Practice Makes Progress | Practicing Skills in Waldorf Grade 3

If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you know that I started out my Waldorf journey as a middle school teacher. In fact, I took three classes through the upper grades before teaching the lower grades.

Now that I’m in 3rd grade with my 4th(!) class, the first one I’ve taken from the beginning, I am realizing a whole other side to teaching in a Waldorf school.

Here’s the thing, in the upper grades, you don’t have to work as much on skill development. The students already have the basics of reading, writing and doing math figured out. They need to practice, yes, but they don’t need you to guide them through that practice in a step-by-step way. You set them with challenges and turn them loose.

In the upper grades, you want to encourage them to think. The teacher creates an environment that fosters creative thinking, problem-solving and imagination. We set the stage and then watch and see what comes to life.

The lower grades are totally different. I mean, imagination is still key. It is how we keep our students engaged and inspired. But every single day they are learning new skills and this is really big, important work! The teacher needs to get into the student’s mindset to figure out exactly what step is the next, most logical one on the path.

Figuring out the puzzle of unlocking those skills is one of the things I love most about being a teacher.

But it isn’t easy.

When my students are focused, not chatting or distracted and giving me their full attention, I can usually see, in the moment, what to say and do to help them take the next step in their learning.

When I’m not stressed out about holding their attention or worried that I’m going to lose them in the next step, I can usually follow my intuition in the right direction.

But this ideal situation doesn’t present itself without effort. It takes a lot of hard work to make sure that students are eager and receptive for those big lessons.

Luckily, there are things we teachers can do to make those golden moments happen more often. We all have our secret tricks of the trade, and mine is rhythm.

After talking to a colleague last week, I took a minute to reflect on my daily classroom rhythm. I realized that our days are SO full of rhythm that so much of what we do seems to happen automatically.

• We always sing our morning greeting song after the handshake.
• We always take out our composition books after playing the flute.
• We always begin our bookwork time with crayons open and books closed.

When I thought about it, I realized that our daily rhythm is exactly the same for the first 45 minutes of our day.

Long-time mentor Else Gottgens would shudder to hear this. She always encouraged teachers to get to the new and interesting content as quickly as possible in the lesson.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized. Though the rhythm is the same, the content is not. We play a new flute song, solve different problems in our composition books and create new and interesting main lesson pages. This is the new and interesting content. But the rhythm holds us steady and keeps us going. Kids know what to expect and can anticipate the next step. They feel more confident and their teacher can focus on the hard work of identifying the next step, rather than endlessly managing behavior.

What does this have to do with practicing skills?

Rhythm is my not-so-secret strategy for creating an environment that fosters practice.

What we’re doing in 3rd grade this year is a perfect example. There are a few different rhythms we hold in our class that allow for daily skills practice. Our dictation rhythm is just one of them.

Dictation

One of my favorite rhythms this year, is something that I’ve also used with students in the upper grades. In fact, I found this rhythm really great in grades 4-6. It is designed to give my students practice with spelling, vocabulary and the mechanics of writing. This is how it’s working in 3rd grade.

1. I write a composition at the beginning of the week. Usually it is about the first story of the week. I try to include any vocabulary, spelling words or phonics rules that we’ll be working with that week. The composition includes about 4 sentences (one for each day of the week) that work together to create a cohesive whole.
2. Each day of the week, Monday-Thursday, after our flute practice, the students take out their composition books and write the date at the top. I dictate the sentence for that day and students write it down in their books, making their best guess at spelling.
3. After they’ve had a chance to write it, I write it on the chalkboard, asking volunteers to help with spellings, making note of punctuation and anything else that presents itself. If I’ve done a good job of thinking through the skills we’re practicing that week, there is lots to talk about. Often an impromptu lesson arises. So far this year we’ve noticed things like the Oxford comma, capitalization rules, when and how to use quotation marks and the different pronunciations of the “ea” vowel team. As we go through, students self-correct their dictations in their composition books. Each day we add to the composition on the board, leaving the sentences up throughout the week.
4. On Friday, the students have a complete composition on the board that they then put in their main lesson books. In the upper grades, the dictation is given as a quiz on Fridays. It gets scored and recorded on their end-of-block report.

Why I Love This Rhythm

There are so many things I love about our daily dictation rhythm.

• Because we do it every day, the practice is nearly automatic. Students don’t have to overcome the idea of being presented with a writing assignment before they can engage with it. They know it’s coming, they’ve done it every day, so they feel confident about being able to do it again.
• This rhythm meets so many of our practice goals. In this activity, students practice block vocabulary, phonics rules, sight words and, importantly, commonly used words. I would rarely put words like because, about and people on a traditional spelling list (maybe once per year). But students need to practice these words regularly. This gives them the opportunity to do it. And three goals accomplished with one activity is great news for a busy teacher who doesn’t have enough time with her students to fit it all in (let alone prepare all of those lessons!)
• The dictation is about the content that we’re learning that week so there is imaginative content for the students to connect with. This is way better than just a list of random words that meet a particular phonics rule.
• It’s short. I don’t need to have a complete skills lesson to do this practice. I take no more than 10 minutes to dictate, correct and review our dictation. In the upper grades it takes even less time.
• It allows me to give the students an example of well-written content without having them passively copy it from the board. Students are engaging with it and thinking about it, not just copying. I think copying from the board is one of those old Waldorf traditions that doesn’t really serve student learning. There’s always a way to have them engage and do more. I love to have my students write their own independent compositions, but the challenge of doing this is that their writing is fairly simple and uses common vocabulary. Dictation presents them with a picture of what writing can look like so they have something to aspire to.

