Hands-On Learning in the Waldorf Classroom

I’ve posted a lot about the academic work I do with my students.

The thing is, I really love thinking through the academic topics my students are learning and figuring out how I can teach them so they will make the most sense.

It’s the kind of puzzle that makes my teacher-heart happy. I grew up loving school, so getting all studious about strategies and techniques for teaching is just the kind of thing I like to do.

Another reason I post a lot about the academic work we do is because I think this is an area that sometimes gets overlooked.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, we Waldorf teachers think about academics a lot. But Waldorf is known for all of the outside-the-box learning we do. When you think of Waldorf Education, you think about field trips, science experiments, cooking projects, handwork and outdoor play.

You don’t necessarily think about grammar and times tables. But if you read this blog, you know that we do this stuff a LOT. (And if this is the first post you’re reading, make sure you take a look at the archives to see how I’ve taught language arts, math and other core curriculum topics.

But today, I’m coming to you to talk about PROJECTS.

It happens that 3rd grade is a big year for hands-on learning and I’m having just as much fun thinking through how to do those projects and how they will help my students learn some of those academic topics.

Today’s main lesson is a perfect example. Yesterday I told the third graders a story about my great-grandmother Mertie who lived on the farm and had 8 children to take care of. She went to the store to buy fabric to make a dress for my grandmother Loretta.

The person who usually measured out the fabric, did so using elbow-lengths (fingertip to elbow) and Mertie knew that 5 elbow lengths were what she needed to make a dress for Loretta. But when Mertie got to the store, she found that the usual fabric cutter wasn’t there, and instead there was a younger woman. She cut 5 elbow-lengths and Mertie went on her way.

When she got home and pulled out the fabric to cut it, she was surprised to find that she didn’t have enough. Of course, this was because the woman’s elbow-length was shorter than the usual fabric cutter.

My main point in this story was to demonstrate the need for a common unit of measure. What would have solved Mertie’s problem? A standard unit of measure.

Engaging Review Activities

Today we remembered that story and extended it to talk about Noah’s ark. The students learned that that same elbow-length was the unit of measure that God used to tell Noah how big to build the ark, and he called it a cubit.

All of this background went into our super-fun activity for the day. First, each student measured their own cubit and compared it to their desk partner’s. They were so surprised to see how different they all were!

Then, we decided to take on the challenge of measuring out the length of Noah’s ark. In my research I found that Noah’s ark was 300 cubits long. So I put the measurement of Noah’s cubit, 18 inches (though there is some debate about that) on the chalkboard. Children came up to the board and measured out a piece of string 10 cubits long.

Once they had done that, we counted by 10’s to make sure we had 300. We had 24 children in class today, so we figured out that 6 kids needed to have 2. Then we went outside and extended the strings, each child standing between, until they were all stretched out.

Would you believe that the strings stretched out 2 whole blocks?! So exciting.

Of course, things got a little crazy as we were getting all the strings unwound and kids were standing holding their strings. And it took us awhile to get all of the strings rolled back up and everyone lined up ready to go in.

But it was a lot of fun. And as we went in I heard comments: “No wonder it took him so long to build it!” And “I guess he would need that much space to hold all the animals.”

In the end, it was a good way to introduce our measurement work and there was a LOT of academic information in that little lesson!

Form and Freedom

The whole thing had me thinking about those free-form, exploratory learning moments vs. our formed, organized and carefully held classroom lessons.

Here’s what I’m thinking about it all — I’m realizing that because we have those carefully held, formed moments, we can occasionally let go and have those free-learning moments. If I didn’t know that my students would listen to me and pull themselves back into order when I tell them to, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable heading into a crazy, exploratory, outdoor lesson with them.

But because they’re great kids who listen to their teacher, I can enjoy them, let them run amok (at least for a little bit) and then pull them back in when it’s time. So great. And it makes my life as a teacher much less stressful.

We’ve got lots more lessons like this in the year ahead of us, so I was glad to see my students handle it so well.

Tomorrow we’ll review the work that we did and do a class composition together to put in our main lesson books. And in the new content portion of the lesson, we’ll start exploring some standard imperial measurements — the foot, inch and yard.

Compound Words

Speaking of academic work, in the afternoon today we had a fun lesson about compound words. I gave the students the imagination (inspired by Roadmap to Literacy) that back when they were naming things, some people didn’t have permission to make up new words, so they had to combine words that already existed to create names for things. We had fun imagining what it would be like to try to name things only using words that already existed.

I put two lists on the board — the first part of the word on the left, the second part on the right — and they had to match them up to make compound words. After they wrote three actual compound words, they were allowed to make up some funny ones.

Oh my, did they have a great time! Some of their inventions:

• popbed
• grasssitter
• babyball
• fireflower

Then, while they were working on drawings to go with their lists, they came up with more ideas. Someone wanted to draw a volcano, but that’s not a compound word. I suggested he create a compound word for volcano. You guessed it — “firemountain.”

And then, of course, everyone rejoiced when someone pointed out that “underwear” and “armpit” were also compound words. And yes, I let them draw underwear in their phonics books. Sometimes the right dose of silliness is just what you need in the learning process.

One of my favorites was when a quieter student showed me his drawing, which he called a “textbook” for how to care for babies. His drawing included “firebaby” “ballbaby” “flybaby” and “sunbaby.” Hilarious. A little disturbing, but hilarious. See, not everything they do needs to be so sacred.