How does waldorf teach reading

Many words have the same sounds but are spelled differently or contain silent letters. Learning such a language takes a long time and requires many abilities that develop over time. Being able to decode words is essential for beginning readers. Another important skill for beginning readers is learning to recognize words at a glance. The Waldorf approach, in its own way, sets the foundation for reading starting in Kindergarten. However, reading is not rushed before writing and soon Waldorf students are typically reading at or above government standardized levels and with improved comprehension.

Most importantly, children who read when they are ready are able to maintain a passion for stories and love of reading further into their older years. See all newsletters ». Keep abreast of what's happening with Waldorf education. RSS Feeds. Waldorf Teachers. Its language is movement. Importance of the Spoken Word At Waldorf schools, from birth to age seven, the focus is on the spoken word.

Repetition Helps Retention The same sequence and stories are repeated in daily circle time for weeks at a time. Writing Begins Holistically In the first grade of Waldorf the alphabet is formally introduced in an imaginative, pictorial way.

If teachers get a break for their own children attending a school where they work, then I can only imagine that would help with teacher retention. With the meager salaries they make, perks are in order. I am curious if there is a book with these beautiful pictures and stories than can be used at home to introduce the letters and their sounds to home schooled children?

I would love to have that resource! Thank you so much for the clear and simple explanation of the Waldorf method for teaching reading. That answers many of my questions. There are also excellent Waldorf homeschool curriculums and many Waldorf inspired parenting blogs and online resources.

Have your children completed second grade yet? Well he can read it but takes about 20 seconds and multiple misreading of the 4 words to get it correct. I panicked and bought 3 Bob sets for summer reading and that just made me feel more panicked! No other kids are not reading simple books recommended by the teacher. Also starting the 15 of 20 kids in his class who have Waldorf school teachers as parents are reading chapter books like Redwall,Pippi Longstocking, and Harry Potter!

One other unique thing about my child is that he is the only child in the class without older siblings so maybe that is a reason?

My son spends hours a day playing with his toys but no time reading outside school. I just feel like there is something I should be doing to help him progress since 1. I read a lot to myself but my son does not care to be read to: he spends hours day playing outside with friends after school then hours playing with Playmobile play sets on his own 5.

He picks lots of books out at library every week but then refuses to sit and let me read any to him. Hi Lola, I am in this position. Putting him 2years behind the state age. What was the outcome for your child? I have three children all Waldorf educated and I work in a Waldorf school. Some of those children will also not be able to memorize their multiplication tables.

It is true that some kids take longer to learn to read and that should be OK. But some kids will never learn to read without direct intervention. Many of the children in 3rd and 4th grade at my school are seeking outside intervention with Lindamood Bell at a very expensive cost to supplement their Waldorf Education. Steiner admonished teachers to observe the students before them and to meet the students coming towards them. Waldorf teachers by and large have acknowledged that more children with learning differences and challenges are coming toward them but I see public and other private schools rising up to meet that challenge at a faster pace than Waldorf.

Rather than hoping a child is just a late reader why not identify dyslexia early on , at the end of 1st grade and work with them in a more direct way in a smaller group going into 2nd grade?

Waldorf schools were innovative years ago, in many ways they still are but their blind spot is that they need to keep evolving if they want to stay in the fore front of innovative education.

I am currently helping out in a third grade Waldorf inspired public classroom. My youngest who was considered on the autisitc spectrum had intensive therapies and is now reading very well. She is six. Have you had any direct experience with this??? What do private Waldorf schools do if a child can not read by the end of third grade???

I am a trained Waldorf teacher and also recently took a course in early literacy for public school contexts. Waldorf methods are changing right alongside public schools. All are learning from one another. This is of course never an across the board thing — each school holds different methods or traditions as successful and each teacher integrates traditional and new methods.

Traditionally Waldorf school methods have stressed developing oral vocabulary and phonological awareness: a very good Waldorf teacher will have spoken or sung from memory 15 or more poems, songs,and stories by the end of the Main Lesson each morning typically with the children reciting and moving along and virtually all Waldorf teachers intentionally enunciate very clearly using markedly richer language then children will generally hear in any other learning context.

These poems and songs repeat, but only for a short time and then are replaced with new ones to match the season of the year and the subject being learned.

