Once upon a time, there was a beautiful, shining ship. It had golden sails topped with high-flying multi-colored pennants. The rich burgundy wood of the deck was so polished it glimmered in the sun.

But this wasn’t just any ship. This ship held the magical powers of transformation. When everyone on board worked hard and shared a common vision, the ship could become whatever they needed, allowing them to travel wherever they wanted. It could transform into a packet boat that could navigate the waters of smooth-as-glass canals. It could become a kayak that leapt through the rapids of swift rivers. Or it could become a large canoe that traveled down the waters of the Great River thanks to the coordinated paddling of the entire clan.

On this ship, anything was possible with hard work and a common vision.

One day some incredibly fortunate young adventurers boarded this ship with their captain (who, it turned out, was the most fortunate of them all). They got to know each other, packed their bags (with the help of some devoted land-lubbers), made some agreements, and set sail.

As the journey began, those adventurers listened to their captain and followed her every command. They worked together caring for the ship, swabbing the decks, hoisting the sails, and cleaning the galley.

They cared for each other, picking up extra work when someone needed rest, working through disagreements as they arose, making sure everyone had what they needed to continue the adventure.

They quickly found that the magic of the ship was real. When they worked hard and built a common vision, they could go anywhere! On board that ship they traveled to the frigid waters of the North, where rugged Norsemen lived passionate lives and died triumphant deaths. They journeyed to a mysterious land where yellow sands parted to make way for a meandering, life-giving river. They met powerful kings, wise rishis, charismatic monkeys, tempestuous princesses, ladder-climbing fish, humble queens, opinionated gods, clever goddesses, and living, talking trees that shared their wisdom with those quiet enough to listen. (The adventurers quickly learned the importance of listening.)

At times, the ship would pull into port and some adventurers would disembark — waving and smiling and blowing kisses through tears as they continued their journey on another ship. Sometimes new adventurers would join the crew, ready to share stories and enjoy new experiences.

Their adventures brought laughter and tears, joy and sorrow, delight and heartache. And the adventurers may not have realized it, but the ship wasn’t the only thing transforming.

After five glorious years of adventure, the ship came in to port once again, but this time it wasn’t to find new crew members. After many hugs, tears, and well-wishes, the captain herself stepped off the ship, clearing the way for a new leader, who would guide the ship on even greater adventures.

With her feet on solid ground, the captain turned and looked at the wonder that they had created together. Those young adventurers taught just as much as they learned, and now someone new would gain the benefit of their teaching.

She reflected on the beginning of their journey, thinking of her younger self, and that sun-drenched day when she unknowingly stepped onboard for the wildest, most adventurous experience of her life. She had no idea what awaited her.

Then she thought again of that new captain who would soon stand at the helm, taking their own leap into the unknown.

With a nostalgic tremble in her voice she whispered to herself, “They don’t know how lucky they are.”

The post The Adventure Continues appeared first on A Waldorf Journey.

I can think of so many times with my last class when I presented the class with a challenge, matched them up in groups, and let them start figuring things out. The productive hum that fell over the class told me that there was some good working and thinking going on.

Most teachers have some of those positive experiences of middle school group work and many of us are looking for ways to create that happy, social, and hard-working environment in our classrooms.

Unfortunately, we also have those experiences when group work didn’t quite work out. Because as great as social group work is, it can go horribly awry, as well. There are some pretty big challenges to overcome when creating a healthy group work environment. Let’s talk about some of those challenges and how the teacher can face them.

Are you up for it?

As satisfying as a group learning experience can be, it takes work to manage. And it’s loud. And, honestly, sometimes I just don’t have the patience for it.

And you know what? That’s okay! Far better for me to be honest with myself about my patience level and save the group activity for another day, than to set some great activity in motion, only to find myself annoyed and grumpy with my students (who are just doing what I asked them to do.)

I’ve definitely had days when I didn’t ask myself this question before getting rolling with the activity and I had to pep talk myself through it. I’ll find myself getting irritated with the noise and feeling ready to pump the brakes and tell everyone to just be quiet. When I have the wherewithal to do it, I try to stop myself and look around. Invariably, everyone is engaged and working productively. They’re just making a lot of noise while they do it. I try to take a deep breath and let it go.

Is everyone learning?

