The Human and Animal blocks

I absolutely love this pair of blocks for the Waldorf fourth-grader.  I think the Waldorf approach to learning about animals is so inspiring and beautiful.  The last time I taught this block, I tried to do too much and tried to combine too many approaches.  This time I stayed simple.  I did NOT try to make this into a more mainstream zoology block. 

For my "spine", I used the Man and Animal block plans shared by Marsha Johnson on her yahoogroup.  For the stories, I used Charles Kovacs book The Human Being and the Animal World.  There was only one animal that wasn't covered in his book, the spider monkey, so I found a story online and adapted it to be appropriate for 4th grade.  Kovacs had way more stories in his book than Marsha Johnson had animals in her outline, so while we studied one main animal each week, at the end of the week I told an additional story from Kovacs.  Sometimes we used that story for a painting lesson, other times we just enjoyed it without any additional work.  I did not worry about using his stories in the order they appeared in his book; we fit them into Marsha's outline.  Another resource that I found to be absolutely invaluable was this: https://www.zukunftsstiftung-entwicklung.de/media/Bilder_ZSE/UEber_Uns_Dateien/Grundlagentexte/Human_and_Animal_Study_Manual_2012.pdf

We began by talking about the human being and the parts that make us up, leading into a discussion of the head, trunk, and limbs. 

We looked for patterns in nature, similarities between us as humans and other creations in the universe, and found that our heads have much in common with the sun, our trunks with the moon, and our hands and feet with the stars.

We sculpted a little "star child" to help us remember.

Then we talked about what we have in common with animals, which led into discussions about how different animals have physical features where either head, trunk, or limb features predominate.  Each week for the next three weeks we focused on "head" animals, "trunk" animals, and then "limb" animals.  Here are some samples of Sariah's work.  (We spent a great deal of time during these blocks focusing on artistic skills--colored pencil drawing, painting, and modeling.)

The Cuttlefish:

A cuttlefish in the aquarium in Pittsburgh where we went on a field trip.  I was expecting something large, but these were miniature!

For secondary "head" animals, we read about the snail but painted the octopus.

The Seal, an animal which is mostly trunk.

(Sorry the picture is turned on its side.)

The shark is another animal that is almost all trunk.  It happens to be Sariah's favorite animal.  Here is the shark seeking after its prey of sea turtles.

The Spider Monkey, which I chose to represent limbs.  They even use their tails as extra limbs!

 Our attempts to model monkeys in the trees.

 

 Our secondary "limb" animal was the horse.

During this first block, Sariah also wrote and illustrated a report on sea turtles.  She was able to pick any animal she wanted, but I did nix the shark since she knows pretty much everything there is to know about them and has read all the books the library had.  I told her she had to choose an animal she didn't know so much about since being able to research and learn was part of what I wanted her to gain from this experience.

 

 We were going to make sea turtle masks, but she opted to do an entire papier mache sea turtle instead.  I pretty much left her on her own, and this is what she created.

We were disappointed to discover on our field trip that the Pittsburgh Zoo/Aquarium does have a sea turtle hospital, but they had no turtles there when we visited.  Sariah was bummed because we spent quite a bit of time learning about how volunteers help to rescue sea turtles.

During our second block in February, we looked at three animals that represent how human beings' *inner* experiences can be seen in the animal kingdom.

To represent the "thinking" aspect of humans, we looked at the eagle.

The lion illustrated the "heart" part of humans, our emotional lives.  Sariah says that learning about lions, particularly LIONESSES, was her favorite part of these two blocks.




The lion is stalking its prey.  All of the painting ideas we used came from the book Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools.

And, cattle represented humans' "willing", our ability to get things done.  We talked about the strong will of a bull but also of the quiet, diligent will of a cow chewing her cud and making milk to feed the world.