Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

Hi Everyone

Life here has been busy over the past few days, we’ve celebrated the festival of All Souls (Halloween), been to a craft fair and spend the day with friends, had a sleepover for Jules, and have today been harvesting. Hence my lack of blog posts!

We have 5 chickens which provide us with more eggs then we need, and compost, 2 of them are pictured below. The fat brown one is called Babs and the orangey one is Mac. The names came from the movie chicken run, but morphed into ke”babs” and “mac”nuggets. We don’t eat meat so it was merely a family joke, the chickens are in no danger!

Needless to say we have a love of hens, I have hen salt and pepper pots, a chicken shaped timer, a chrome chicken shaped egg basket and the list continues. Each hen is completely different from the others, own personality and likes and dislikes. So it’s easy for me to tell the kids stories about hens as they are well acquainted with them, and understand that they are not just stupid birds. Not at all!

So we were weeding one of our vege beds this afternoon, and I’ve found lately that both kids are a bit reluctant to help maintain the beds. You know, the weeding, clearing pruning etc. They’re the first ones out there when it’s time to pick something for dinner!

So as I was pulling out a row of dead pea plants and they were weeding behind me I started a story, just slowly slipped into it. Once upon a time there was a Little Red Hen, she was given a gift of a handful of wheat seeds by the farmer…. and so it goes on. The hen asked all the farm animals along the way to help her, to grow, harvest, mill and bake the bread. Every single animal says,”No, not I!” And when it comes time for the eating of the bread they all want some and the hen says….No.

I finished the story, and did not expand on the life lesson I wanted them to learn, and then took them to the veges that needed harvesting today - beetroot, onions, lettuce and tomatoes, and a small last bit of broccoli. We all shared in the work of pulling up and settling the soil afterwards.

They went a bit quiet as we were harvesting and hopefully overnight will digest the story’s moral, the moral being…help with the damn gardening if you plan to eat in the future!

I’ve just found using the Waldorf principle of not actually stating the obvious to the child, not saying for example; the little red hen got no help from the animals, so they couldn’t share her bread, so don’t be like the other animals, be like the little red hen…in other words, work hard and the rewards will be great.

The child then hears it but does not absorb it into the body, soul and spirit. Immediately they will feel defensive, that Mommy has said that they’re not helping out enough. So the lesson is not learnt, but self esteem is lost. This is not what we want. We want to educate with love, so we tell the story, they are given time to absorb it and I promise, that overnight they process it, and it is absorbed into their very being. Rudolf Steiner describes this in many of his lectures, including, The Study of Man.

I’ve put the link to the Little Red Hen book below, it is an easy reader for Grade 1 or 2 I’d say, but the moral of the story for me is most important, the fact that it is a reader is just an added bonus.

 

Now I have to go and see how dinner is progressing on the stove, I left it bubbling away about an hour ago. We had many scraps of our veges left, broccoli, pumpkin, potatoes and a few other odds and ends so I popped it together to make a vegetable curry. And I still need to go and feed the animals, take in the washing and sort out a bath or 2 for the kids! Okay I have to go!!!

Many blessings to you all this week.
Sue

Filed under: Waldorf Homeschooling, Homeschool on November 4th, 2008