This was a big hangup for me for a long time. I mean, if they’re working in small groups, how do I know that everyone in the group really gets it? There are bound to be some kids who will happily sit back and let others do most of the work.

I worry about this most when we’re working on a hard skill — like a math concept. Everyone is responsible for understanding the concept, and it’s my job to make sure they do.

But having all students participate in the group is important no matter what the project is. The last thing I want is for one of my students to come away with the understanding that it’s just fine to sit back and let others do the hard work while they relax.

For awhile I rationalized it by thinking that the positive experiences they were getting by working together out-weighed the potential for missing out on that individual skill-building. I’m no longer so satisfied with this, though. Instead, I’m thinking that it IS possible for students to be individually responsible AND work in a group.

This is the question I’m currently grappling with as I put together a possible group project for my fifth graders. They’re a little young to be able to handle the responsibility of making sure they all participate equally, so I’m thinking about what kind of structure I can build into the project to make sure everyone participates.

I’m thinking I could have defined roles with clearly structured tasks. I know that this might frustrate some kids, who would be more than happy to complete all of the tasks themselves, so I guess it’s a good learning experience all around.

How much are we working and how much are we socializing?

When I was a new teacher, I remember getting my students ready for a group project and at the mere mention of the word “group” they were already looking at each other like, “Woohoo! Par-tay!” I hadn’t learned the importance of setting them up for success and making sure that those group project times were WORKING times. They just couldn’t help themselves and they got carried away with the social aspect of the experience.

In those days, when I stopped to look around to check that everyone was working, they definitely weren’t! And I didn’t really know what to do about it. (Oh how grateful I am to have some experience under my belt!)

Now, as I prepare my current students for their first real group project (possibly, this is still in the planning stage) I’m thinking about the ways I can build in checkpoints so I can be sure that they’re striking a good balance between socializing and working.

• We’ll start with a short group work session and build up to longer periods over time.
• At the end of each session, each group and each individual student will reflect and share what they accomplished.
• We’re starting when they’re young enough that pleasing the teacher and following instructions still wins out over having fun with classmates.

I’m hoping that by starting out with these things in mind, my students will establish some good habits about group work and we’ll have many successful years of group projects ahead of us.

Are you teaching middle school? You might consider checking out some of my curriculum guides. Many of them include instructions for projects that can be done in small groups, including my 6th/7th Grade Astronomy Guide and 8th Grade Physics and Meteorology.

The post Group Learning in Waldorf Middle School appeared first on A Waldorf Journey.

Register for my summer productivity course.

My history as a middle school teacher

How our work will change

What we’re doing to set a solid framework

Building Habits

• homework
• Finishing their work
• Engaging with our lessons
• General classroom behavior

Building a Culture of Caring

• we’re good people and we’re working together
• we’re on the same team
• building up an image of each individual as a caring individual
• building an image of the class as a whole being caring
• building a reputation for them to live up to

How Middle School Will Change Things

• less focus on me as the teacher/authority; much more social with each other
• focus on the content
• looking out at the world together
• contrast the morning verses

Links

My substack newsletter

Teaching Children to Care

Facebook group

Buy me a cup of coffee

Send me an email.

The post Heading Into Waldorf Middle School appeared first on A Waldorf Journey.

But the truth is, those Pinterest teachers don’t always know what spoke most to my students about our lessons. And though I could certainly reverse-engineer my lessons so that those lovely Pinterest pages will appear to naturally align, that does seem a little backward. This well-trained Waldorf teacher knows that the work should respond to the needs and interests of the students — not the other way around.

So, over the years, I’ve given some intention and developed systems (goodness knows, I love a good system) that guide the creation of our main lesson pages.

The Content

The first thing is deciding on the content. The system I’ve developed for this is one of my favorite things. It was an epiphany that absolutely changed my teaching.

You see, when I first started teaching, I allowed the main lesson pages and the review content to naturally arise out of the lesson. Sometimes we would write a composition about the story. Other times we would do a guided drawing. It all just depended on what the content seemed to ask for.

The problem with that approach was that it sometimes meant that we went weeks without doing a guided drawing, or we might do three guided drawings in a week. With this inconsistent and varied approach was that I couldn’t rely on my students getting the skill-building practice that is so essential to their growth. Though allowing the work to naturally arise is probably the most holistic approach, I feel that skill-development is just too important to leave to chance.

