💡 Balancing Academics and Imagination in Waldorf Grade 5

When I first started teaching I was blown away by the magic of the Waldorf curriculum. And it’s true. This developmental curriculum is spot on and I’m continually astounded by how inspiring these 100-year-old indications are.

I was so blown away by it, and so excited to fill in the gaps of my own education, that I spent almost all of my time working on the imaginative content. That first year of teaching (it was a 5th grade) I savored every story and lived into the images so strongly that they ignited my own imagination. Of course, the enthusiasm that those stories ignited came through in my retellings in the classroom (once my nerves settled). And that was lovely, but there was definitely something I was missing.

It wasn’t until I started working with my second class that I realized how much more there is to teaching than the imaginative content. It was then that I realized the stories are really just the medium that we use to facilitate the development of skills.

The stories are great, but they’re a small part of the picture. And though some students will learn those hard academic skills quite naturally and they’ll naturally evolve as you do your work in the classroom, other students need a much more systematic, strategic approach.

Putting it all together.

Back in those early days, my annual block rotation simply consisted of dates and stories. I knew when I was telling stories about India, Botany and Geography. But I had no idea when we might cover there/their/they’re or the Oxford comma. I trusted that it would all come about quite naturally in the course of our work together. And usually it did. I kept my eye out for those teachable moments and made the most of them.

But here’s the thing, what if those things didn’t come up? Or what if I didn’t catch the opportunity?

With that naturally evolving approach, I could never be quite sure that my students were doing enough writing, or that their spelling skills were improving. I didn’t have a method for making sure I’d ticked all the boxes and that we covered all of the necessary benchmarks for that grade. Heck, back in those days I don’t think we even had benchmarks.

Now, when I sit down to plan out my year, in addition to writing out the imaginative content — the blocks that I’ll be covering — I make a long list of academic skills that will be covered.

Once I’ve got all the goals written out, I organize them, looking for themes that might go together. Some of those goals are skills that we’ll work on throughout the year. For example, this year I’m going to start covering Greek and Latin roots. This work will last the entire year. We’ll have a Greek or Latin root to focus on each week.

Other goals are skills that get assigned to a block. During that block, I’ll directly teach the skill and we’ll practice it. For example, during one of our first blocks of the year we’re going to review the parts of speech. In that block I’ll introduce the idea of subject, predicate and direct object.

Organizing Goals and Resources

In general, the goals I set out for the year fall into two categories — language arts and math. I tend to check a few resources as I’m collecting my list of skills and then settle on one to give direction to my teaching.

Language Arts Goals

I checked the big yellow curriculum book, as well as some online resources for my language arts goals, but the resource that I found the most helpful this year is the book Continuing the Journey to Literacy by Jennifer Militzer-Kopperl. This book is the sequel to the groundbreaking book Roadmap to Literacy (which focuses on grades 1-3, Continuing the Journey is grades 4-8). While not quite as revolutionary as Roadmap, Continuing the Journey is a fantastic resource.

The piece of information I found most helpful from this book was The 17 Aspects of Language Arts. Yes, there are 17 different things to think about with your language arts curriculum! Continuing the Journey goes into great detail about each one of these, with ideas for how to teach them and how to structure the practice of these skills in your classroom. I can’t emphasize how helpful the book is in this way.

Here are the 17 Aspects of Language Arts that I came up with a plan for addressing in my classroom this year.

1. Storytelling
2. Reading
3. Research Skills
4. Notetaking
5. Outlining
6. Compositions
7. Essays (Actually, this is mentioned, but not something we address in 5th grade.)
8. Reports
9. Creative Writing
10. Correspondence
11. Vocabulary
12. Handwriting
13. Spelling
14. Speech
15. Grammar
16. Literary Terms and Analysis
17. Morphology

Once I had this list put together, I thought about the rhythms and routines of my classroom and considered how I could address each one. For example, for Correspondence, I’ll teach the format of the friendly letter as we write to family members during our North American Geography block. Vocabulary will be addressed in several ways — a vocabulary curriculum with grade-appropriate lists, but also word lists that pertain to each block that we’re studying. Handwriting will be reviewed during our first block back in the fall.

All of these topics fell into the year in one way or another. Grammar is a subject that requires a closer look, however. There are so many goals within the category of grammar that I broke those up over the course of the year and assigned them to specific blocks.

All of this work happened over the course of a few hours on my living room sofa yesterday, and though it was a long stretch of work (when I would’ve loved to have gone outside for at least a little while) it now feels so good to have it all organized.

Math Goals

After teaching 4th grade — a very math-heavy year — I was pleasantly surprised to see how much simpler the math goals are for 5th grade. The primary topic is decimal fractions, which is infinitely easier to grasp than the fractions we learned in 4th grade.

There were a few resources I used to put together my list of math goals.

Jamie York Press. York has a pretty good list of topics for each grade on his website. I used to have his grades 1-5 book but I must have loaned it out.

The Alliance for Public Waldorf. The organization that supports Waldorf charter schools has put together a fantastic document that lists Common Core goals and outlines how they align with traditional Waldorf timing. I found this document so helpful and I consider it my primary resource for this year’s goals. I generally align with the traditional Waldorf timing, but if I see that there is a Common Core goal that makes sense but isn’t typically taught according to the Waldorf schedule, I’ll add it to the list.

Here’s what I came up with for our math goals this year.

• Continue to review fractions
• Practice with the 4 processes
• Use parentheses to organize problems (common core)
• Write numbers as a “product of primes” (common core)
• Decimal fractions
• Place value to the left and right of the decimal
• Understanding the power of 10 in place value
• Using exponents to understand powers of 10
• Read, write and compare decimals to thousandths
• Round numbers to any place
• Multiply multi-digit whole numbers
• Divide 4 digit dividends by 2 digit divisors
• Use the 4 processes with decimals to hundredths
• Add and subtract unlike denominators
• Interpret a fraction as the numerator divided by the denominator
• Equivalent fractions
• Converting fractions to decimals
• Area of a parallelogram
• Geometry terms

All of this content is going to be covered in either our regular practice classes or in one of our two math blocks. Because it is such a light math year (and it is decidedly NOT a light history/mythology year) two blocks should do it, as long as we keep up the practice during the week.

Now that I’ve got all those goals listed out and assigned to different times in the year, I can go crazy with the imaginative content. I’m looking forward to reading some new and interesting stories this year. I’ve taught 5th grade 4 times already, so it’s familiar territory, but I’m sure I’ll find some new ways to spice it up.