Waldorf Inspired Homeschooling

Nov 25
Hana

Homeschooling using the Waldorf pedagogy is a wonderful option for families, but sometimes, breaking down what the philosophy is and how to practically implement it can be challenging. These videos help break down what a main lesson is, how to do a block rotation, what daily work, how opening activities are used and more.

Daily Work

December 2024

Daily work is the independent work I assign to my students to work quietly and without needing assistance. I usually have my students work on this when I need time to prepare other lessons or work with another student. I start daily work packets or binders around age 9 or 10 years.

I usually start with a single page or language arts or math worksheets. I use old workbooks, hand me down workbooks or worksheets I find online to put together the students’ daily work. Key to making this successful is that the work is 1-2 grade levels below their grade level so they may work independently. The purpose of daily work is to provide ‘busy work’ with a purpose. Sometimes we need our students occupied in quiet work. Daily work serves that need but also provides an opportunity for students to practice and eventually master math and language arts skills they previous learned. Mastery takes years, so if you’ve only just introduced and learned fractions in grade 4, you’re likely going to need a few years to master everything about fractions. Daily work provides that opportunity to become proficient at skills the student has learned but doesn’t know well. While the student is moving forward in new learning with lessons, she may practice those skill in their daily work.

Typically I only assign worksheets in language arts and math, but occasionally I add in other subjects. I begin by only assigning a single page of math and grammar which takes about 5-10 minutes, but as the students get older they are assigned up to 10 pages daily with work taking up to an hour by the time they are in high school.

Daily Math Binder

April 2017

Creating a math binder is an easy way to take the best worksheets from a variety of workbooks. I take worksheets that are about 1-3 grade levels below with the intention that this daily math shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, should be easy, and cover basic math.

These worksheets contain five questions each day of the school week (Monday through Friday, or in the case of the worksheets marked Day 1 to Day 5 to accommodate international school weeks). That’s a total of 35 questions a week. That’s over 1000 questions a year, most of which are two part questions so that’s like doing nearly 2000 questions a year! That’s sufficient, but when I was doing these questions with my children, I often did 6-10 questions a day when my children were about grade 5 to grade 9, and about 2-5 questions when my children were grades 1-4. I would repeat the same questions year after year adding more challenging ones the first time my children went through these questions. By the time I had created all my mental math questions I had over 4000 questions spanning 3 years. I simply recycled the questions year to year.

If you would like to add mental math to your daily work, you can find prepared sheets here: Mental Math Grades 1-3 Mental Math Grades 3-5 Mental Math Grades 4-8

Mental math is the process of orally asking math questions and having the student compute the math in his or her head and orally answer the question. These are not questions that are drilled or memorized. Often you’ll find two part questions that can still be done mentally but are more challenging because now the whole question needs to be remembered while each portion of the question is worked out.

Questions are often two parts with the first part including a multiplication or division question followed by an addition or subtraction question. When questions include whole numbers and fractions the possibilities for questions is tremendous. Here are some examples:

2 x 5 + 9 = (19) 12 x 1/2 – 1 1/2 = (4 1/2) 12 ÷ 4 + 6 = (9) 7 x 7 + 18 = (67)

Mental math is ideal when it is included in your opening activities, but you may choose to do mental math whenever it fits your daily schedule. While it’s best to do mental math everyday, you may double up on mental math lessons when necessary. Or, you can do mental math 2 or 3 days a week. I find that mental math is best before a lesson and that it is math the student is already familiar with; it should not be new learning. In general, mental math is best when the student is fresh and isn’t already academically fatigued. For most children this is in the morning, but you may find your child performs best at another time of day.

Opening Activities

Opening activities are short varied activities you may do to start your homeschooling day. You may include things like playing a board game, practicing a musical instrument, doing some mental math, or reading a picture book. These short engaging activities serve many purposes, but be clear what your purpose is or you can get lost in the opening activities and before you know it, hours have past and your whole school day was opening activities! Not that it’s a bad thing! Sometimes we have spent our best hours deep in a game of Scrabble that should have been just a few turns before starting our main lesson. But instead of picking up our game the following day, we end up playing a riveting 2 hour game.

