Home School Life

Tomorrow and Friday are my last days as a guest teacher at the not-so-nearby school I’ve been visiting. I’ve had such a wonderful time teaching this small class of two and I’ve been so struck by how much we’ve been able to do in our lessons. I feel like, more than most waldorf students, these girls have engaged in a very holistic treatment of the content, and I’m quite proud of the work we’ve done together.

Tonight I’m going to write a block test so that tomorrow they’ll be able to really synthesize and look over all of the material they’ve covered. I always think of block tests as providing a satisfying look back over the depth and breadth of material that has been covered, and if the teacher has done his or her work well, the experience should be satisfying, not anxiety producing.

So, as part of my own review of the block, I thought I would go through my preparation process and the material that we covered over the three weeks we’ve had together.

The first thing I do when preparing for any block is to consult this book:

This book  is called The Educaational Tasks and Content of the Waldorf/Steiner Curriculum (and I could apparently sell it for $2408 — check the link!) but I affectionately refer to it as “the big yellow book.” It does a fabulous job of going through Steiner’s indications for each of the different blocks including skills that should be acquired and information that should be covered. By reading the eighth grade anatomy block section in this book I found that this block is more than simply the study and memorization of the bones. I realized that the anatomy block is very closely tied to the physics studies of both 7th and 8th grade. The focus is the human being in action, affected by the physical forces in the world, not simply the dead skeleton separated from all living movement. So, though I knew we were going to learn alot about the names of the bones, our focus would be their function and how the human skeleton works within the laws of physics.

So, with that knowledge I started gathering resources. My primary resources for this block were:

Anatomy for the Artist by Jeno Barcsay

How to Draw the Human Head by Louise Gordon

Uprightness, Weight, and Balance; Human Biology in Grade Eight by Manfred von Mackensen, Claudia Allgower and Andreas Bielfeld-Ackermann

To begin to cover the entire skeleton I just chose one end of it — the end that would lead us most directly into an understanding of the physics behind the movement of the skeleton — the foot. The progression we followed was basically this:

• The foot
• Bones of the lower body
• The calf muscle
• The hip joint (through which we studied joints in general and muscles and ligaments)
• Bones of the upper body
• The vertebral column
• The skull
• The ear
• The eye

Over the course of the weeks I presented material, told stories and we participated in demonstrations together. To me, the best part about this education is how it focuses so strongly on providing the students with experiences to shape their education. We’re not trying to fill their backpacks up with lots of information, but our effort is to create opportunities for them to engage with a subject with wonder, which can best be achieved through rich, memorable experiences.

Tomorrow I’ll describe some of these memorable experiences and how they led us to the conclusions that we were trying to make in our amatomy block.

Tags: anatomy, eighth grade, resources, teaching, Waldorf education