Waldorf’s Integrated Way of Learning (Transcript)

Narrator: Movement and art integrate with learning at the John Moore School in Sacramento, California, one of the first Waldorf-inspired public schools.

Cheryl: Running through the mud, digging with their shovels, and singing to the teacher and really speak to Waldorf Education. It’s always about stimulating the creativity and imagination of the child. What Waldorf methods are, essentially, is an integration of the arts into regular curricular areas.

Izabelle: With one, like sometimes we draw pictures, when we’re done with this, she puts a letter inside some, and we try to figure out the letter.

Teacher: These are first-grade main lesson books. Where the princess was surrounded by faeries, the faeries that surround the princes turned into the letter F. And in this way, the children’s imagination is woken up to the entire world.

Barbara: We have apples that we cut in half to find five seeds. We traced our hands with five fingers. We saw the five-pointed stars, so that we had science integrated with nature studies, and geometry and artistic work before it ever led to mathematics.

Students: Five!

Teacher: Good. Who wants to do the backwards one? Severin? Here it comes.

Students: Ten!

Teacher: Good work, first grade! Who wants to…

Narrator: Kids move to learn math, and social skills.

Vince: They were skipping through the room, following each other around in a chain. It’s developing spatial awareness of what’s happening in the room, and how they’re working as a group.

Taylor: I like the John Moore School, how you get to play instruments, you get to do hand work, movement classes, you get to do all sorts of extra stuff as the schools is going to allow you to do.

Narrator: For more information on what works in public education, go to edutopia.org.