Grade One, X, Y, Z

These letters were very difficult for me to plan. I have been trying to stay as true to waldorf principles as possible with our approach to the alphabet, but coming up with stories to base this lesson on just wasn't happening. I finally went back to Steiner's lecture "Teaching Children to Write" and realized that the letters and thier forms can come from life experiences and don't have to be tied to a specific fairy tale! Whew! So that is what I did. Thus we came up with the following words and pictures. I think it worked well, as Elsa did not balk at all and is now finished with her lessons about the consonants.

Grade One, P & Q

Letters P & Q
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf First Grade
Oak Meadow Kindergarten

Story:
The Three Spinners - Grimm, as told in Oak Meadow Kindergarten Fairy Tales

This is a great story to flesh out with details and dialogue. I based my retelling off the interpretation in Oak Meadow Kindergarten as I knew Elsa would love the addition of the little pet quail. We also named our lazy girl soon to be princess "Polly" and the prince "Peter" and said that they had been best friends in school. "Polly" wasn't so much lazy in our version, but rather dreamy.

Grade One, L & N

**I am doing some serious catching up here! I really want to post about as many of our Waldorf homeschool lessons as possible as I know how helpful it can be to see what other families are doing. So the next few posts actually occured in the last 3 months!


Letters L & N
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf Homeschooling Grade One
Oak Meadow Kindergarten

Stories:
Little Red Riding Hood - Grimm
The Nixie of the Mill Pond - Grimm

"Little Red Lingers on the Lane"

"Naughty Nixie Needs Nelly's Gold"

Grade One, F & R

Letters F & R
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf Homeschooling Grade One
Oak Meadow Kindergarten


Stories:
The Curious Fish by Elsa Beskow
The Roly Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter
Rapunzel by Grimm
The Dream Fairy (poem) by Thomas Hood


Activities:
Add new fish to our pond
Bake Roly Poly Puddings (recipe in Oak Meadow Kindergarten p. 209)

The newly released in English book by Elsa Beskow was perfect for F! We actually scheduled our lessons for F around the release of the book and I am so glad we did. It is such a sweet tale, and Elsa loved all the different kinds of fish in it.

We told several different tales for the letter R, but the image we finally settled on as most meaningful was the river. It lent itself so nicely to the shape, and really flowed in and out of all our stories this week.

One of our resources this week was the poem "The Dream Fairies" by Thomas Hood. It is in the public domain, so here it is:

A little fairy comes at night,

Her eyes are blue, her hair is brown,

with silver spots upon her wings,

And from the moon she flutters down.

She has a little silver wand,

And when a good child goes to bed

She waves her wand from right to left

And makes a circle round her head,

And then it dreams of pleasant things,

Of fountains filled with fairy fish,

And trees that bear delicious fruit,

And bow their branches at a wish;

Of arbours filled with dainty scents

From lovely flowers that never fade,

Bright ‘flies that flitter in the sun,

And glow-worms shining in the shade;

And talking birds with gifted tongues

For singing songs and telling tales,

And pretty dwarfs to show the way

Through the fairy hills and fairy dales.

So many beautiful images! "Fountains filled with fairy fish" was our repeated sentence for F. And Elsa was so inspired by "...pretty dwarfs to show the way/ Through the fairy hills and fairy dales." that she had to paint her version of her dwarf guide through fairyland...

...a lovely opportunity for a painting exersize in Red!


I wanted to share the picture Robin drew for Elsa. He put in as many "R"s as he could from the story Rapunzel. Elsa had a great time finding them all!

Grade One, G & K

Letters G & K
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf First Grade

Stories:
The Golden Goose - Grimm
King Thrushbeard - Grimm

Activities:
Gardening
Autumn Nature Walk


Elsa in the golden early autumn light in Payson, AZ. We took a little trip to visit my sister in Gallup, NM the first weekend of October and stopped at my parents' cabin. The woods were so beautiful and golden!