When children are young and easily engaged in imaginative or pretend play, very little is arguably better for their education, well being or developement. But if you must pull them away from from such nourishing activities, choosing something equally engaging or intriguing might be the ticket. Transition activities suitable for small or large groups may differ from those especially suitable for small groups or individual students. Sometimes simply reading aloud is enough to draw students to you. Other times I realize that if I prepare an activity and the students see me preparing materials they are curious and if I begin the activity (either to make a sample or work out project details), they are drawn to what I’m doing. Very little needs to be said to invite them into the learning space, they are naturally curious.

If you are looking for ways to include those beautiful flash cards or conversation starter cards, opening activities might be the right place. I use these kinds of cards sparingly and usually with older students from middle school and high school. Our most used set is the Harry Potter conversation card set, but there are many to choose from. One year, my daughter and I did a mother daughter journal where we wrote in the same journal with daily question prompts. Then we could read each other’s answers.

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If you have kinesthetic learners, you may find that working with clay, wax or putty keeps them engaged longer as you deliver a lesson. Creative project driven students may become engrossed by origami or suncatchers. Competitive students may love board games or math puzzles, but if your students are younger than 9 years old, or not into competitive games, you may opt for cooperative games like those from Peaceable Kingdom, or you may modify games to make them cooperative.

Handwork is another fabulous opening activity if the project is already under way. Working for 10-15 minutes daily makes a big project manageable and reduces fatigue. If your student is too young for knitting, they may like a knitting tower or lucet. These tools are easier for little fingers that are still developing their find motor skills. Form drawing is often included in the main lesson, but some creative form drawing may be just right for an opening activity, but be mindful not to tire your students with such a mentally engaging activity. If you try form drawing, you may need to get thick stick crayons. One of my favorite winter activities is dipping candles. But dipping candles is a timely and often messy activity. Instead, try rolling beeswax candles! They only take a few minutes, but you need to make sure your wax is warm enough to roll or it will crack. A hair dryer is enough to soften the wax. Don’t try the oven as I did! It will melt faster than you can close the oven door.

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Mental math, Mad Libs and pictures books are by far our most used opening activities. We do mental math daily, but that’s not an activity that’s going to to draw your students away from their engaging activities unless you have a student who loves math very much! But a math game might bring some into a learning space with interest and Mad Libs are not just great fun and humorous, but I think it’s the best, funniest, and most creative way to learn your parts of speech. My go to favorite has always been picture books. The variety of topics is unmatched, the illustrations are gorgeous and the learning is deep. You can learn about people, history, science, politics, grieving and more.

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The Waldorf Main Lesson Block

The Waldorf Main Lesson block is a block of time in which a subject is focused on. Generally the blocks last 3-6 weeks, but longer blocks are advised to break into two or three smaller blocks and separated by other blocks. The Main Lesson block rotation is not necessarily set according to the waldorf pedagogy, but some blocks are advised to come first in certain years depending on what the other blocks are for continuity and context. For instance a block on form drawing and introduction of the letters will come first before a grammar block on blending letters. Or a block on Ancient Greece will come before the block on Ancient Rome. For me, I rotate my blocks according to seasons. I learned this from a non-Waldorf homeschooler named Rachel DeMille. She did her history in the winter and science in the spring. I loved how she saw a natural rhythm in her family and adjusted her lessons to work with the seasons and the needs of the family.

I rotate my blocks by starting with or Language Arts and Math blocks in the fall, History in the winter and Science in the spring. We tend to do our handwork more regularly in the winter when we are reading aloud our history or novels. This block rotation works well for our family as I see my students more lively and eager to learn in the fall, and ready to take on more challenging learning. Then we all need a mental break and do more passive learning of listening and reading to stories of the past in history or literature. Even though our Southern California winters rarely get too cold, we do tend to slow down and naturally move inward as the days are shorter and cooler. By the time spring rolls around, we are eager to get out and get moving. We love doing our science main lesson blocks in the spring, or field trips, or more time outdoors. We often run out of time and end up carrying over a science block to the fall and end up starting the year with a leftover science block from the previous year.

Homeschool Routine

Homeschool routines are especially personal. What works for our family may not work for yours. We tend to take a long lunch break as lunch is our main meal of the day and we usually cook from scratch fresh almost every day. We also have lunch leftovers for dinner on many nights. We also cook breakfast. All this food prep takes time and our day reflects that with a later start time, a very long lunch break (anywhere from 2-4 hours) and a second homeschool session in the late afternoon or evening consisting of extra curricular activities or Main lesson work that’s a bit more passive like reading aloud.

