Teaching Time in Waldorf Grade 3

It’s been pretty quiet around here, mostly because the plague has descended upon the 3rd grade. No, I’m not talking about the locusts from the Hebrew Legends, it’s winter in Portland and we’ve had quite the variety of illnesses coursing through the classroom. Lots of students have been out, and I was home in bed for a full 4 days!

Today is my first full day back and it feels so good to return. It’s so frustrating when you’ve put so much time and energy into planning a new block and when it comes time to teach it, you have to try to prepare it well enough for someone else to teach.

Teaching Time

Speaking of a new block, we’re focused on time for these three weeks between Thanksgiving and the holiday break. I’ve pulled from a few resources to put together a plan, including Live Ed! and the Waldorf 3rd Grade Manual written for the East African Waldorf Teacher Development Program. This resource is available online for free download.

When I first sat down to plan it, I thought it would be straightforward enough. You know, how hard could it be? Years, months, days. Hours, minutes, seconds. Not much to it. But of course, as I started exploring, the complexity and enormity of the subject of time began to dawn on me. Leave it to a Waldorf teacher to find cosmic significance in even the most straightforward 3-week third grade block.

The Kingdoms of Nature

One of the things that I found the most fascinating came out of an exploration of how the kingdoms of nature relate with time. The 3rd Grade Manual is what got me thinking about this and it led to some big epiphanies. I realized that as you move higher through the kingdoms of nature, the smaller periods of time become most significant. For example, the mineral kingdom stays the same for millennia, while the animals are most impacted by the rhythms of day and night. It led to this basic idea.

• Mineral — millennium, century, decade
• Plant — year, month
• Animal — week, day
• Human — hour, minute, second

Now, this is a bit of an oversimplification, of course, but it gave us a place to start, and even a bit of a framework for the block. I also find it utterly fascinating.

This resource also pointed out that the younger a human being is, the less concerned they are with the smaller periods of time. Babies are more connected with the rhythm of night and day (closer to the animals) while adults have meetings that start on the minute.

See how much there is to think about with time?!

Calendar Project

I chose to place this block at this point in the year, in large part, because we are putting together 2020 calendars for our holiday family gifts. I’ve taken a pretty easy way out with this project. Rather than having the students draw grids on the pages, I photocopied 8 1/2 X 11 monthly grids and they’re filling in the days of the week and the dates.

We’re using main lesson books for this activity, which means we won’t have anything to bind. We’re gluing the monthly grid on the page and doing a drawing above. When we’re finished we’ll pull out the extra pages and use them for practice paper.

For the drawings, I’m taking inspiration from the book Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back, which came highly recommended in my summer training. The images in this book are just beautiful and they do a good job of showing the seasons in a way that is even relevant for our Pacific Northwest climate.

Telling Time

My illness has put a bit of a wrench into the planned rhythm of this block, which I mapped out ahead of time. Here’s a rough outline of the content I’d planned for the block.

Week 1

• M — kingdoms of nature and time, an introduction
• T — the year — birthdays, seasons, the stars, 365 days
• W — dividing into smaller chunks, months and their connection to lunar phases, month names
• T — lunar phases, lunar calendar, Hebrew months
• F — start calendar project

Week 2

• M — days of the week, feeling sense, meanings and qualities
• T — day and night — length of day and night, qualities
• W — the clock — historical, sundial and waterclock
• T — make a waterclock
• F — no new content, calendar project focus

Week 3

• M — hours, minutes, seconds — overview of telling time, big picture, hour hand
• T — am and pm, 24 hour time
• W — minute hand
• T — half clock, quarter clock
• F — extra day, catch-up

But regardless, next week we’ll be moving on to learning about the clock. The manual linked above does a really good job of explaining, in a step-by-step way, how to understand the 3 hands of the clock. They recommend taking a look at each one of them at a time, starting with the hour hand and adding in the minute and then the second hand on subsequent days. In addition to learning about every number equalling 5 minutes for the minute hand, we’ll talk about “quarter past” or “quarter to” and “half past,” so we’ll understand the clock as two halves and also as 4 quarters.

Isn’t our clock ingenious?! I swear, this is what I love most about being a Waldorf teacher — taking a look at those every day things that you don’t give much thought to, and discovering complete wonder. The best.

We’ll also take a look at different methods of measuring time throughout the years. I doubt we’ll be able to create a sundial in rainy Portland, but we’ll talk about and maybe make water clocks and candle clocks.

Winter Artistic Work

We’ll be saying goodbye to our beloved pentatonic flutes at the end of the month, handing them down to the 1st grade. I just love playing flutes with my class and I sure hope they love their new diatonic flutes just as much.

For our last pentatonic flute song, we’re playing and singing that 3rd grade favorite, Speed Bonny Boat. Just love that song. We’re also singing a pretty complex winter song that we’re building up to be able to sing in a round. It’s going to be lovely.

That’s it for now. I’ll come back and add some pictures of our calendar project, once I get a chance to take some. Right now, after so many days away, I’m just grateful to be heading back to class to have lunch with those sweet 3rd graders.