For some reason, Elsa had a difficult time with G. She loved the story, but did not think she could draw the picture. She started and then was so frustrated that we had to put it on hold. It took her about three weeks of letting it settle before she was ready to revisit it and make her MLB entry. That's ok. It is why homeschooling is so wonderful! It was no problem to move on with other things and come back to it when she was ready. I did not make a big issue of it, so she did not feel stupid.

The story of King Thrushbeard is adorable! Elsa loved the Princess' silly descriptions of the Princes, and was glad when she learned her lesson to be less proud and selfish. She had great fun acting this one out with me, and really enjoyed the drawing of the King and Princess dancing at thier wedding!

Grade One, J & B

Letters J & B
Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf First Grade
Oak Meadow Kindergarten
Kit'n'Tales

Stories:
The Water of Life - Grimm (a prince brings his father a JUG of the water of life)
Flora Flutterbye - Sieglinde de Francesca (Kit'N'Tales)
Hummy Bee - Sieglinde de Francesca (Kit'N'Tales)


Activities:
Make clay jug
Make jam
Make bee and butterfly from Kit'N'Tales
Bake bagles




We actually spent most of the week last week on J. I was under the weather with a bad cold and just couldn't seem to focus on academics. We told the story of "The Water of Life" and illustrated the jug and fountain in our MLBs. We made strawberry jam, but I couldn't find clay I liked so we didn't make our jugs. We did have tons of fun dying silk and wool with flowers from our yard - more about that in another post! We also spent a lot of time with our goats and our new neighbor- a little calf named Sassy...

We did all of B on Monday of this week. Well, actually, we were talking about B all weekend as we observed the bees in our garden, thought of all the B words we could think of, baked bread, and talked about butterflies. Elsa was very ready for the two stories on Monday, and was very happy to finally enter her picture in her MLB.

The highlight of our B lesson was making a little Hummy Bee using our sunflower dyed wool and the instructions in Sigi's Hummy Bee story. So cute!!! Elsa loves her little bee and has been taking very good care of her.

We also started the butterfly from Sigi's Flora Flutterbye story (downloads free on the Kit'N'Tales website!) But this morning Elsa discovered that her wings needed a little more color so she had to repaint them. We will finish that one before bed tonight.

Grade One, H & D

Letters H & D

Waldorf Alphabet Book
A Journey Through Waldorf Homeschooling Grade One
Oak Meadow Kindergarten

Stories:
The Hut in the Forest - Grimm
The Twelve Dancing Princesses - Grimm
Fairy Houses, Everywhere - Barry & Tracy Kane

Activities:
Make a fairy house

Last May on a visit to Grandaddy & Gramie's cabin, Elsa picked up all these rocks. We were on a little hike, and she saw so many pretty rocks. I told her she should only pick up what she could carry herself and she ended up with her whole skirt full! We brought them home, and she has used them for all kinds of creative play.

To go with our lesson about H and Houses, Elsa built a fairy house. She was so excited to use her rocks from the mountains to make a house for the fairies.

She wrote a little note to the fairies, and sure enough, they wrote back! They thanked her for the beautiful house, and obviously they danced all night as there was fairy dust sprinkled everywhere!

Grade One, Week One

Our first week of first grade with Elsa went very well. We are using the first grade curriculum from A Little Garden Flower and supplementing it with some activities and stories from Oak Meadow kindergarten and some of our own story books. We are following a traditional Waldorf format - doing blocks of lessons, introducing the letters using stories and many hands-on crafts and movement activities. Elsa has already begun to read, and we are very gently supporting her without rushing her out of this sweet time of magic and imagination.

For each letter, we tell a story that has an important element which starts with that letter ("mountain" for "M", etc...)We color a picture where we try to find the form of the letter in the picture. We practice writing upper and lower case. We write the word for that letter from the story. We also do silly sentences, like "Misty mountains marching merrily". We bake bread in fun shapes, or play with playdough, or use yarn and make the letters. We color them on the driveway with sidewalk chalk. We look for them all around us.

First week lesson plans:

Begin container story from "A Journey Through Waldorf Homeschooling: Grade One"

Introduce the letter "M" - tell Grimm's "Mt. Simli"

Introduce the letter "V" - tell Grimm's "The Vagabonds"