Soup; Refining, Drawing Article

Thank you for all the carrots and soup vegetables last week. Please remember to bring soup vegetables Tuesday (if your child is concerned, I will prepare bread for them).

We had a generous amount of fruit last week, and I have more than enough fruit for the coming 2 day week.

Wednesday again seemed a positive day for our children. The woods around our school provide teachers and children a gift, and our nursery children seem to be taking advantage of this gift. As I worked on the trail Wednesday, children pretended to cook, pretended to be bears in caves near me, pretended to be bears cooking. While children had a lot of freedom, I sensed they also felt comfort from having me nearby on the trail work and Michael near the teepee sawing wood. We will continue with this work and rhythm in the coming weeks.

It was great to have the 7th and 8th graders help our nursery children get dressed and come to the woods with us (we will try to work out any clothes that end up getting traded with all this help). While many of our nursery children have enjoyed the visits before, the open space of the outdoors with the protectiveness of the woods seemed to allow both the younger and old children to relax and find joy and comfort in being in the moment--something we could wish for for all of us.

You may notice that your children have not had as much time to draw. This has not stemmed from a desire to limit drawing but from my observation of rich their play has been inside the classroom (every child gets involved right away with amazingly few conflicts at present), and I felt by introducing the mats, papers, and crayons, I might be distracting the children from their work. As I have said and written before and advised other teachers when mentoring them, one of the most important skills an early childhood teacher can have is to keep the day nourishing and simple by being willing to exclude certain activities, artistic work, and the like. When I was in teacher training, I remember a frenzy that would come about when we would learn of all the wonderful things a teacher in a Waldorf kindergarten could do; it began to become pretty stressful when realized we couldn't do everything without creating a really hectic and unhealthy morning. Over the years I have grown from the process of refining, simplifying, eliminating, sometimes adding, and working like an artist to craft a rhythm of the morning that really helps the children in my care flourish--what may work one year may need to change the next.

Drawing is a wonderful activity. It is also one that a child can dive into with passion for days or weeks or months at age 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6, and it is an activity that a child can let sleep for days or months and pick up again with a fervor. Waldorf educators take children's drawings with great interest--especially for what they can reveal about the development of the child. I recommend the book Understanding Children's Drawings: Tracing the Path of Incarnation by Michaela Strauss. The first few chapters, in particular, help us to make sense of the scribbles, spirals, circles, and crosses of young children's drawings. I believe a copy of this book is available in the parent library. I am also providing this preview of the book from google; the preview contains the chapters on drawings for preschool age children. If it is hard to read on the computer screen, you may wish to scroll down to the chapters on drawings from preschool children.

I look forward to seeing you at my talk on conflict on Wednesday at 5pm. Kindergarten and parent & child families have been invited as well.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde