I'm going to write a book

[mrsbrown]

It will be a collection of all the things you can do around the house, with a toddler in tow. It will include only activities that you have to do anyway, and instructions for how to include the child in your life. It's the stuff nobody tells you, but you have to learn in self defence. I have never seen a book like it. If you look through the shelves in a bookshop or library, you could come away with the impression that stay at home parents spend their days finding ways to amuse their children and never get anything done. I can see it would be very popular with the Rudolph Steiner set.

1. On a really hot day, defrost the freezer. Allow your toddler (or older child) to play with the ice and the plastic ice pick thingy. Let them sit on the icey cold towel you put on the floor to catch the water.

It's not hot today, but I realised in the middle of it that it really is an ideal hot weather toddler amusement activity. It kept my 14 year old amused for at least 20min too. It must be more exciting than I thought.

Also, I want to keep this in mind:

Kinder and Prep

During the first seven years children are physically forming and live very much in their imagination. This great capacity to enter into imaginative pictures and stories is a good place to begin the process of learning. Free, creative play is considered the best preparation for self-realising adult life.

The teacher endeavours to create an environment that gives children time to play and encourages them to exercise their imagination and learn to conjure up ideas from within themselves. Simple homely tasks and artistic activities to both do and see are balanced with story telling, singing games and generous play times. A rich supply of natural materials provides scope for imagination in play, which refined toys often deny.

Activities offered for the four to six year olds are based on the house and garden. These include sweeping, gardening, cooking, building cubbies, looking after animals, singing, listening to stories, helping to prepare the meal table, cutting fruit, painting, clay modelling and drawing. Children learn to enjoy building, using the natural materials in the room to make their own constructions and patterns. Practical experience helps the child develop confidence and capabilities.

Steiner education seeks to nurture the senses through water-colour painting and singing, beeswax and clay modelling. The teacher works consistently to provide rhythm and structure to the day, week, year and whole curriculum, to harmonise with the child’s natural rhythms.

At this age, children are discovering how to relate socially with a peer group and take part in fundamental life tasks. Through meeting and playing creatively together, children learn vital interpersonal skills. The teacher plays an important role in enabling relationships between children to strengthen through play.

Young children develop primarily in their doing, learning through imitation and physical activity. The role of the teacher is to provide a model for the children and a secure space in which to discover the world. They are not yet ready for more formal classes. Thus, the teacher reserves the formal teaching of numbers and letters for the child’s next developmental stage, signalled physically by the change of teeth, at about the age of seven.

From http://www.steiner-australia.org/other/overview.html

Comments

Rantiness.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Ehhhh, Steiner.

Steiner schools give me the screaming heebiejeebies, because right when the kids are at their most sponge like for absorbing early reading and numerical teaching, they _don't_ do it. I've done a fair bit of remedial reading/writing work while I was a highschool and university student, helping kids who had come from steiner schools adjust to reality, and this has given me a strong opinion that Rudolf Steiner was a raving nutter. Sure, steiner schools are great when compared to 19th century ultra strict three Rs and the Cane (read with the same inflection as 'rum, sodomy and the lash') that it was a reaction against, but in the modern world, with advances in neuroscience and brain function knowledge that makes a mockery of the 19th century conception of child development and brain function that Steiner was working with, it's madness to keep to his now obsolete and sometimes kooky ideas.

pant, pant, rant...
(Please note, I've been an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff here, watching the wreck of steiner kids hitting highschool. It's not that there are not brilliant steiner schools out there, but that the brilliant ones seem to do it by _accident_ not by any design)

Re: Rantiness.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm with the Jesuits - 'give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man', albeit not quite so brutally.

Re: Rantiness.

[tabouli.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I have a friend whose daughter is at a Steiner school who will be heading for high school next year. What sort of wrecks did you see?