When the children were younger, we also allotted plenty of time for free play. If they were actively engaged in open ended play, I rarely interrupted it. Often I would let it play out until it naturally ended, or a dispute erupted between my children which caused a naturally transition into our school day. Because we valued open-ended play so deeply, our day often revolved around their play which is especially important in the younger years of 9 years and younger, but often younger than puberty. So our school days were not as consistent when my children were younger, but as they grew, our routines became more structured.

Open-ended play is incredibly valuable for children and in my early years of parenting, I learned many values of play and the dangers of screen time. I avoided screen time religiously, and rarely used it. As the children got older and screens became more prevalent, they were exposed to them more. Then later as they entered high school and college, screens were unavoidable which is to be expected. Some of the articles and books I read in which I learned what screen time does to brain development are titles, I cannot remember at the moment as it was over 20 years ago. Since then, even more books and articles have been written about screen time or the value of play.

The Main Lesson

The Main Lesson is the educational focus of the day. It tends to be the first lesson in Waldorf schools and is recommended to be the first lesson in a homeschool environment. While I wholeheartedly believe that making the main lesson the first lesson of the day is the best way to accomplish the work of the main lesson block, on many occasions we didn’t get to our main lesson until much later, or not at all! There was a time when our daily work, opening activities, open ended play and reading aloud took our whole homeschool day.

The main lesson takes about 2 hours and consists of several parts: Opening Activities (about 20 minutes), Review work (about 10-15 minutes), the main lesson work consisting of narrations and illustrations (about 60 minutes) with the remainder of the time (about 20-30 minutes) for the new lesson or new learning of the day. Depending on the grade and main lesson block, our main lesson could easily take 3 hours.

Waldorf Subjects that are Not Main Lesson Blocks

There are many subjects that round out the Waldorf curriculum. We often talk about the main lesson blocks and focus on them for our homeschool, but there are many other subjects that a Waldorf school offers that are often overlooked in a homeschool setting.

My favorite subject is handwork. Handwork includes knitting, crochet, embroidery, sewing, weaving and much more. Each grade has a skill to learn which supports their development and the rest of the curriculum. While we tend to do our handwork projects that most consistently in the winter, handwork is a year round subject occuring about twice a week in a school setting.

Eurythmy is a movement practice that is also offered a couple times a week. Once again that forms that are learned in eurythmy also mirror that child’s development. In eurythmy, some special equipment may be used for some grades like a copper ball or copper rods. These items are used in the eurythmy. While this is a subject area I completely avoided out of inexperience and inability, as I learned and desired to teach my children, I found it nearly impossible with just the 1-2 students. Now you can find eurythmy tutorials online if you wish to include it in your homeschool.

Foreign language is one additional subject that is done daily, though the lesson time is only an hour compared to 2 hours for the main lesson. We I lived in France and attended a Waldorf School in the early 1980s, we were taught English and German as our foreign languages. I passed English class with flying colors as French was my second language. If you know another language or our mother tongue is different than the language of the country you are living, I encourage you to speak and use your mother tongue as as much as you can.

Metal work, ceramics and woodworking are other subjects that are taught in the older elementary and high school years. Special equipment is often needed for these subjects making it more challenging to include in a home setting.

Music instruction begins in grade 1 with the recorder and moves to the violin and on to other instruments as the students get older. Music instruction continues through high school.

While singing and art are not special subjects in isolation of the main lesson, they are taught beginning in kindergarten. Verses and poetry are also included and are quickly memorized. Singing is learned by listening and doing and art is part of the main lesson for most lesson work. Watercoloring in taught in grade 1 as part of the main lesson, not as art instruction necessarily. Later other art mediums are utilized like pastels, colored pencils and charcoal. Perspective drawing is taught in middle school which also supports the development of the student.

Ruining Your Kids with Waldorf Education

“You cannot mess up your kids, but you can make mistakes”

M. Chaudhry

What a relief that you cannot mess up your children, but you can make mistakes. Well it’s not so much a relief that you can make mistakes, but mistakes are part of our human existence and when we come to terms with it, we may better navigate the fall out of mistakes by correcting them and changing our course. Given that we cannot mess up our children, it also means that any one educational philosophy cannot ruin your children. If we establish that ruining your children means they are somehow unprepared for life, just know that the two are not the same, and in every education system, homeschool including, you will find children who fall through the cracks and others who excel exceedingly. And, of course, you will find the majority of children who find themselves somewhere in between.