The Solution

So a few years ago, I settled on a main lesson review content plan that guides our weekly work. Each week, we work on three main pieces of content:

• An independent composition
• A guided drawing
• A dictation

I could write an entire post about these three pieces of content, but here’s a quick overview.

Composition

I use the term composition to refer to pieces of writing that the students write independently. I prefer this term because it can apply to different types of content — summaries of imaginative stories, reports about animals, etc. It’s a much more useful term than “essay” or “story.”

Usually, we write compositions on Tuesdays (I make sure to tell a really good, image-rich story on Monday so they’ll have lots of ideas), I correct them that night and we put them in our main lesson books on Tuesdays.

Guided Drawing

This is a full page drawing that I guide to help work on drawing skills. It’s generally a fun way to remember stories together, while still having a skill-building lesson. We usually do these on Thursdays.

Dictation

I’ve written before about my dictation rhythm here and here — and it’s one of my favorite things. Here’s how it works.

• I create a piece of writing about one of the stories they’ll hear that week (or some sort of overview content). I break that writing down into daily chunks. When we first started in 3rd grade, they got one sentence each day. Now in 4th grade it depends. It’s sometimes more than one sentence.
• Each day I dictate the sentence for the day, they listen and they write it in their dictation book.
• We correct their writing together, and talk about whatever phonics or grammar rules we’re working on.
• Depending on the grade, the students receive a dictation quiz at the end of the week. Now in 4th grade, they’re getting a fill-in-the-blank quiz. I’ve chosen meaningful words for the week, they study them and the fill-in-the blank dictation quiz takes the place of a traditional spelling test. It’s a nice and satisfying way to wrap up the week. You can see a sample of our 4th grade dictation quiz here.
• At the end of the week (or sometimes on Monday of the following week) we put that dictation in our books.

Here are some of the things I love about dictation:

• It allows me to expose the students to beautiful writing. I want them to do plenty of their own independent composition (which I think Waldorf teachers don’t do enough of), but I also want them to be exposed to beautiful writing samples.
• I can naturally incorporate phonics and grammar lessons with content that is engaging and interesting, instead of boring, unrelated grammar exercises.
• Because it is such an essential part of our daily routine, I know that my students are going to practice spelling, punctuation, and grammar every single day.

Okay, so those are the three main pieces of content we work on each week. Now, of course, this is definitely flexible. For example, we often don’t do a new composition during the last week of a block, as we’re finishing things up and getting ready to turn in.

Writing Pages

So, if you’re following along, you’ll see that most weeks we have two pieces of writing that go into our books, so that’s what I’m going to address for the rest of this post.

(I’ll just say briefly, about guided drawings, I’m much less intentional about planning the specific drawing skills we’ll be working on. If I were a more skill artist, I would probably have an art curriculum that I moved through as we completed these guided drawings. Instead, I just let the stories and their images guide our work.)

So let’s talk about how to format writing pages.

First of all — come up with a system that your students will use throughout the year to set up and complete the page. The system that you use will depend on the grade, and maybe even the individual student. You want to give them a structure that will help them keep their writing clear. Here’s what I’ve done.

Grade One — Capital and Lower Case

First grade is all about learning the letters and their sounds — with lower case letters coming at the end of the year. For each letter we drew a picture that had the letter hidden within and we did a letter page that included the capital letter, the lower case letter (we hadn’t filled it in yet on this page) and a few words from the story that begin with the letter.

By the end of the year, we wrote short sentences together, but we were just beginning with that work, so I did not get too intentional about a page set-up system.

Grade Two — Sky, Earth and Water

In second grade, we did much more writing, so we needed a proper system for writing in our main lesson books. I used a page set-up that many Waldorf teachers have used through the years — sky, earth and water.

To set up the page, we used the “mama bear” side of our block crayons (I actually think we started the year with “papa bear” and switched halfway through) and drew stripes across the page in yellow (sky), green (earth) and blue (water). It did a pretty good job of helping us to form our letters properly, though occasionally kids’ lines curved on the page. I was always amazed to see that even with their curved lines, they were careful to make sure that lower case letters stayed in the earth area, while capitals reached up into the sky.

The other benefit of this format was that it gave us good imaginative language for talking about where the letters were supposed to be. Lower case y and g “dip into the water”, while h, k and l “reach up to the sky.”

