Main Lesson Planning: Development
Dear friend,
In this series we’re looking at how to plan a main lesson, through three lenses: balance, rhythm, and development.
In this letter we looked at balance: how to address the whole person we are teaching.
In this letter we looked at rhythm: how to structure effective lessons for our student.
Balance and rhythm together cover so much of the Waldorf method and pedagogy: how to teach.
What’s missing is the developmental content of the lessons: what to teach.
The lens of development helps us match the content of our lessons to what our child needs at this moment in their life.
The developmental story content is the heart and soul of the Waldorf curriculum.
The stories for each grade are meant to match and mirror a particular stage of your child’s development. This is soul-nourishing for your child and provides a truly engaging education.
There is something magical at work when you tell children the right stories at the right time.
How do you do that? Keep a few things in mind:
A Living Curriculum
The Waldorf curriculum is not at all set in stone. People love to play the popular game of “Steiner says” but the truth is he didn’t give many specific prescriptions on what to teach. Instead, he asked teachers to be artists who bring a living curriculum to the children.
Over the past century, the Waldorf curriculum has developed, teacher by teacher, classroom by classroom, in many different countries. Traditions have been born and passed down.
I think of this as a gift! The Waldorf curriculum traditions are helpful data. Here is what has worked, for many years, in many classrooms.
The story content for each grade is not gospel, it is a helpful and generous guide for those of us planning to teach our children at home.
The Heart Stage
Over the course of a child’s development, they go through three major stages. As human beings, we are always thinking, feeling, and willing. But in each stage one aspect of the three-fold human being becomes predominant. Think of this as the primary, overarching “learning style” for this age group.
Children move through the willing/hands stage of early childhood to the feeling/heart stage of middle childhood, and then the thinking/head stage of adolescence and young adulthood in the natural course of their development.
All through the elementary years, ages 7-14 and grades 1-8, children are in the heart stage.
Cognitive and physical development are not left behind in these years, and they are not any less important. Your child will grow by leaps and bounds physically and academically throughout the grades. Every lesson we teach the head, heart, and hands.
But we reach and inspire the elementary child most effectively through the feelings.
Children can sniff out a lifeless, dead curriculum pretty quickly. It looks like a dry, adult “we have to learn this” kind of curriculum “inspired” by a bureaucratic timetable.
A living, heart-stage curriculum is built on story content that matches the child’s natural interest in the world, their in-born inclination towards awe and wonder.
Let’s make sure we got this, it’s important!
Children are in the heart stage of learning throughout their entire elementary grades education.
To be effective as educators, this means we must always be connecting to their heart.
We capture the heart with stories.
Age by Age Development
Within the larger heart stage of childhood your child is growing and changing all the time. Every year of childhood has its noticeable developmental milestones, challenges, and resolutions. So every year of the Waldorf curriculum has its particular content, stories, and images.
Each grade in the curriculum has its own flavor.
This makes it incredibly fun to teach!
Every year is uniquely special because along with steady growth in skills and confidence, we also have these lovely layers of story to savor.
As teachers, we look forward to the “farming year,” or the “mythology year,” and so on.
Our students look back and say, “Oh, I looooved when we did zoology!” “I remember India, I loved that block!”
Making every main lesson block different helps you cover a lot of interesting ground while also making each grade specifically memorable.
Thinking Outside the Box
It is ok, and in fact wonderful, to allow the Waldorf tradition to develop in our own homes and classrooms.
The curriculum is not set in stone, and these special, memorable main lesson blocks can come outside of the traditional plan.
They can come from your own interests and passions in life. Are you a birder? A bird block would work well in any grade. Speak Japanese? Plan a block on Japan that you and your kids will look forward to. It could be a multi-age block you do once with all your kids, or a block that each kid gets to do when they reach 4th grade (for example). Obsessed with science fiction? Oh my gosh, please plan a science fiction block for 8th grade!
Yes, the curriculum really is that flexible.
Story content also can and should come from the place where you live, your own culture, the cultures of your ancestors.
In our home, learning about the people of America is important. We include stories from Native America every year in our curriculum, especially the Abenaki, whose land we live on. I made time for a block on the Maya in 5th grade, because there was ancient history and mythology here in the Americas too. It’s important to me to include African-American history and stories throughout the grades, and a full main lesson block on Africa in 6th grade. We celebrate Jewish festivals and stories because they are beautiful, and because my older daughters have Jewish ancestry. I choose lots of books for read aloud and independent reading to give my kids a wider picture of the many peoples and places in America through history.
We tell and read Grimm’s and the Odyssey and Ceasar and Beowulf and King Arthur, and these classics are much loved and enjoyed in our home! But we don’t stop there, because the world is a wide place to explore.
Still, we can’t teach everything. There just isn’t the time.
If you find that overwhelming, just realize this: even if you only tried to cover the most traditional Waldorf blocks, you would still feel that you couldn’t cover everything. Every great teacher has always felt that way.
So do take time for what you care about and love—that will speak to your child because of their heart connection to you!
The Traditional Blocks
Again, stories feel deeply satisfying when they come at the right time.
This “right time” approach has in some ways been a long group experiment leading to the Waldorf curriculum traditions.
There are particular themes in the stories that match what a child is working to develop in himself in each year. For example, the struggle to come into right relationship with authority is a big theme for the nine-year-old child as well as for the ancient Hebrew people as portrayed in their stories. The ten-year-old is beginning to see the complexity in the world and to realize there can be right and wrong but also ethical dilemmas and complex characters—he naturally loves Norse mythology.
As adults, we are not experiencing the world in the same way as our children. The same stories do not always meet our needs or even interest us. So we have to find a balance between what we like (so we can connect with what we are teaching) and what our child will find meaningful. I find it worthwhile, when I’m not sure about a traditional story or why it’s included in the canon, to give it a try at the indicated age for my child. It’s usually a home run. My child is delighted, so I am too!
How do you find out what story content belongs to which grade?
Waldorf school websites are great starting point! Many of them provide a quick and colorful overview of each grade and what is taught when. You’ll find some variations, and a whole lot of overlap.
Two of my favorite book overviews are "School as a Journey" by Torin Finser and "Teaching as a Lively Art" by Marjorie Spock.
(Note that Spock lays out the curriculum by age starting at age 6, whereas here at Lavender’s Blue we strongly recommend you stick closer to ages 7-14 for the grades—see more here.)
Finally, there is a book that covers both the vertical and horizontal curriculum for the early years through high school: Tasks and Content of the Steiner Waldorf Curriculum. Also known as the “curriculum bible” or the “big yellow book,” this one is pretty dry but it’s the standard, thorough reference book.
To Sum Up
Bring your child a living curriculum that will light him up
Engage her heart with stories throughout the elementary years
Choose stories each year to match and mirror your child’s age
Rely on the Waldorf traditional curriculum as a guide
Layer in what matters to your family too
Focus on engagement and connection not “covering everything” (which is impossible anyway)
All the best with your summer planning!
xo
Kelly