What Happens When You’re Not Waldorf Enough

It’s possible to feel like you are not Waldorf enough when there are plenty of opportunities to see how others are applying Waldorf principles. Are you really not Waldorf enough? Maybe…but that’s okay! We all have to start at the beginning. Even if you’ve attended a Waldorf school, you still have to learn how to teach it in a home or class setting. And as we learn and apply the Waldorf way of schooling, we meet ourselves in our teaching. We find ways to improve and realize shortcomings. We find inspiration in others and hopefully use those opportunities to grow and become more skilled in our journey. When we encounter “not Waldorf enough” we may feel terrible about our circumstance or we may use it as inspiration to learn. We may follow in someone’s footsteps until we find our own footing. We may read the same books or teach the same way. And that’s okay! I hope you’ll find plenty of inspiration on your Waldorf journey.

How to Avoid BOTH Kinds of Homeschool Burnout

https://youtu.be/_nxIYCNPrxs

There’s burnout and then there’s BURNOUT. Distinguishing between the two is important so you can find viable solutions. Burnout that is associated with the change in season, the months prior to the school year ending, or with winter blues is fully manageable and curable. BURNOUT is not. Let’s avoid BURNOUT by addressing issues that may cause this crash. Big milestones in life are inevitable. Things like having a baby, moving, separation, death or a new job are just some of the life changing things that happen in life. Some are anticipated milestones like having a child or moving into a home. Others are devastating like a relationship ending or a death. All these milestones and life events take a toll on us. And if we are not prepared to handle these changes, we are likely to struggle in little or big ways which may contribute to BURNOUT. During these life events, other obligations and commitments need to be renegotiated in order to have the bandwidth to manage the big life changes.

If managing daily life is beyond your ability where you find yourself relying on friends, family and the community consistently, eating out due to poor planning, or find yourself overextended, it is also time to renegotiate your commitments and your schedule. Of course there are times when all these things happen occasionally. We must differentiate between the two, however.

So how do we avoid the smaller burnout when all you need is a break or a flash of inspiration? I find that when we start a new main lesson block, there’s a wave of excitement that keeps burnout at bay. Other times, a good break in the schedule does wonders. This could be a break from your daily homeschool schedule to do something completely different, or it could be a natural break that comes with some time off school say winter break for instance.

Identification of the type of burnout you’re experiencing is key to finding solutions.

Untrained and Unskilled in Waldorf

What happens if you are untrained or unskilled in Waldorf education and I don’t feel capable to teach your children? This is a valid free that has a solution! It’s improbable that we are going to be skilled in all aspects of education. We have two solutions: Learn or hire out. Actually there’s a third solution: Ignore it! Yes, you can skipped many (but certainly not all) areas in which you are untrained. You may not value those areas and feel it’s unnecessary to spend school time exploring those skills. Music, for instance, was one area I didn’t pursue in education for a few reasons. As it wasn’t a top priority for me and we spent our time in other endeavors, I didn’t make room for it in our schedule, I did not spend time becoming trained, nor did I find someone to teach my children. In areas I was enthusiastic about, say handwork, I did spend time becoming trained, I did learn new skills, and I did hire out a teacher for my children on occasion. The choice is yours!

When There’s NO Time For Hands-on Projects

There’s certainly not going to be enough time to do hands-on projects and keep up with academic rigor. Or there will be time for both but not for something else. When choosing to do hands-on projects, you are choosing something that will take time, require set up, and will probably leave behind a mess to clean up. You may have to be extra hands on with your children or the supplies and overall it will be more draining (and possibly expensive) to do a meaningful hands-on project. But, they are worth it! Schedule them infrequently if you are just getting into them. Schedule ones you love first! Schedule the projects that you find doable rather than complex ones. This will help you feel successful in your endeavors and hopefully you will be encouraged by your success. And…be sure to take pics! These hands-on projects are sometimes the memories that make up your homeschool journey.

How to Achieve Rhythm and Consistency in Daily Schedule

https://youtu.be/NbzDBP6PxBs

When life changes with a growing family, or a new endeavor (like homeschooling), or a move to a new neighborhood, our rhythm is disrupted and our daily schedule needs renegotiating. If you’ve never had a consistent schedule or a good rhythm that works for you, I have a couple suggestions. First, I suggest you observe your day, your energy, your children’s nap times and meal times, and your children’s energy level throughout the day. When you start to see patterns, you can start to establish a rhythm and routine. Getting routine and schedule inspiration and advice from others will help you when you feel at a lost. Those schedules may work for you, which is great, or they may need some modifications. But we need to differentiate between a a schedule that’s not working versus we are not working. If you find that you, yourself are unable to keep a schedule because of lack of discipline on your part, it may not be the schedule that’s the problem. I find that the perfect middle ground between someone who is highly scheduled versus someone who is especially go-with-the-flow is the rhythm. Once the rhythm emerges, it is a powerful tool to help the unscheduled person find structure and the scheduled person find flow and ease.