One other note about second grade writing — if I had a student who really struggled with forming the letters properly, I would not hesitate to switch to traditional primary paper with dashed lines across the middle. We used this paper in our primary composition books for “kid writing” (see this post for more info about that) and I think it really helped kids to know how to form their letters. I started out the year thinking that if it was necessary, I would have kids do their final drafts on lined paper and glue them in to the main lesson books. It just happened that my students did pretty well with the sky, earth and water set-up, so I didn’t worry about it.

Grade Three — Alternating Colors

Towards the end of 2nd grade and moving into 3rd grade, my students were writing so much that things just didn’t fit when we used the sky, earth and water set-up, so we switched to using two alternating colors to create lines.

I let go of the imagination to guide their letter formation (they didn’t need reminders about letters that dipped into the water or reached into the sky) and they didn’t really need the dotted center line anymore. So I chose two of the lightest colors (light green and yellow) and we alternated them down the page to create lines.

Also, throughout this year I introduced cursive. In about November, our weekly dictation was written on the board in cursive and they copied it into their main lesson books in cursive. I waited much longer before having them translate their own writing into cursive. I did not change the page set-up when we switched to cursive (they probably could have used it, but it just didn’t seem right to come up with a completely different set-up situation for cursive pages.) Instead, I made sure that we did cursive practice on primary paper with the dashed line.

I should also mention that it was March of our 3rd grade year when we closed for COVID. At that point, I provided cursive exercise packets, but completion of that work varied.

Oh, I should also say that throughout the crayon lines years, we used the papa bear side of our crayon to create borders on the pages.

Grade Four — A Wide Liner and One-Line Border

Now we’re in fourth grade and we set up each writing page with a one-line colored pencil border and we put a liner behind the page. I did a lot of experimenting with making liners that were bold enough for students to see through. Somehow finding a liner has always been the piece of our work that has me scrambling.

I much prefer to create it on the computer — usually a Google Doc — but getting the line to be bold enough has been the challenge. I finally figured out the solution, though. If “add a drawing” to your doc, you can make the line as bold as you want. Then you have a perfectly straight, bold line that you can just print (or online students can print themselves.)

If you want your own copy of my 4th grade liner Google Doc, click here and make a copy.

Borders

Though I know that many teachers encourage students to create beautiful, ornate borders, I prefer that my students keep it simple for writing pages. A colleague once mentioned that when you allow that free-for-all creativity in the borders, kids go a little over the top and it brings out astrality. I’ve certainly observed this as students’ borders get crazy-busy with flowers, rainbows, hearts and forest animals. Of course, I give them a chance to do this kind of free-drawing on occasion, but it is with a lot of intention, and not in their main lesson books.

I’m also a firm believer of the idea that freedom comes out of form. Students need to learn how to work within the form and completely understand it before they can overthrow it with their own inspired creativity. In large part, this defines the developmental path through this period, so I look for all kinds of ways to reinforce it. In my view, the middle grades are ALL about defining the form. Strong form and learning structures help students to relax into their learning and focus on strengthening the skills that will become the tools of their future learning.

This emphasis on form is sometimes difficult for free-thinking Waldorf parents to get on board with. I could write a whole separate post about this, but the Waldorf catch-phrase “Education TOWARDS freedom,” really sums it up. We’re not free yet, and these kids won’t be there until they have a fully-developed ego. Between now and then, they’ll have plenty of time to explore form and experiment with overthrowing it.

Drawings to Fill the Page

Figuring out what to do with blank space at the bottom of the page has been a work in progress for me. Because at this point most of the writing we’re putting in our main lesson books are independent compositions, students’ pages have varying amounts of white space at the end. My students’ handwriting is also significantly varied. I have some students who are still getting a grasp of cursive writing and their letters are quite large. Other students have joined the “teeny tiny writing club” that seems to be a pretty consistent trend in fourth grade. (I actually remember going through that phase myself!)

Whenever possible, I try to account for leftover space at the bottom of the page on my own composition, so students have a model of what to do with that extra space. It doesn’t always work out, though. There are plenty of times when my example goes to the bottom of the page, when a student’s work has all kinds of extra room.

