Music as Meaningful Work, Vegetables

On Wednesday, 9 middle school students and I performed songs on voice and guitar for our nursery students.  Some of our nursery children built a dance stage and created a new dance for each song.  Others played elsewhere in the room with their focus seeming to be there.

When the middle school students left, almost all of our nursery children gathered around their music stands and created an orchestra using pieces of wood and other play objects from our classroom.  The nursery children were engaged and focused in this re-creation.  This opportunity to imitate out of freedom real and purposeful work is an important part of what we provide in Waldorf Early Childhood education.  Over the years, and this year in particular, I have been exploring the ways in which being a musician or music teacher can be a meaningful occupation worthy of imitation by the young child; just as there is the archetype of the cobbler or baker or weaver, my vision of a traditional village includes the town musician (think of the Donkey from "The Bremen Town Musicians" or piano teacher--with all its joy and sternness).  J.S. Bach's father, for example, was a violinist who played in an orchestra twice a day every day in the town square in a village in what was to become Germany.  Without compelling students to take up formal music instruction too soon (avoiding another archetype, the child prodigy who burns out at a young age), I hope to permeate the children's surroundings with music, not so much that they become inspired to find their own musical gifts later (great though that is), but so that they grow up with the concept that joy and work and work with joy can coexist harmoniously.

Thank you for bringing vegetables and fruit all year.  More and more children eat a great deal of soup, bread, and rice.  As such, we do not need many pieces of fruit at all.  In recent weeks, we have had a great deal of apples and few vegetables come in; like the Union and Confederate armies, I have been making apple soup with the children.  While this has its merits, my hope is to allow children chances to taste and eat a variety of vegetables.  If possible, please concentrate on bringing vegetables for our snack for the remaining weeks of the school year.

Thank you,

William Geoffrey Dolde