Re: Rantiness.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Remedial reading, mainly. This was about three people, who'd been to steiner schools until about age 9, but had changed school several times as well. I've also been a bit coloured by a friend who was in a steiner school for most of his education, and is now very pissed off about it. Also a lot of issues with some science stuff, when the steiner school concerned had been rather more traditionally into some of the anthroposophy madness that goes with the whole steiner thing.

Re: Rantiness.

[mrsbrown.livejournal.com]

I have 3 children who have attended a steiner school, and, if I can persuade her father, that's where I imagine that Rose will be heading.

Is it possible that, seeing only wrecks, you have a skewed view of Steiner schools?

I was very happy for my child to spend a year playing, learning to climb trees, and use his imagination; instead of sitting obediently, colouring in, and being sent to remedial reading if they don't learn to read within 6 months.

All my children learned to read after they were 7; the elder two at a state school where it was a problem to be solved and my children became stressed by it, and the youngest at the steiner school where he learned at his own pace. The first word he read out loud was "homogenised".

Our steiner school doesn't stop children from learning to read early, if they're surrounded by words and reading at home, they just have other stuff to use that sponge like brain function for. Socialising, solving problems, getting interested in "stuff" are important skills too.

Re: Rantiness.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

mm. I was reading by age 4, as were the rest of my family, so we were pretty much a year or a year and a half ahead of the other five and six yearolds by the time we went to school.

Most of my issues with steiner schools is from a half a dozen confused kids I met between age 8 and 16, followed by talking to several adults who had gone to steiner schools, and after talking to them, digging around occasionally into what Steiner actually thought. And what he actually thought, although enlightened for the 19th C, is getting close to barking mad now, not quite Madame Blatavsky territory, but close. Bear in mind, I'm an atheist, rationalist card carrying skeptic, though.

So I'm fairly convinced that there's nothing particularly important in the methods and theories of Steiner himself, and indeed, a lot wrong with it. What I do think about why Steiner Schools often throw up better results than state schools is more related to small class sizes and enthusiastic teachers, regardless of what they are actually teaching.

Re: Rantiness.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

I watched my brother and his partner work to set up a steiner stream at their local state school. They're not sucked in by the esoteric bullshit so much as finding that the present state system is not working so well and the Steiner thing works well in comparison, regardless of the idealogy.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they couldn't simply set up a better system at the local state school - it had to either be the state system or this already identified alternative.

Bear in mind your fucked up friends who went to several Steiner schools were having a very non-Steiner experience: Steiner schools go for having the same classmates and the same teacher for the primary years - and chopping and changing schools is generally not a good sign, regardless of the teaching method.

Re: Rantiness.

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

Maybe its also because I'm a rural kid with large family and eclectic parents at a rural school - all the treeclimbing, socialising and stuff happens outside of school, and seems really odd to be curriculum to me - if these things are not happening in the childs home life, it must be very sterile (I'm very wary of having children in a city environment - nowhere to do stuff, and the fun stuff is illegal, or frowned on). But then, in many modern homes with working parents, these things can't happen at home, and so maybe there's a place for making them curriculum.

Dunno. I'm just wierded out by Steiner schools, after a few bad experiences with their products, I guess. The thing is, I only noticed the people who'd had a problem, and I never knew them long enough to work out if the problem was the school, or their home life, or just them.

Re: Rantiness.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

And one of them found Steiner totally unsuitable (while one of my nephews could not cope in the regular system and is now thriving with Steiner).

I'm inclined to agree with the suggestion that Steiner kids don't have trouble learning to read because they generally come from the sort of educated backgrounds where reading is encouraged.

[auntyyolly.livejournal.com]

I went to Steiner school for a little while. After a term, they said to my Dad, "We think she'd prefer the structure of the traditional school system."

They were right. I spent my next term at a rigidly traditional school smiling every time someone said "uniform" "grade" or "exam".

Wasn't as bad as my two years of "home schooling", though. At age 10 I could tell you why a post-modern reading of King Lear was appropriate if looked at from a Bahktinian view, but not Freudian, however, I had no idea where my spleen was (still don't) and have never felt wholly secure on long division (despite a very good A-level in maths).