The children will also rehearse a long very verbal play for at least 8 weeks every year that they will present at least twice to a large and supportive audience. Children who attend Waldorf schools from a young age generally will excel at oral communication and singing to the point that it is awe inspiring. Also hand eye coordination seeing skills are addressed daily as the children learn very challenging physical skills — handwork daily and physical education skills and have a special movement class called eurythmy if the school can afford the teacher that addresses coordination of all the senses.

So Waldorf schools have much to share as far as a curriculum that intentionally and incidentally teaches sensory integration and phonological awareness!

That said there is room for improvement in diagnosing problems early and if the parents choose early intervention. In this case parents need to be aware of the tendency for some Waldorf teachers and administrators to become defensive on the subject and possibly get help outside the school early on if necessary i.

If a child has an inherited or acquired need for extra support to be able to read at a college level one day it will generally be caught later in a Waldorf school because weak decoding skills are traditionally not seen as a problem until 4th or 5th grade years old in a traditional Waldorf school.

The thought is that the curriculum, which is therapeutic by design, will help with the underlying neurological skills to enable the child to read — just later.

Both from research and anecdotal experience there is some basis for this thinking — that early reading is not a great predictor of later reading ability in educated middle or upper class households. These days however many more children are coming to school with sensory integration disorders both urban and private schools are more challenged to meet the needs of such children and many Waldorf schools are now including spelling skills instruction starting in first or the first half of second grade traditionally spelling skills phonics did not occur until the second half of second grade, e.

This instruction fits in easily to the lesson in which the children copy into their self-made text books. In Waldorf education there will hopefully be more early diagnosis and specific testing as science helps us to learn to detect it. In the end however reading intervention actually amounts to a better reader sitting next to a struggling reader for a certain amount of time each day.

No magic there. No school can do it all. If one sends a child to a more academically based school children will not be getting such a well-rounded, classical education as they would get at a Waldorf school.

It seems easier to fill in the decoding skills than try to get a more typical academically based school to help children to be super well-rounded and healthy. However every child and family is different and the most important thing is that parents look beyond the surface. From working in Waldorf schools most parents these days expect institutions to take care of everything and prefer not to get involved.

Then if something is not right two years have gone by and they accuse the school of not doing its job and yank their children out to attend another school. All schools limp at some level, it is up to parents to support them by at least doing some asking and some supporting of some kind. I attended a Waldorf school kindergarten through 9th grade.

I have various neurodiverse conditions and learning disabilities. I always struggled with things like reading, but my family was assured that it was normal. Eventually, they took me out of half of my courses to receive extra eurythmy and other Waldorf therapies.

By the time I was a teenager, my parents were desperate. I was still struggling to read, and my spelling was illegible even to me. In 9th grade, my ACT score was in the 20th percentile. I had to repeat a grade.

Waldorf did have many nice elements, but I think it can be very problematic if you have any sort of learning disability. My three friends with learning disabilities who are in senior year at Waldorf now have been denied acceptance to any schools besides community college. I needed structure and explanation to learn spelling; I virtually have no noticeable signs of my learning disability, since receiving lessons designed for people with conditions like mine.

Please be careful! They panic. I forced him and bribed him to work through the first of 3 workbooks and now he can read very simple books like Frog and Toad and such. An amazing improvement. I plan using the second workbook now and plan to move onto the third. He is still at the tail-end of readers for his grade. So, I went to the back to school picnic.

The girl replied, my mom taught me long division but then we ran out of workbook pages. There is a girl diagnosed with autism and a boy with down syndrome in the class. The girl with autism reads better than my son and the boy with down syndrome can read simple books.

I will include as an addendum to my previous comment a reference to research concerning phonological awareness, which lent some evidence that P. Scott, Jenny Roberts, and John L. Results of their research showed that prior to kindergarten, children with reading disabilities were distinguished from their typically developing reading counterparts by their performance on tasks of letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills. However, between these groups, only differences in skills related to phonological awareness persisted beyond the kindergarten year.

Measures of phonological awareness distinguished the reading disabled group from the control group at Pre-K and Pre These results are consistent with observations that phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading disability in both children at general risk and genetic risk of reading difficulty.

Waldorf methods use a steady and rich diet of oral recitation and games and songs with movement to teach phonological awareness to children throughout the day and include the learning or two languages, but there is typically in a private Waldorf school lesson no stress placed on any child to learn to get it right or better in the duration of one class, that would be against the philosophy that prefers that education come through artistic pursuit — so we learn to speak a poen beautifully because it is a beautiful, or funny, or challenging to speak poem.