Also, one thing to note, I don’t ever collect and review these books. I let them choose what writing to use and let them know that they are the only ones who are going to see these books. This helps them to feel comfortable taking chances with spellings and giving every word a try. They also don’t get stuck on erasing or forming each letter perfectly. I tell them pretty regularly that dictation is the time for their “fast writing” not their “beautiful writing.” If I had a group of students who tended to write sloppily, I probably wouldn’t make this distinction, but I have the opposite problem. For some of my students every letter is a work of art!

Just so you can see what a daily dictation looks like, here is a picture of one of my students’ daily pages. You can see that he likes to check off the words as we go through them, noting to himself that he got them correct (so cute). You’ll see that I also ask them to write the complete, corrected version in their books below their practice, rather than erase their mistakes and write in the corrected version. This is so helpful to me in seeing what phonics rules they need to review!

This sentence gave us so many things to discuss! The main thing we recognized was that there are three “ea” words (means, head and year), and they don’t all make the same sound. This student made some very intelligent guesses! (Oh, and, for the record, I gave them “Rosh Hashana”.)

The other thing we talked about was the word “Jewish.” Before I even considered writing anything on the board, I asked them what they tried. This was a hard word! Some students tried a G at the beginning. Other attempts we heard were “jooish” “guish” “juwish” “jooesh” and “jouish.” Every time a student shared their attempt, I acknowledged and validated something about it. “You heard the -sh at the end!” “There are many ways to make the -oo sound, you used a -u.” Speaking about it this way ensured that everyone was safe to share their attempt. It was fun collecting all of the different ways that word could be spelled!

You can also see that after the dictation I put a couple of math problems on the board. I have the students turn their books sideways in 3rd and 4th grade so they can use the lines to keep their columns straight. This is another rhythm that works really well for us and ensures that we get some daily math practice, no matter what.

The importance of daily practice

One other thing I’m really thinking a lot about this year is making sure that my students get practice in all of their core academic skills every day. For me this means math computation, writing and reading.

Over the summer, I planned that anytime we were in a math block, our daily skills class would be language arts focused. During language arts blocks, the skills would be math.

In practice, I’ve found there to be much more overlap and less separation than I anticipated. For example, though we are currently in a math block (measurement), we are doing a lot of writing about it. I have clearly outlined academic goals for each week of the block, and they are all math-oriented, but when it comes down to what we are doing in our lessons, there is a whole lot of both happening.

Here’s today’s main lesson, as an example.

After our daily opening and warm-up, we did our dictation (the 2nd day about Rosh Hashana) and a couple of math problems. The math problems practiced regrouping, which is a new skill we’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks.

The math concept I have outlined for the week is about rounding off, which we started working with yesterday, but we hardly touched on it in today’s lesson. Just to make sure we had some touch-in review of it, I asked them a couple of rounding off questions later in the day, before diving into skills class.

The main review activity of the day was to review the measurements of the inch and the yard. We did a guided main lesson page with drawings and writing about both of those measurements. This activity was not about any of our core academic skills, but it was a challenging page to complete. There was a lot of instruction about drawing technique and arranging elements on the page.

This page is my own. So far this year I mostly haven’t been completing a book of my own — the students can complete most of it without a model — but for a page like this, that doesn’t follow our usual arrangement, I needed to do it in the morning to think it through before leading the class. Because I did this, I discovered improvements and guided my students to do it the new, better way. In this example, I wished that I had put the king on the right side and the hand on the left side, so my writing about the thumb could be right next to my thumb. (If I was left-handed, I would have traced my right hand and it would have worked out right.)

Completing this page took the rest of our main lesson.

As I think about it, maybe this lesson isn’t the best example, but the point I’m trying to make here is that your main lesson review/practice time is where the skills practice component of the lesson happens. And with a curriculum that approaches all subjects in such varied ways, the kind of practice you do can really vary. Last week, my students wrote independent compositions, engaged in group activities, did math practice pages and guided drawings — all as part of the review portion during a math main lesson block. On those writing-heavy main lesson days, I brought a little more math into skills class.

I’m all about having a lot of clarity about what I am teaching and when I am teaching it, but sometimes things need to be more fluid. It’s times like these that I am so grateful that I don’t have a prescribed curriculum to follow.

Outlining goals is one thing, but finding the way to accomplish them is truly the art of teaching.