Art of Homeschooling Podcast
Join Jean Miller, a homeschooling mom of three grown children, for enlightening stories, strategies, interviews, and encouragement to help you thrive as a homeschooling parent. In each episode, Jean helps you let go of the overwhelm and get in touch with inspiration. You CAN create a homeschool life you love. And here on this podcast, we keep it sweet and simple to help you develop the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Look for new episodes every Monday.
Art of Homeschooling Podcast
Ditching the Dogma
EP200: Is it time to rethink your homeschooling approach? Discover innovative ways to customize the Waldorf approach with our special guest, Robyn Beaufoy from Waldorfish, on our landmark 200th episode! Robyn takes us through her fascinating journey from park ranger to Waldorf educator, highlighting the significance of breaking free from rigid educational dogma. Explore the child-centered, developmental approach that sets Waldorf education apart.
In this episode, Robyn and Jean delve into the dogma that often surrounds the Waldorf approach and how "trying to do it right" can feel like a game of telephone, where the original intent gets lost. They discuss the importance of continuous innovation and personalization to keep the Waldorf method vibrant. They also tackle common misconceptions and practices like festivals, math gnomes, and circle time, showcasing how to keep this hands-on homeschooling method lively and practical. and vibrant. Their discussion emphasizes the flexibility and freedom that comes from responsible innovation. Listen in for practical tips for homeschooling parents to prioritize your children's needs and take home valuable insights for your homeschooling adventure.
Find the Show Notes Here (www.artofhomeschooling.com/episode200)
Check out Waldorfish Courses Here (www.waldorfish.com)
Inspired at Home Membership (www.artofhomeschooling.com/inspiredathome)
Thanks for listening! Follow us on Instagram or find us on Facebook.
You're listening to the Art of Homeschooling podcast, where we help parents cultivate creativity and connection at home. I'm your host, jean Miller, and here on this podcast you'll find stories and inspiration to bring you the confidence you need to make homeschooling work for your family. Let's begin. Hello friends, and welcome to episode 200 here on the Art of Homeschooling Podcast. It's a little hard to believe that we're at Episode 200 with over 125,000 downloads. I started this podcast back in the fall of 2020, so the fourth anniversary is coming up in October, and here we are Today for this 200th episode. I've invited a very special guest, robin Beaufoy from Waldorfish. Hello, robin, and welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hi, happy, 200th episode. That's incredible, incredible 200 of anything is amazing.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Yeah, it's hard to believe, really on my end, like I just record a podcast episode each week and here we are, so fun. Robin and I have been online friends for years and in fact, we met in person in Atlanta in 2019, I think Wow. I know A Waldorf homeschooling conference, but we get together on Zoom to chat, which is always fun, and one of our favorite things to talk about is how to customize the Waldorf approach to meet the needs of our children your children in an authentic way, of our children, your children in an authentic way. So today we're talking all about ditching the dogma. I know, because none of us want to just accept things without question right or blindly follow any educational approach. So stay tuned for our top tips and lots of examples of how you can ditch the dogma and make Waldorf your own. But before we dive in, I want to introduce you to Robin, in case you don't know her, and we'll also touch on all that Waldorfish offers to homeschoolers. So here we go.
Speaker 1:An early career as a park ranger led Waldorfish CEO, robin Beaufoy, to her love of illustrating and education. Trained initially as both a public school and Waldorf teacher, she has been involved in art and education for over 25 years, including homeschooling her two children for some of that time. Robin is the keeper of the creative vision held by the Waldorfish team, which serves up modern, waldorf-inspired curriculum resources for homeschooling families and teacher training. Working out of the premise that life is short but sweet for sure, she empowers soul-filled teachers and families to find their joy in teaching and making art. Robin is the author, illustrator of From here to Everywhere, a book for children and their grownups about living our best lives and sometimes losing someone we love.
Speaker 1:Oh, I'm so excited to have you, and I just want to mention here that there are so many members of my Inspired at Home community who talk about Waldorf Fish Courses. Oh, I love it. It's so fun to know. So people will ask do you recommend this? Who's done it? You know, and that kind of thing. And of the favorites, oh, yeah, tell me. Yeah, include the form drawing, for okay, one through four botany. Everybody loves the bottom. Great, that's so nice. The geometry awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, I will pass that on to the teachers of those courses.
