts are
integrated into everything.
So we drew pictures of owls and eagles and that became our main lesson block.
After that we started incorporating some of the curriculum
that Rudolf Steiner prescribed for Waldorf education. For instance, fairy
tales in 1st grade,
fables and stories of heroes and saints in 2nd grade, Middle
Ages in 6th grade and so on.
Using those subjects for inspiration,
we would try to find related field trips. What really my big "aha" moment was
when I realized that the difference between home schooling and school
schooling, institutional schooling,
was I didn't have a class of twenty-five children. I had three.
You may have one or two, you may have a big family and even have five or six but
I bet you don't have twenty-five.
So we had the freedom. Our schedule was flexible, we had the freedom to go on
a field trip
without having to get twenty-five permission slips or arrange for car pools or a
school bus. So we kind of moved toward "unschooling." When I started my
homeschool experience I thought that
Waldorf school and unschooling were kind of polar opposites, where
unschooling is very unstructured and Waldorf school is pretty structured and
prescribed but I actually feel like I found a way to meet the two.
That's what worked for us and our learning became much, much more joyful
after I made that discovery. We stopped sitting at our desks, we'd sometimes
read on the floor or on the couch snuggled up together which are just some of
my happiest memories. After two-and-a-half years of homeschooling, our local
Waldorf school needed an early childhood teacher again,
my children were missing their friends, so we ended up going back to the Waldorf
school. But when my kids went back their teachers really
commented on how excited they were about learning and
how their excitement was rubbing off on the other students and I think they and
I really attribute the love of learning we found to our years homeschooling.
So whether you home school or not, I wish you a week full of joyful learning.
I may not see you next week. On Tuesday I'm headed to Nuremberg, Germany,
for the International Toy Fair and I'm so excited. I haven't been to Europe
since my oldest son, Harper, since I was pregnant with him, and he
just turned 21
this month so that tells you how long it's been.
I'm not only excited about going to Europe but also to see a huge hall full
of European toys, wooden toys, and hoping to bring back some exciting new
things to share with you at Bella Luna Toys.
I will try to take some video and post some pictures, I'm not sure what my
internet connection will be like so I may not see you next week
but I promised to be back with you in two weeks.
Thanks again, see you soon.