Day two of our rhythm is for academics. Now, I should say that we do some math every day even when the focus in language arts. We practice times tables daily and also work on oral math problems. And we do spelling every day. And I require Dallin to read silently at least 30 minutes a day (he generally does more than this).
But basically, day two is when we work with the story in an academic way. We start by having Dallin re-tell it. This would get very dull, but we liven it up using the props we've created on day one. So basically the re-telling often ends up being a puppet show
.Another integral part of our "Day Two" right now is what are called word families. It's basically phonics... reading practice. Of course we are way past the pat, sat, mat stuff. But with each story, I choose one word that might have a more complicated blend or letter combination, and then we create a list of other words that are in the same "family". We go by the aural sound, so the words may have different spellings. But I think that's good because it exposes him to a larger variety of words. For this one, to make it more fun, I drew the outline of a house. The original word was cloak. When he started listing words that had the -oak sound, but not at the end of the word, I told him those were "cousins", so they could be in the house, but had to have their own separate room. This was probably an easier word family. The last one we did stemmed from the word "brought", so the -ought was kind of tricky. After doing this for a couple of weeks, I then started having him make sentences using as many words from the family as possible. He actually really loves doing word families--he asks for it every time!
A big concept with Waldorf teaching is "whole to parts". The whole is brought before any parts. That is why the story is told first, and then everything else is derived from it. Spelling words (mostly) come from the stories. The word families begin with a word from the story. Another big concept is "Head, Heart, Hands". Hands refers to the will and encompasses activities like handwork, form drawing, PE and movement exercises, even things I think like requiring work to be done in non-erasable form. We are teaching self-control, discipline, control over one's body and it's actions. Head obviously refers to the intellect. Heart means the emotions and encompasses all the creative and artistic things that are done. A well-balanced education will include all these things! Also, in each stage of childhood one of these things predominates. In early childhood, the hands (will) predominates as a child learns to make her body do so many physical things. In adolescence, it is time for the head (intellect) to really come into it's own. In middle childhood, where we are now, the heart predominates, and it is the task of the teacher to bring all material, including academic material, to the child in a way that appeals to their emotions and creative side. Hence the reason why I did the word families exercise by drawing an actual house on the board.
But basically, day two is when we work with the story in an academic way. We start by having Dallin re-tell it. This would get very dull, but we liven it up using the props we've created on day one. So basically the re-telling often ends up being a puppet show
Our re-telling of "The Crow and the Pitcher" was actually a science lesson in water displacement. In the story, the crow wants a drink of water but can't reach the water in the bottom of the pitcher. So he puts pebbles in it to make the water level rise. We had fun gathering gravel from the front yard and trying this out to see if it really worked. It does!
Then, we write the summary together and put it on the board. Dallin is good enough at this that I only have to provide minor coaching at this point. We discuss capitalization, punctuation, etc. The colored words are important--the nouns are blue and the verbs are red. This is preparation for grammar in November. (I didn't color-code the pronouns, but realized afterwards that they are still nouns, so I will in the future.)
Dallin then copies the edited version neatly into his special book called the Main Lesson Book. This is where his best work goes.
The work is done in colored pencil or crayon. Dallin wants to write in crayon, but I told him after Christmas he must switch to pencil. Either of these methods means that there is no erasing, so the work must be done very carefully. (Which is why we edit at the chalkboard.) He had to do this entire page over again because of too many careless errors. It was a good lesson for him--hopefully he will learn to slow down and focus! Small, occasional errors can be fixed creatively by turning them into pictures or designs.
We are having fun with spelling! On this particular day we played Spelling Bingo. He had a list of about 20+ words he had accumulated. We each had to choose 16 of those words to write in the squares. (This was good practice in writing the spelling words.) I had written the entire list on small slips of paper. We took turns drawing them out of a sack. Whoever drew the word had to spell it out loud. (More great practice.) Then if we had that word on our card, we got to put down a piece of pasta. Dallin loved it!
We've also done things like Hangman, finger-spelling the words, quizzing and then whichever words he misses, I sing the spelling to him and he has to sing it back to me. One day I wrote his words in secret code (which he had done in Cub Scouts) and he had to figure out the code. Dallin is good at spelling anyway, but we've really had fun with this.
A big concept with Waldorf teaching is "whole to parts". The whole is brought before any parts. That is why the story is told first, and then everything else is derived from it. Spelling words (mostly) come from the stories. The word families begin with a word from the story. Another big concept is "Head, Heart, Hands". Hands refers to the will and encompasses activities like handwork, form drawing, PE and movement exercises, even things I think like requiring work to be done in non-erasable form. We are teaching self-control, discipline, control over one's body and it's actions. Head obviously refers to the intellect. Heart means the emotions and encompasses all the creative and artistic things that are done. A well-balanced education will include all these things! Also, in each stage of childhood one of these things predominates. In early childhood, the hands (will) predominates as a child learns to make her body do so many physical things. In adolescence, it is time for the head (intellect) to really come into it's own. In middle childhood, where we are now, the heart predominates, and it is the task of the teacher to bring all material, including academic material, to the child in a way that appeals to their emotions and creative side. Hence the reason why I did the word families exercise by drawing an actual house on the board.
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