I found here a nice description about how letters are introduced in Waldorf education, so I won't resummarize it all. Lucy is so excited to be starting school in a few short weeks. She has been chomping at the bit for first grade, mostly for reading and knitting, oh, and flute and math. So basically all of it. I'm excited, too, because first grade is so much fun. (Oh, and second grade too, plus I can't wait to start third grad. So, basically it is all fun).
Jack and Lucy will start together with a quick one week form drawing block, and then move into their first big subject block. Lucy's first block will be what I call "Fairy Tales and Capitals" - the quintessential Waldorfy way of introducing capital letters using fairy tales. She will then do two more blocks of it over the course of the year. In my effort to make sure things are fresh for her this year, I've kept some of our favorite stories from Jack's first grade, and added some new ones. For the first block I'm using Marsha Johnson's Fairy Tale block found in her first grade files. I love the great ways she found to weave the stories into the circle times, and I'm using those, too. I've also purposefully chosen some fairy tales that have songs in Let Us Form a Ring. I also looked to Carrie's list for inspiration. Unless noted, the stories are from Grimm's. I don't think you really need to intro this many letters with the story format, but I really love these stories and didn't want to miss working with any of them.
First Block
M - Water of Life - Mountain
B - Rose Red and Snow White - Bear - has song
W - Hansel and Gretel - Witch
G - The Goose Girl - Goose
Second Block
T - The Children in the Treehouse - Tree (from an African folktale book)
H - The Hut in the Forest - Hut - has song
L - Longshanks, Girth and Keen - Longshanks
B - The Queen Bee - Bee - has song
C and P - The Castle Under the Sea - castle and palace
R - Rumpelstiltskin - Rump. - has song
K - King Thrushbeard - King
Third Block
F - Mother Holle - Feather - has song
S - Twiggy - Snake - Plays for Puppets We saw this performed at Hawthorne Valley and love the story.
A -
E -
I -
O -
U -
So, you noticed all that nothing after the vowels. I didn't really find a good way to introduce them to Jack. We do lots of vowel sound speech exercises during circle time. I like the ideas I've seen about introducing them using a container story, but I don't use a container story for these blocks. So I'm still up in the air with how I'lld handle the vowels for Lu. Jack is reading really wonderfully, so I guess he survived my indecision transformed into lack. How do you intro vowels? Like consonants? Or something better?