Balancing Artistic Focus and Academic Requirements

How do you balance artistic focus and academic requirements in Waldorf education? What IS artistic focus and academic requirement? Many main lessons in a waldorf setting include written work and an artistic expression. This art isn’t an art lesson, it’s a core subject lesson with an artistic representation of the lesson. Children, especially those younger than 13 or 14 years old learn and think in whole pictures and images. Storytelling is a tool used in a Waldorf setting to effectively deliver a lesson. And, the art associated to the lesson is the expression of the lesson. Balancing both the written and artistic portion of the lesson is necessary in achieving a successful lesson and main lesson block. Both take time. It takes time to find that balance and it takes time to do the lesson work. It may seem like a waste of time to spend on illustrating the lesson, and you may get push back from students who tire from all the writing, but together the tie the lesson together and ensures that the lesson rests with the student in a profound way, arguable stronger than if the student completed a worksheet.

Are They Compatible? | Charlotte Mason & Waldorf

The short answer is yes! The long answer is there needs to be some understanding on what can be combined and what cannot. There are some deep differences between the Waldorf and Charlotte Mason philosophy, and I will help break down some of the differences in the main lesson block versus the short varied lessons, the duration of lessons, and the use of living books versus storytelling. There are places within both philosophies in which they are compatible, and where there is that overlap, you can get the best of both worlds. During a main lesson, there are opening activities, review of previous lesson, the lesson work and the new learning. The main lesson takes about two hours. Comparatively, the Charlotte Mason approach advises short, varied lessons taking about 10 minutes when children are young and upwards of 30-40 minutes as students get older. To combine the two, use your opening activities to do several short lessons using living books. You can include your daily work to make it Charlotte Mason focused with work that is achievable and keeps the students’ focus before they can tire or lose interest.

While Waldorf advocates for storytelling lesson, Charlotte Mason advises the use of Living Books. Living books are usually written by a single author who is passionate and knowledgeable about a topic who writes in an engaging way. Books and written work is arguably work that has been written and rewritten to the best quality. Facts have been checked, work has been edited and the author is presenting a final project that is her best work. Charlotte Mason advises presenting that high quality work in its original form rather than diluting it and reducing it with your own words which may include poor vocabulary or grammar or may not express the points as well. Conversely, in Waldorf, it is advised that information is first processed by the teacher who owns the information in order to deliver the lesson, not from a living book but that the teacher IS the living resource.

To combine the two, I use living books when I don’t have time to prepare a main lesson. I use living books often in our open activities, and I use living books as research content for myself when preparing for a lesson.

Worried About Expensive Waldorf Supplies

Waldorf supplies are expensive. It’s hard to justify the cost of these materials when there are cheaper more accessible materials. I’m sharing my list of items worth spending money on versus items you can find alternative for. The first place I invested money in, and a product I still have today is our grade 1 curriculum by Live Education. It was expensive for us back in 2004 at nearly $400, and it’s still expensive today. At one point I bought a PDF from a Waldorf blog that was an overview of the curriculum from grades 1-8. I was thrilled because it was about $20, but it was barely useful to me and it’s a reminder that sometimes the materials you need are going to be investments.

Here’s a quick list of the items I bought and found them to be high quality materials that lasted and enhanced our learning: Stockmar Block and Stick Crayons, Stockmar watercolor paints (the concentrated kinds, not pan paints), Lyra Colored pencils and the Lyra thick color pencils, Main Lesson Books, wool yarn, Waldorf resource books and large sheets of watercolor paper.

Places you can save money by finding quality alternatives rather than buying specific supplies from Waldorf vendors: pencils, charcoal, chalk, chalkboards, paper, extra sheets of watercolor paper, watercolor paint brushes, math tools like compass, protractor, ruler, etc., silk and cotton fabric for play, knitting needles and crochet hooks, cotton yarn, and wooden toys and blocks and dolls.

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