Steiner is quoted as saying that nothing is truly therapeutic from a holistic and spiritual point of view unless it reaches the artistic. Traditional Waldorf teachers ask children to speak to others and to repeat poems and songs with clarity and each day a different child might be chosen to speak some of the days more often repeated poems for the others at the front of the room.

One day after rehearsing at home and in school with the teacher each child gets the chance to recite their poem in front of the class — often while standing or balancing on a stone or piece of wood. Traditionally speech exercises are given to children at each grade level to help them develop in their speech and individual speech exercises are given to children who have difficulty in speaking clearly or to strengthen aspects of their constitutions after a certain grade level depending on the school.

Visual aspects of reading and phonics, or orthography receive attention later in a traditional Waldorf school in order to intentionally delay reading until it is developmentally appropriate. After all, as the saying goes, when a child learns to read they stop reading from the book of nature.

If a child has trouble with hearing the sounds of language, learning orthography may improve phonemic awareness or if a child has trouble with tracking or has dislexia then instruction involving alphabet and word recognition begun early may be in order.

I am a Waldorf past pupil and my son is now in playgroup. We live in Durban South Africa. I would not send my child anywhere else. I am my own living proof that Waldorf education works. Thanks for such a wonderful post breaking it down and explaining. How wonderful that you were able to attend a Waldorf school yourself, Louse, and that now you are able to send your son to one. When I discovered Waldorf education, I wished that I could have had this kind of education when I was growing up.

Teaching in a Waldorf school for so many years gave me a second education. Hi sarah, I just read your article and it is fantastic. My daughter has just started waldrof schooling 2 months ago and is very happy. I was a little worried about the whole reading issue but your article is very informative. Lovely post. I am interested in having my homeschooled children make books of their learning.

Reading English is mostly memory anyway. No reading is required in Waldorf schools until the end of grade 3, or later. The Waldorf curriculum is based on the developmental interests of children, and does not require reading in the early grades. Material is presented by the teacher in dramatic, interesting ways and the children make use of the material in their play and hands-on dramatic and artistic activities. Waldorf schools have several rules-of-thumb to determine readiness for first grade in a child.

Physical development:. There are many other subtle indications of readiness in the child that a parent may be able to recognize. The human brain is divided in two halves, the right and the left side. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. In most people, the left side of the brain dominates and the person is right handed. However, in a significant number of people, the right side dominates and those people are left handed.

Some people do not have a dominant hand. It is often children who are either left-handed or who are ambidextrous who are also late readers. The two sides of the brain are connected by a bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum, a late developing organ in the brain. This organ becomes complete somewhere around the age of seven, give or take a year or two. Learning to read is not possible until this organ is fully developed. Late readers are not less intelligent children!

If you think about it, it makes sense that a better brain might take longer to develop, and therefore late readers may indeed be more intelligent! Until the corpus callosum is developed, nearly all children are dyslexic, that is they see p, d, q, and b as the same letter and often reverse them as well as other letters.

A person who remains dyslexic is often a person who not only sees things as they are but as they could be, a bit of hindrance in learning to read, but an indispensable talent for a creative inventor, architect, or artist! English is a very difficult language to learn. So how can one learn to read by phonics alone?! Phonics can be somewhat useful and a lot of fun if done in a playful way. But your child will perceive you as a liar if you try to tell him that these are rules of the language and he later discovers how many exceptions there are!

You can play with phonics and then joke about the exceptions. Here is an example for your own amusement:. I have a spelling checker. It came with my PC.

It plane lee marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot sea. Eye ran this poem threw it, Your sure reel glad two no. Its vary polished in its weigh. My checker tolled me sew. A checker is a bless sing,. It freeze yew lodes of thyme.

It helps me right awl stiles two reed,. And aides me when aye rime. Each frays come posed up on my screen Eye trussed too bee a joule. Now spelling does knot phase me, It does knot bring a tier. Sow ewe can sea why aye dew prays Such soft wear four pea seas, And why eye brake in two averse Buy righting want too pleas.

Even in such a strict language, he recommended later rather than early literacy, approached with a sense of play. How much more important it is in English, which is so much more difficult to read! Your child WILL learn to read. You merely need to be a patient, enthusiastic, and playful, willing accomplice. You are helping your young spy to crack the code! Thank you Barbara for this great post full of your wisdom and humor!

Hi, I'm Jean.