The Ultimate Guide to Main Lesson

When I first started teaching and sat down to plan my first main lesson (14 years ago!) I remember looking at that two hour stretch of time that is dedicated to the typical Waldorf main lesson and thinking, “How can I possibly fill two hours with valuable lesson content?!”

I worried that we would run out of material, the kids would get bored and chaos would ensue. I ended up spending HOURS preparing every lesson, just to make sure I filled every minute.

What’s worse is back in those days I planned EVERY minute of that 2 hour lesson anew every day! I hadn’t learned the value of rhythm, which is an absolutely ESSENTIAL part of my teaching these days.

Well, it didn’t take long for me to realize that this mysterious main lesson — that full 2 hour stretch — can be broken down into four different parts. And you DON’T need to plan each one of them anew every day.

So, this post is all about taking the mystery out of main lesson and putting together a plan that works for you and your students.

If you read this and you’re interested in learning more, you might consider signing up for my free workshop The 3 Classroom Management Strategies that Every Waldorf Teacher Needs to Know. At the end of that workshop I’ll be presenting a special offer to help take even more of the mystery out of that Waldorf magic.

But on to main lesson . . .

How does it break down? These are the parts of main lesson, as I (and many other Waldorf teachers) see it.

• Warm-Up
• Review
• Bookwork
• New Content

I’ll go through each of these and share a few thoughts about how much time it should take and what you should think about when planning.

Warm-Up

For me, the whole idea about the warm-up is that it helps the children arrive at school. They are transitioning from being at home, where their individual needs, wants and interests exist fairly unhindered, to being at school where they are part of a group. This requires a huge shift and our students do it every day!

In addition to making that shift from home to school, the warm-up is to help the students awaken their thinking, feeling and willing. This is an important part of making sure they are ready to make the most of the lessons to come.

There are a lot of things that can happen to provide this warm-up experience, but throughout all of this time, my guiding thought is about these two experiences.

• transitioning from home to school
• awakening head, heart and hands

So, usually, my morning warm-up includes the following experiences. I’ve marked the purpose beside each one.

• Greeting (transition)
• Jump rope
• Singing (heart)
• Folk dance (heart and hands)
• Playing flute (heart)
• Movement exercises (hands)
• Dictation and math problems (head)

When it’s all said and done, this part of my lesson lasts 45 minutes to an hour. I know that many teachers and mentors say that you should never warm up for more than 30 minutes. But I have found that my students just need that time to settle in. Also, many of the things we do in our warm-up pertain to our lesson, so there is quite a bit of overlap between the warm-up and review.

Review

In this part of the lesson, you are reviewing the content from the day before, in preparation for working with it in some way. I usually do the review at this point in the lesson, though I am well-aware that it can sometimes feel like a bit of a let-down to start talking about yesterday’s news.

I try to remember that students feel like they come to school to learn the new content and it can be frustrating to have to wait too long to get it.

To alleviate this, I often bring some little nugget of new content in the midst of the review. As we are remembering together (usually in a verbal retelling) yesterday’s story or idea, I’ll mention something new and I always notice that my students sit up a little straighter and pay more attention.

Also, I should note that we don’t always do a verbal review together. It’s always a good idea to mix it up, so it doesn’t get dry. Sometimes we retell the story together. Other times students will act it out. Other times they’ll dive right into a composition about the story.

However we review the content, the next step is to work with it in some way. Usually this is with a drawing, writing assignment or some other exercise.

This is a part of the lesson that does require daily thought and preparation, though I try to map out ahead of time the different review activities. For example, I know that I have an assistant teacher in the room on Tuesdays, so I usually choose that day for independent activities that need a lot of one-on-one or small group support. I like to do guided drawings on Wednesdays and in the upper grades on Mondays I liked to give the students a reading passage to read and respond to.

It doesn’t always work out this way because I can’t always flex the content to make it work. For example, if I really want to do a guided drawing of Moses parting the Red Sea, but that story comes on a Thursday, I’ll probably change my usual schedule and do the drawing anyway.

My daily preparation became so much easier when I realized it was smart to map out the activities according to the day of the week in this way. Usually the recall and work takes 20-30 minutes.

Bookwork or Practice

Moving from the recall into the bookwork or practice time is so natural and easy. Sometimes the bookwork is an intrinsic part of the review process (like in the case of a guided drawing.) Other times, students are working at their own pace through the review content and they can move into bookwork whenever they are finished.

Often the bookwork involves transferring a completed, corrected composition into their main lesson books in finished form. Other times they are entering the review of a science demonstration. Other times they are writing step-by-step instructions to a math process. Almost always, the bookwork is the final, complete work and comes out of a draft that the students have written and I’ve corrected. It is rare that I have students turn straight to a page in their main lesson books without some sort of preparation.

One thing to note: I know that it used to be regular practice for teachers to write class compositions on the board that students would simply copy. They would write the composition together, so it was a group effort, but everyone wrote the same composition in their books.

My feeling is that this practice doesn’t give the students enough experience with writing. Often only a few students (the natural writers in the group) are involved with the process, and others are simply copying from the board. I find this to be of minimal educational value, so beginning as early as 2nd grade I started having my students write their own compositions. Now they’re old hands at it! And it really helped them listen to the sounds and do their best to spell.

If you’d like to read more about how I handled compositions in 3rd grade and “kid writing” in 2nd grade, click through and read those posts.

New Content

In the lower grades, I tend to end the lesson with new content, while in the upper grades, I bring the new material earlier in the lesson (sometimes even before the review) and end with bookwork.

In the lower grades, though, I like the feeling of bringing everyone to rest with a story at the end of the lesson. It feels like a little gift from teacher to student.

It was particularly important in 1st grade, when I think my students would have fallen apart without that daily story. These days, sometimes the work of our review goes long and I save the story for another day, but I do my best to manage my time so I can tell a story.

And one thing to note: I can’t tell you how many classrooms I have visited where the teachers did NOT tell a story or present new content in the lesson. It is definitely true that this is the aspect of our lesson planning that requires the most preparation, but it should not be skipped! It is absolutely essential that students learn something new every single day.

So, on those days when my story needs to wait until the next day, it’s usually because our review was juicy enough that it satisfied the need for new content and took up more time.

So, what does the timeline look like?

• Warm-Up — 60 minutes
• Review — 20 minutes
• Bookwork — 15 minutes
• Story — 20 minutes

So, what does that add up to? Hmmm, 115 minutes? It should all fit. So why is it that I run out of time every day?!

What do your main lessons look like? Which part of the lesson do you struggle with the most? Drop a note in the comments and let’s chat.