Speaker 1:They will love that yeah, and I think because as our kids get older, it can be harder and harder to find resources right that are art and Waldorf inspired. So, yeah, I think that's such a great thing and I just wanted to share that with you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I love hearing that.
Speaker 1:So, as I was beginning to think about this conversation, I thought, oh my gosh. As I was beginning to think about this conversation, I thought, oh my gosh, we could have just recorded all of our conversations through the years, it's true.
Speaker 2:It's true, might have been a little disjointed, but yeah, this has been an ongoing theme for you and I since 2019, which seems like a really long time ago. I know it does, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:But I just want to say we love talking about this stuff. So here is the first question for both of us, and that is when you first discovered, when either of us first discovered Waldorf, what was our impression of the approach and did it feel dogmatic? And I just found that to be so interesting. I always love kind of going back to the origin story right, and I'll talk more about that with the very first Waldorf school too. But I'm just wondering, I know little bits and pieces of your story, but when you first found Waldorf and then you did teacher training, what was that like for you? And then you did teacher training?
Speaker 2:What was that like for you? So I came to know about Waldorf education when I was in my master's program and I was studying comparative education. And so I was looking and I this was me, pre children, you know, early twenties footloose, fancy free, no obligations. I was studying comparative education, so looking at lots of different pedagogies, different ways of educating, and Waldorf was one of the many things that was served up to us to take a look at and I I didn't not necessarily fall in love at the time, but it definitely caught my attention at the time and I loved the idea that it was child-based.
Speaker 2:The whole idea is that you're looking at the child or the children in front of you and putting together the puzzle pieces and figuring out what they need. So you're not necessarily trying to give this blanket approach that will work for 30 children. Really, you're looking at the child or the you know the small group of children in front of you, and, using a foundational understanding of child development, then you're creating the different things that you're going to use with the children. And I found that to be very different than some of the other approaches that we were looking at, so I sort of tucked it in the back of my mind. You know, someday when I have children, I would like to do that with them if possible. So that's kind of how I first came to notice it and it definitely did not feel dogmatic. But also I wasn't in it. You know what I mean. I wasn't experiencing it in real time, I was only reading about it at that point. So no dogma at that point.
Speaker 1:It's so compelling to me that concept of looking at the children or the child in front of you and using that as the starting point for the curriculum, for the lessons, for whatever it is that you bring them. My first experience with a dogmatic approach was actually Montessori, because I, a little earlier than you, was in grad school and Waldorf wasn't even mentioned. Oh yeah, didn't exist.
Speaker 2:Didn't exist right.
Speaker 1:And so to me, as I'm listening to these different possible approaches, montessori seemed the most alternative, I guess.
Speaker 1:When I started teaching. I began teaching in high school English, but I was so discouraged I then, the next year, went and worked as an assistant in a Montessori early childhood classroom and I'm fresh out of grad school, I'm working at this Montessori school in Atlanta and I just heard myself say over and over again, as instructed this is what I was supposed to say to these little three-year-olds that's not how we use the material, that's not how we work with the material, and I'd have to redirect them over and over again, and that felt very limiting to me and kind of discouraging, like I did not feel good about that. So then, when I discovered Waldorf, I was fascinated, and the truth is I didn't feel like it was very dogmatic. I didn't have that reaction or that response. And when I was thinking about this, I'm wondering if it's because at the time when I first started homeschooling my oldest two, you could not purchase a Waldorf curriculum. It did not exist. Those did not exist. Yeah, they didn't exist.
Speaker 1:And so everyone was creating lessons based on looking at the children before you, them, and so to me. Then, when the curriculum did sort of arrive on the scene, that's when I started questioning like, oh my gosh, maybe I'm making these main lesson books all wrong, Like I'm just following this lockstep approach of I read the story and then have them draw a picture, and the next day we view it and write a little summary, and I began to began to think there must be more like ways to break out of this approach and then also that you know, maybe I, maybe I'm supposed to be doing a three-day rhythm instead of a two-day rhythm and maybe you know so then I think that's when people started really looking at the curriculum, the grade level, like packaged curricula.
Speaker 1:Right and thinking oh, this is the way to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been thinking about that the past couple of days, leading up to knowing that I was going to be talking with you, and I was thinking about my teacher training experience. And again, I wasn't in the classroom for all of that teacher training. I was in the classroom for some of it, but a lot of it was just being a student myself and being taught by these legendary mentor teachers who had, you know, decades of experience, one whose father knew Steiner, like you know. The legacy of the people that were teaching me was incredible. The legacy of the people that were teaching me was incredible, and I was willing to take their word for it.
