Our Waldorf Homeschool Journey

Mmmmhh…you may be thinking, what on earth is this crazy woman doing now? But bear with me there is method in my perceived madness. For Grade 5 we finished Atlantis studies with the destruction of Atlantis taking place in 9600BCE. I didn’t want to then hop forward to 3300BCE and launch myself into India, so I started searching for the link between Atlantis and the next mentioned civilization in the Asia type area. Some history that could fill the gap, that I kept feeling,… That’s when I found the Harappa Civilization. It is fascinating beyond measure and I wrote a 2 week long lesson block on it…

The first archeological evidence dates back to 7000BCE, it is found in the city of Mehrgarh. This is what I based the lesson block on. The city of Mehrgarh is situated up and to the left of the Indus Valley, in Pakistan. The civilization flourished until about 2600BCE when the city was finally deserted. It is thought that severe climate changed (no longer able to grow food) and possibly an enemy attack was responsible for this. But that said there is ample proof that the citizens of Mehrghar had been moving over the previous few hundred years to join the Indus Valley Civilization further down in India.

So we started at the beginning…for us that means a chalkboard drawing. I decided that this time I’d do one drawing and add as much detail as possible. It doesn’t show up well on the blog, but included in it are relevant foods, animals,plants, activities,architecture, etc.

 We started with a bit of background looking at where Mehrgarh is on our world map, and then spoke about what it looked like, the climate and other general things.Do you know it is the earliest civilization to use a grid pattern for it’s city? And that the bodies dug up had proof of dentistry, and I mean drilling, possibly the earliest to date? Anyway, after this Juliette wrote a bit about the Harappa Civilization….

And drew it as she imagined it…

We have since done form drawing. Now for Grade 5 I’ve changed the forms we do quite a bit, because there are so many awesome ancient types of writing, seals and signs we’ve used them as our form drawings. These are the few seals from the Harappa Civilization that have been translated so far. There are over 400 of them uncovered todate!

If you look carefully at her written work, you see that we use the much debated, loved and hated Vimala alphabet. I love it and use it daily myself. Juliette learnt it in Grade 4 and has used it ever since, which was her own personal choice. But what I wanted to share with you is…do you see the repetitive forms above the writing? Jules drew them and cut them out using a craft knife type thing, and made paper chains which she then coloured.

I’ve spoken about this before, and just colouring, painting, modelling etc, can become boring. I truly feel we need to keep coming up with fresh ideas. And seals of the Harappa Civilization made into paper chains seemed like a fresh idea! It also is a repetition of form drawing which I feel is necessary for the form to become part of the child.

And tomorrow I’ll add a post about the crafts of Harappa (awesome beads amongst other things!), and we’ll also be looking at an animal study of an ancient bird of Pakistan and then a  wild flower found in Pakistan and strangely enough in our back garden as well!!

I’m hoping to be finished the Harppa Civilization by the end of the week, so that we can then spend next week on St Michael and St George. Keep your fingers crossed for us please…often things don’t go as planned in this home!

Filed under: Waldorf Grade 5, Ancient Civilisations, Vimala Alphabet, Waldorf Homeschooling, Homeschool on September 22nd, 2009