Library Lady's Corner
The Poetic Meaning of End of Year Reports in Waldorf Schools May 16 2023
Children, students, everywhere strive for excellence. All children who have not been traumatized by extraordinary experiences or abused by adults one way or another, want to learn, to be smart, to understand this large and confusing world into which they have been born. Some children hide this yearning. If they find out early that those delivering education, in whatever form, have decided they are not excellent, or have not met invisible expectations, they might become seemingly insouciant, uncaring, indifferent to what is happening in a learning environment. Some children crumble and dissolve into confusion, striking out at whatever they can identify that might be “right.”Book Review - Honey Bee Haven January 12 2022
Honey Bee Haven that is a real delight. Teaching ourselves and our children about the precious work done by pollinators, especially bees, has become a topic of some urgency in the last decades. With gloriously colorful pictures, done in watercolor paintings by the author, and the simple telling of how bees live and work, a penetrating story gets told in this little masterpiece of a book. It is about the significance of the work of honey bees, and about our part in making them feel appreciated, cared-for, and loved!
Book Review: Form Drawing October 11 2021
Form Drawing is a book about a subject unique to Waldorf schools. This book offers the best introduction to form drawing this Library Lady has ever seen! Form Drawing is full-color and bursting-with-illustrations—it is a must-have for understanding this powerful and engaging artistic subject!
Beginning on the first day of first grade, form drawing helps artistically to develop in children a sense of space, movement, balance, proportion,
Book Review: Xavier Sings Stories of His Alphabet Friends January 12 2021
Technology has opened vistas galore on the science of brain development. One remarkable discovery for Waldorf teachers and parents is how potent music is in developing memory. All of us are much more likely to remember something if we learn it in song.
This isn't surprising in one significant way: music often makes us feel, sometimes very deeply. It cultivates a mood, and we are more likely to recall the mood than the content. If something is very funny or very sad or very moving or very shocking, we are much more likely to remember than if there is no mood at all. Once the mood is evoked, the content then follows.
Waldorf Grade 5 Book Recommendations December 15 2020
The fifth-grade child is reaching the height of childhood. Capacities have solidified and consolidation runs through the whole fifth grade year. The child begins to realize what he or she knows and can do. Rudolf Steiner said that fifth grade is a year of balance. Though this is true, it can be misleading. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the fifth-grade year is without any problems. This balance is most clearly true for the physical maturing of the child, as a child. For the first time the breath and heartbeat reach adult proportions. Each breath is now accompanied by four heartbeats.Book Review: Growing Up Healthy in a World of Digital Media January 02 2020
Growing Up Healthy in a World of Digital Media: A guide for parents and caregivers of children and adolescentsThis is an essential and timely book that addresses the dangers of screen time, addiction, and EMFs on human beings, especially on young ones. It helps empower parents and teachers to be mindful and vigilant. The overwhelming acceptance of digital media (digital everything!) happened as if without Input from us, parents, teachers, everyone! Schools, businesses, and ordinary people were, within a decade, all managing, reading, learning and communicating on wired, digital devices. Only recently have the deleterious effects of free-range use of digital media become well-known. Behavior disorders, depression, addiction, loss of concentration, and general feelings of malaise or unhappiness have been traced back to screen time for many. The younger the user, the more powerful the impact.
Book Review: The Invisible Boat and the Molten Dragon April 20 2018
One genuinely marvelous thing about this second book in Eric Mueller’s Invisible Boat series is the steady stream of pictures of how nature looks behind the curtain of beauty we see. The creatures and the palaces, and the gardens and the light, are all resplendent with imaginations that ring true and lift the heart with a feeling of what’s happening on this living Earth of ours!
These pictures are charming, sometimes breathtaking, and ofttimes startling. Through these images, we are drawn closer to the earth.
Book Review: Award Winning "Helping Children on Their Way" August 16 2017
Waldorf Publications is proud to be recognized by Mom’s Choice Awards with Helping Children on Their WayElizabeth Auer has assembled a remarkable group of educators to write about many aspects of supporting children in their different and varied “stuck places” along the road to a balanced development for life.
Math and Arithmetic in a Waldorf School May 24 2017
Children learn arithmetic in school. Most of what we call “math” is arithmetic — the skills of computation and calculation. When we do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, times tables, square roots, calculating area — for examples — we are doing arithmetic. Arithmetic is a division or department of mathematics. Geometry, algebra, and calculus are other branches of mathematics.
Teaching children skills in arithmetic tends to be a cause of anxiety in our culture. Comparative studies accomplished in the latter part of the last century, comparing the attitudes of Japanese parents and American parents about arithmetic skills was revealing. Read More
Book Review: Active Arithmetic! and Math Lessons for Elementary Grades April 28 2017
Are you concerned about your child’s math skills? Are you wondering how to bring a math idea to your class in an unusual, memorable way? These books are indispensable! Perhaps the best thing about these books is that they turn your mind from the drier approaches to teaching arithmetic, and open the faucet of your own imaginative ideas for teaching math.There’s No Minute Like the Last Minute! December 16 2016
Waldorf Publications and the Research Institute for Waldorf Education have many fine possibilities for thoughtful gifts when thoughtfulness in the hectic season becomes hard to muster.Consider the caliber and depth of some of these gifts — remember, books and subscriptions keep giving long into the future!
Being Nine Years Old June 16 2016
The teacher knelt before the boy to explain how to cross the street carefully and to check to see if he felt uneasy about crossing without a teacher holding his hand. The boy’s mother was taking a job in the area and she wanted her children in a Waldorf school. The boy had come to visit the second grade that day. He had, up till then, been home schooled, and there was a question about whether or not the boy belonged in second grade or third grade because of his age—older than the youngest in the third grade and younger than the oldest in the second grade.
After the teacher had completed explaining carefully how to cross the street without a teacher helping him, the teacher asked, “Can you do that?.....