A few weeks ago, in my last blog post I outlined what we are doing this year in our
Waldorf inspired homeschool. I am really excited to share our first few weeks of Waldorf kindergarten homeschool since we updated some of these things! Before I go further, I want to reiterate that I am a homeschool mom who uses a gentle holistic approach inspired by both the Waldorf philosophy and Charlotte Mason. I have read about and taken some classes on Waldorf in the early years. I am NOT a Waldorf expert and am still learning a lot myself. I am sharing about my own personal experience and if you are hoping to follow Waldorf in your homeschool, I encourage you to do your own research using resources like WECAN and LifeWays of North America.
The last few weeks leading up to the Holidays we told the story of The Gingerbread Man!
Choosing the Story
In my last blog post, I talked about I am using this list to decide which stories to tell based on my four (turning five) year old's development this year. Both The Gingerbread Man and The Elves and the Shoemaker are at my daughters level, but it didn’t seem like we would have time for both. So decided to leave The Elves and the Shoemaker for next year. Also, since my daughters birthday is around this time of year I also like to combine a winter solstice story since it is the suns birthday- with a special birthday story for her, so I wanted to leave some time for that. If you aren’t familiar with the Waldorf birthday story you can find an example here.
Looking back, maybe I should have told The Elves and the Shoemaker, instead since Snow White and Seven Dwarves is also a traditional Waldorf Kindergarten story that is told around Christmas time, but I didn’t realize that and had thought I’d tell it in January. So now I may have a dilemma next year, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. However, one of the reasons I thought The Gingerbread Man would be the perfect story to get us back in the swing of storytelling because of how simple and repetitive it is. Young children can join in almost immediately saying, "Run run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Man."
Planning the Activities
Waldorf doesn't necessarily do “themes” where everything revolves around the story, but rather focuses on the season and upcoming celebrations as a whole. So we weren't strictly just doing The Gingerbread Man, but spending time immersed I the unique sensory experiences that come with the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the season.
Telling the Story
We began with introducing the story. I told it from memory putting my own personal spin on it without any props or pictures. Another option I have read about, is to read the story (again without showing pictures) if you don’t have time to learn it ahead of time. However telling it form your own memory to your child, removes the "middle man" and helps make an authentic heart connection. You can read more ideas about how to prepare and tell a story here.
A small change I made to our daily rhythm this month is doing some more movement focused verses right before the story. (Right now we aren’t doing a full circle time- but rather spreading verses and songs throughout our day). Part of why I decided to do some movement at this time, is with the colder weather I have pushed our outside time to later in the morning when it is a bit warmer out. this means story time is now coming before outside time, and I felt my daughter needed a chance to burn off some energy before sitting for the story. I am also continuing to learn about the meaning of in-breath and out-breathe when it comes to rhythm and how to integrate this into our day, but doing some movement before a story seemed to fill that need for some out-breath, before an in-breath activity.
To transition from the lively movement songs to the contemplative mood of story time, I light a candle saying,
“Fire sprite shining bright, thank you for your golden light”
Then I sing a little song I made up about journeying to fairytale land. There are several examples of songs like this including this one that inspired my version.
Gingerbread Play
We made down homemade gingerbread play dough and played with it over a period of about two and half weeks. I added a generous amount of cinnamon to it to give it a brown color and help it smell nice. and We used this dough for both free play (we stored it in the fridge) along with rolling pins and cookie cutters, and we also worked together to make some salt dough ornaments which we dried out in the over and then painted.
While we’re doing this I cut and dried a mini gingerbread man to use for our next round of story telling along with some other little props set up on a table. After the story I gave my daughter the chance to do some small world play with the little scene I set up. I already had these wooden toys and little stuffed people on hand, but a couple other ideas for creating your own props for this story are farm animal using cookie cutters to make more salt dough ornaments, or even cutting them out for felt for a felt board, or making three dimensional felt animals like this cow.
A few days before Christmas, we baked and decorated our own gingerbread cookies including a large gingerbread man like the one in the story!
Drawing the Story
And finally, we drew a picture of the story with beeswax crayons in our “book of stories.” This is also something new I added in since my daughter has turned five inspired by something I read in a Waldorf Early years book (I want to emphasize this was my own spin on this and is probably not a true Waldorf activity- I simply am not a purist about keeping all print away from my child, but just focused on keeping it gentle, interest lead, and developmentally appropriate- I hope to write a more detailed post on this later).
This was not an alphabet lesson or anything like that, simply an example of using drawing and writing to remember something and share your thoughts. After getting out our beeswax crayons and saying our coloring verse, I got out my book and did my drawing and wrote down a few words from the story and simply let my daughter imitate me. This is different from how we have just used beeswax crayons to color freely in the past. We will still be doing mainly free drawings but every few weeks we will complete one of these drawings in this special book when we are finished with a story.
Extending the Activities
After our shared drawing experience my daughter wanted to make her own book from the story. I printed out some story cards from my Early Years Curriculum for her to use as inspiration and to he remember the order of the story and helped her put together. a simple book. Then she asked me to print her some paper dolls to play with. I couldn't find an I loved so I made my own quickly, and unfortunately don't have a pattern I can share, but here is another one I found.
So that about sums it up. Most of our time we spent doing regular everyday things that revolved around the time of year; Wrapping gifts, decorating our tree and home, cooking, cleaning and getting together with family for holiday activities. That is to me the essence of the Waldorf homeschool kindergarten years. Life is the curriculum.
I hope this post inspired you, and I hope to share more of our kindergarten journey as the year continues! I’d love to hear about your homeschool journey this year too!
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