I wish I could be fine with leaving the rest of the page blank, but pages with too much white space just look incomplete to my eye. So when this happens, I tell the students to fill the bottom half of the page with a drawing that aligns with the story. We’ve done enough of them that they know what I mean, but sometimes they get a little out of hand and that astral free-for-all creeps out. Often kids are not satisfied with their own work when this happens, which is a good learning experience for them. Eventually, they’ll know to keep it simple.

The other reason I tend to latch on to this solution is that invariably the students who have extra room at the bottom of the page are those kids who fly through their work. Of course I encourage them to slow down and give more care, but many of them do perfectly lovely work quite quickly. Having them do a drawing keeps them engaged while others finish.

Grade Five and beyond — Getting Creative

Towards the end of fifth grade, we start experimenting with other types of borders. This is still a step-by-step, strongly-led process, though. I want them to have an experience of what kinds of borders tend to work best, and we still have plenty of writing pages that use the good old one-line border.

Even in sixth grade, the most successful borders are when they’ve had a model to look at, so I try to do an example for every page through sixth grade. This doesn’t always happen, though. (By the way, last time around, I figured out a good solution for making sure I have a complete book of my own at the end of the block, even if I did some of the work on the chalkboard or was just too busy to make my own page. I had one of the early-finishers do my page while others finished their work. This ended up being quite an honor and they loved working in my book. I loved having work samples from a wide variety of students.)

In my view, sixth grade is the last of the super-strong form years (6th graders need a lot of structure, even though they seem ready for more freedom), and by seventh grade they’re ready for much more independence and creativity. Last time around, I remember observing this so clearly in the first block of seventh grade — The Renaissance. I can’t think of a better block to encourage creative, artistic thinking.

At this point, main lesson book entries can be a combination of writing and drawing. Students can see how drawings can enhance their writing and vice-versa. (Interestingly, even my fourth graders are asking if they can include a sentence on a drawing page so they can tell the story a little better.)

So, that’s the evolution of writing pages in my Waldorf classroom. I can imagine this becoming a series where I go through how drawing materials, writing processes and other classroom practices change through the years.

How do your writing page routines compare to mine? Is there something you do differently that is really working? I’d love to hear it! Respond in the comments!

The post How to Create a Waldorf Main Lesson Page appeared first on A Waldorf Journey.

Okay, on to the topic.

Record-keeping is another one of those topics that wasn’t fully addressed in my Waldorf teacher training.

I mean, yes, there was a lot to cover. And I got a FULL dose of the importance of imagination and activating the feeling life of my students. And truly, this is the MOST important aspect of my work. So thank you Nettie and Betsy!

But, beyond this, I firmly believe that what Waldorf teachers need to do to become more appreciated and respected in the mainstream world is to provide more documentation and feedback.

All it took for me to be convinced of this idea was my first IEP meeting collaborating with the local public school. They asked which “research-based” curriculum I had tried and what records I had regarding the student, indicating more evidence was necessary before they would consider him eligible for services.

Yikes. Clearly my insight and intuitive connection with the student wasn’t enough to convince them he needed extra help.

So, based on experiences like these, here are the top 4 documents I think every Waldorf teacher should be maintaining to track student progress.

Main Lesson Book Tracking

Are your students completing their main lesson pages? In the upper grades you should collect them and give feedback. At this age students themselves need feedback to encourage them to improve. If you’re curious about what this feedback might look like, take a look at my Record-Keeping and Feedback Guide.

In the lower grades, you probably won’t share your observations with students, but you should definitely have a sense for who is completing pages and who needs extra time. This will go a long way towards preparing them for middle school.

Developmental Movement Tracker

In the early grades, I tracked my students’ movement skills with an eye towards how I could help them along.

I created a chart with every student’s name listed and all the skills I was watching for. If you put your email address below you’ll get the chart I used for first grade, but it’s easily adjusted for your grade level.

Student Observations

However it works best for you, make sure you develop a system for tracking your student observations.

I can’t tell you how many times I wish I’d written down thoughts I’d had about a student. Even those insights that seem inconsequential at the time, can be really important when you’re meeting with parents and wanting to impress the importance of providing extra support at home.

Come up with a system that works for you and start keeping those records, even if you’re in first grade.

Extra Support Log

We all have those students who we suspect will need extra support to fully realize their potential. Often, we give them the support they need without really recognizing it.

