Main Lesson Planning: Rhythm

Dear friend,

On top of the dizzying loveliness that is the month of May, our family is preparing for a busy summer that looks very different than we expected—more on that sometime soon!

In the meantime, let’s go back to our series on crafting main lessons that work, through the lenses of balance, rhythm, and development. Whether you’re using a written curriculum or making your own lesson plans, it’s helpful to know what makes a great main lesson “tick.”

In April's letter I wrote to you about all the many lively activities that make up a Waldorf main lesson—ways to engage head, heart, and hands in every subject. But with so many lesson ideas, how do you know what to do each day? How do you pick and choose, and put it all together?

The lens of balance helps us address the whole person we are teaching (see lots more on that here).

The lens of rhythm helps us structure effective lessons for our student.

A big pile of every activity you can think of does not make a strong lesson, even if you have a good balance of head, heart, and hands. Main lesson rhythm helps you plan within a framework and choose the right activities, not pile on every idea.

The Waldorf lesson rhythm works with the natural pace of human learning. When we're learning something new, we need time to understand it in context of what we already know, time to sleep on it, to recall it to memory, practice, and integrate.

Rhythm brings a sense of safety and predictability to your lesson time. Just as in the early years, the right amount of order and structure lets children relax and learn. They can learn new things, tackle challenges, and build their wills while resting in the comfort of rhythm. This helps to develop a positive attitude towards school time.

A well-crafted rhythm also keeps focus and energy high by alternating different kinds of activities, allowing the lesson to breathe.

How do you craft an effective main lesson rhythm? Start by making sure you consistently include the four essential parts of a Waldorf main lesson: warm up, review, new content, and bookwork.

Warm Up

A solid main lesson begins with time to warm up. This means literally warming up--getting some movement into your day--but also in a larger sense warming up the body, brain, hands, senses, and voice for the work of the day.

There is a lot of leeway in planning your warm up in the context of your overall main lesson and entire day. A warm up can be as simple as you need it to be. You could walk around the block, then at home light a candle and recite a verse to start your lesson time.

A warm up can also be an opportunity to incorporate active learning such as times tables with movement, speech and singing, recorder, memory work, and games. You can use your warm up rhythm to fit in a lot of great practice during the year (practicing math, language, music, and more). This can be an important efficiency for homeschoolers who don't have time to fit in academic skills lessons apart from main lesson.

Regardless of how much you plan into your warm up, be sure to include movement and rhythm. This sets the stage for focused learning through the rest of your main lesson time.

Review

After the warm up comes time to review. In the Waldorf method, the time in between lessons is considered just as crucial for learning as the main lesson time. Learning is consolidated and integrated while we sleep, play, and go through our day.

The key is to allow time for new material to sleep, and then wake it up again in the next lesson. Reviewing what was learned before is critical!

Just as in the warm up, you have a lot of flexibility in planning the review section of main lesson. You can keep it simple and concise or you can include a lot of your head, heart, and hands ideas in the review.

However you structure your review time, do find ways to make the review varied and active. If the parent is recalling the previous day's lesson to memory and the child is passively listening, that is not nearly as effective as if the child is engaging in active recall.

You can invite your child's active engagement by planning interesting review activities, such as dressing up to retell the story together, modeling an animal character from beeswax, creating a "mad libs" from the narrative, or measuring out the lengths of different whales and sharks with a tape measure.

New Content

The new content section of the lesson can flow directly out of the review or come after you do your bookwork (see below). Either way can work well!

The new content is the heart of the curriculum. It's the content that is chosen for your child's year to match their stage of development. This is when you tell the stories for this grade, present the ideas, concepts, and biographies, and learn the wonders of the natural world, geometry, numbers.

The Waldorf curriculum is highly interdisciplinary, but what keeps it focused and elegant is the clear division into main lesson blocks. In each main lesson block you pursue one subject, one theme. Within that theme you engage the whole person (head, heart, and hands) and grow your academic and artistic skills. Throughout the curriculum, block by block, you engage further with the wider world and build an internal knowledge base of stories, cultures, language, geography, sciences, and mathematics.

There is some confusion in the Waldorf world about how often children should receive new content. The answer is, emphatically, every day. The rhythm of new material, sleep, and review is an overlapping rhythm so that every main lesson you are reviewing but also introducing something new!

Heart and hands activities can fit here, but be sure to include plenty that engages the head in this section of the lesson.

Bookwork

During the bookwork section of main lesson, your child creates a record of what they learned. This often (but not always) means creating a "main lesson book" full of writing and illustrations. When planning out your bookwork, focus on content that has already been reviewed (not introduced during that day's new lesson).

An early grades language arts main lesson book will likely be filled with story summaries and drawings. A middle grades mythology or history book will be a more sophisticated version of this, with the child's original story retellings and essays. A math main lesson book can show examples of the types of number work the child has mastered. Form drawing and geometry main lesson books will be primarily visual, while science main lesson books may include a good mix of writing, drawing, and labeled diagrams.

As with just about everything in the Waldorf method, there is plenty of flexibility to go along with form and tradition when creating main lesson books!

Rhythm

Let's circle back to the key idea of rhythm. Rhythm is just a predictable flow to your main lessons. With so many creative possibilities within the Waldorf curriculum, you need rhythm to hold it together and feel coherent. Rhythm helps you plan lessons that give attention each of the essential parts: warm up, review, new content, and bookwork.

Waldorf education is beautifully multi-layered and it's always lovely to discover the patterns and synchronicities. Notice in this main lesson rhythm how big-picture attention is paid to the concept of the three-fold human being, educating hands, heart, and head. Notice how the typical pattern begins with warm up (mostly hands/willing) and ends with bookwork or story (mostly head/thinking). This order of things, from active to reflective, and from full body to head, is repeated in many ways throughout the curriculum.

Enjoy!

xo

Kelly