Do you have a student who you ALWAYS give extra support right after an instruction is given?

Is there a child you KNOW would not succeed without a little extra encouragement from classmates and teachers?

Document this. At the end of every lesson, write down the students you worked with individually. Later, go back and look through your notes for trends. Are there students who wouldn’t have been successful without your support?

Ultimately, this is fine. Providing extra support is part of our work. But make sure you communicate with parents about it. You don’t want them thinking their child is a self-directed, independent learner, when they actually rely on you for a lot of support.

If you’re interested in finding ways you can support your students in the classroom, I am offering a free workshop all about the 3 classroom management strategies every Waldorf teacher needs to have. Registration for the workshop is open now and it will go live on September 10. Make sure you register so you don’t miss it.

I’m all about giving Waldorf teachers the tools they need to give their students all that they can, and this workshop will really help. I hope you’ll sign up.

The post 4 Record-Keeping Documents Every Waldorf Teacher Should Have in Their Binder appeared first on A Waldorf Journey.

Seems like lately I’ve been having lots of conversations with my colleagues about math.

Could be because (if you ask me) January is a perfect time for a math block. The more inward, reflective quality of this time of year makes it a great time to sit down and crunch numbers. (That’s what we’re doing this month!)

But teaching math in a Waldorf way is not so straightforward. Developing an approach to math that aligns with Waldorf ideals, but gives students enough solid skill-building time is a challenge. Here are some of the challenges I have faced when teaching math. These are issues lots of readers have emailed me about and colleagues ask questions about.

• How do we make math (a subject that can be so abstract) lively and imaginative?
• How do we make sure our students get enough practice without it becoming “kill and drill”?
• How do we keep our students feeling confident and capable about math, especially when they struggle?

Here are some ways I’ve managed these challenges.

Keeping Waldorf Math Imaginative

Here’s the thing. Often, when I try to create an imaginative picture around a mathematical concept it feels forced. Our place value block this year is a perfect example. I came up with a story that explained the concept of place value. (You can read more about it in this blog post.)

While the story I came up with was good, as we moved through the block, I found a couple of challenges. First, those little math stories were not the kinds of stories my students loved and enjoyed together. We were used to rich fairy tales with strong images and cosmic significance. My little stories about a character collecting firewood and putting it into bundles just didn’t compare.

The other challenge with the story is that it can sometimes feel forced. We create characters and situations that bring the mathematical concept we want, regardless of whether it makes an enjoyable or believable story. It’s hard to tell stories like this with confidence and our students often see right through them.

If you ask me, one of the most important things in working with students is that the story feels right. If I try to tell my students a story that doesn’t resonate with me and I’m telling just because it’s what my colleague did, I’m asking for trouble. The lesson inevitably falls flat.

So, what to do? Do we have to use a story, even if it doesn’t resonate? Well, go back to the reason we use stories in the first place. We do it because we recognize that for the elementary age child, the path to interest is through the feeling life, and imagination is a huge part of the child’s feeling life. But, the truth is, a story is just one way to capture your students’ imaginations.

• Connect your math work with art. If imagination is king for the elementary school child, art is queen. Those beautiful geometry drawings, paper folding activities and free-rendering activities with all kinds of crafty supplies can allow your students to explore mathematical concepts in a way that comes alive for them.
• Connect your math work with the senses. You know that 4th grade fractions block where you divide up the pizza and then eat your fraction? That’s a lesson that always sticks. Look for other ways you can involve your students’ senses of smell and taste (the ones that often get neglected.)
• Explore math socially. Get your students working on a project together, talking it through, explaining to each other. Middle schoolers especially learn really well in a social environment.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you completely abandon story time. There’s nothing I enjoy more than telling stories and collectively building images with my students. But I’d much rather do that with a rich and meaningful story, rather than something I made up just to get to a particular math concept. I call this “a story for the sake of a story” and I love that it opens up my options and gives us good, rich stories to explore, even during a math block.

Getting Enough Practice

Oh boy, I don’t know a single Waldorf teacher who hasn’t asked herself if her students were getting enough math practice. That old Waldorf idea that a subject needs to “go to sleep” before you bring it back and expand just doesn’t seem to apply to skills like math. If you ask me, students need daily practice with skills like math, reading and writing.

But does a creative, inspired Waldorf approach allow for routine practice. In short, YES!

Giving your students a worksheet (I like to call them “practices pages”) is not anti-Waldorf. If worksheets were the only thing you ever did, then yes, that would not be an inspired Waldorf approach. But try giving your students a worksheet and see how they respond. Very often I find my students inspired by the challenge of a paper full of questions that they get to answer! They like it!

Again, the important part is that you are working to engage your students. If your students are showing signs of being engaged and interested, even with a worksheet, that’s your measure. If they’re bored and overwhelmed by a worksheet, that’s your cue to do something different. Math games (involving the social realm), riddles and puzzles are good ways to get the practice in.

The other mistake I sometimes see teachers make is holding on to the image for too long. At a certain point, that image that you’ve used to introduce a concept becomes cumbersome. The concept itself becomes solidified in your students and going back to the image every time can confuse things. Use the image as a tool to introduce an idea, practice with it and then move on.

By the way, the amount of practice your students need depends somewhat on their age. Here’s how I see it.

Grades 1 & 2 — In these grades we’re working with big ideas — number concepts, the feeling for numbers, place value and how the processes and our number system works. Practice comes in movement, rhythm and circle activities. They do need some practice writing the numbers and solving problems, but not as much as in other grades.

Grades 3-6 — These are the prime skill-building years, and this applies to every subject. Skill-building requires practice. They’re learning and practicing how to use the processes and they need daily practice using them — over and over and over.

Grades 7-8 — In these years we go back to the big concepts. Here they have solid computation skills and they are being presented with lots of different opportunities for using them. They’re figuring out how and when to use those skills. Less practice is required and ideally their skills are solid enough that they can explore the world mathematically.

Building Math Confidence

I have worked with so many students who, despite my best efforts, get the idea that they just don’t get math. And it’s true, there is something magical about thinking mathematically. When I think about my strongest math students, I think that their genius with the subject is something that they were born with. Their brains just work that way.

I’m not usually one to categorize students and there is plenty of overlap here, but bear with me. In my experience there are different kinds of math students. There are the Intuitive Geniuses and the Rule Followers. Both can be wildly successful but I think our traditional Waldorf ways favor the Intuitive Geniuses. I’m here in support of the Rule Followers.

I was one of those students who didn’t have that natural connection with math. For me it wasn’t that I didn’t understand math, it was just that, when given the choice, I always preferred to read or write. When it came time to do math, I was a Rule Follower. Luckily I had some really good teachers along the way who helped me find my way to actually enjoying math.

When I think about my experiences with those really good math teachers, I remember that they laid things out and explained them very clearly — step-by-step.

We are often taught to allow our students to approach math with a spirit of exploration and we encourage them to make connections and discoveries on their own. And truly, this is a fantastic way for them to learn. My strongest math students LOVE being presented with a real world math situation and then thinking it through to come up with the answers. With math tools at their disposal, they are ready to conquer the world, make connections and find solutions. They’re Intuitive Geniuses when it comes to math.

But this kind of experience is overwhelming for the Rule Followers. Those students need things laid out in a very clear, step-by-step way. Teach them the steps (the Rules to follow) and they will implement them flawlessly, eventually developing an understanding for the concept and how and when to use the rules.

I implore you, in your enthusiasm to keep math lively and interesting, don’t overlook the Rule Followers. If you are an Intuitive Genius yourself, this might be really difficult for you. Slow down, observe your students and think through the topics you are teaching step-by-step.

That ability to observe your students and intuit how to meet them is your number one job as a teacher. Don’t forget.

And if you’re looking for support and resources to help, here are some of my favorites.

Resources

• Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally by John Van de Walle
• Making Math Meaningful, Grades 1-5 by Nettie Fabrie, Wim Gottenbos and Jamie York
• Making Math Meaningful, Grades 6-8 by Jamie York
• Key to Fractions (also Decimals, Algebra, etc.)

Curriculum Guides

• Grade One Quality of Numbers
• Grade Two Introduction to Place Value
• Grade Six Geometry

Blog Posts

• Math Resources
• Grade One Math
• Grade Two Math Planning
• Grade Two Math Update
• Another Grade Two Math Update
• Grade Six Business Math
• More Grade Six Business Math
• Even More Grade Six Business Math (includes link to block test)

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