Speaker 2:I was young, I knew that I was going to be going into Waldorf teaching within the next couple of years and I wanted somebody to tell me what to do, because I didn't want to do it. Quote unquote wrong. You know, I wanted to be liked by my future colleagues. I wanted the future parents of my future students to feel like I was doing a good job, and so I was very willing to take the word of the people who were teaching me that this is how we do this, and it was a lot of. This is what you do in fourth grade. You read these stories, you study this thing, you might sing these specific songs and maybe your class will pick. You'll pick one of these two different plays for your class to do, but this is what we do in fourth grade. Yeah, and I was just willing to take their word for it to have that as a starting point.
Speaker 1:And I actually think on the journey, right as parents, as homeschoolers, we often start there, right, we want that and then-.
Speaker 2:It's a foundation. It offers like stability, which is, again, we're all looking for. That you know we need a place to start, So-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then as we grow and learn and our children grow, we begin to branch out right, we begin to be willing to sort of look beyond. And so for me that came in this incredible interest in the very first Waldorf school. So I started when my kids, like I think my boys were probably like 10 and 8. So we had been homeschooling a few years and I just became fascinated in the first Waldorf school and sort of everything around it Because I had not gone through teacher training. And there are those three collections, those three books that are collections of Steiner's lectures that are read in teacher training. So I decided I would read them myself.
Speaker 1:Wow, I know them myself and I had these conversations with my friend Allison, who is also an educator and a homeschooling mother of three, and we had these conversations about the lectures and it was fascinating to me because I felt like going back to that original first school and also knowing that Steiner didn't really intend to start a movement, right he Right In one school. He only knew, he only knew. It just helped me sort of break loose a little bit from this idea of there's only one way, like this is what we do in fourth grade. This is what we do. This is how we've always done it, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:So I decided I would look up the word dogma, which is often something that I like to do, and so I'm going to share a little bit about that here, and then we'll get back to talking about the Waldorf approach in particular.
Speaker 1:So dogma is defined by Merriam-Webster as a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by members of a group without being questioned or doubted. Doing things a certain way, without questioning blind acceptance, right, and it's really a set of assumptions that operate in the background of everything that we do as educators, as homeschoolers, that drives our decisions, our actions, but we're not even really thinking about it. So this reminds me of a story. I don't know where I read this, or maybe someone my mother-in-law might've told me this story, but there's this really interesting, funny story about I don't know if you've heard this, but it goes like this so, for generations, women cut off the ends of their pot roasts before cooking them, because that's the way it's always been done, right? One of them asks their mother, their grandmother. They find out that their great grandmother only did that because she didn't have a large enough roasting. Isn't that just so great and educational dogma can be so like that too, like it gets passed down, and we blindly follow.
Speaker 1:You know this approach without question can I give an example?
Speaker 2:this is like the Waldorf version of the roasting pan, yes, story. So when I did finally pick up my first class and start teaching at a Waldorf school, you know, in the few weeks before the school year started, a very well-intentioned teacher who had previously taught that same grade, like I, was going to be picking up a sixth grade, so she had taught the sixth grade the year before. She came to me with two or three gigantic bins full of books and books and resources and I don't even know what else, all kinds of like science material and all this stuff. And she said here, this is what we do in sixth grade. And she handed me these things. And I was like, okay, part of me was actually a lot of me was very relieved that somebody had just handed me some things and basically told me if you do everything in these bins, you will do what we've always done in sixth grade.
Speaker 2:And now, as I look back at it, like if you stretch that out over time, like I handed the same set of bins to the next teacher you know at the end of the year who's going to pick up the sixth grade and I say to them this is what we do in the sixth grade. And then they do the same thing for the next teacher. This is what we do in the sixth grade. And just sort of blindly following that stretch that out over decades, just sort of blindly following that stretch that out over decades, I mean, you can see where these, where this dogma, where these ideas sort of like we assume, oh well, this teacher, this mentor teacher, handed me these things. She must, she knows what she's doing. So Steiner must have said this is what we do in the sixth grade, or she would never have handed me these bins of resources. So Steiner must have said this, you know, Steiner must have said this is what we do.
Speaker 1:And then it's growing stale and sort of stagnant, right the approach.
Speaker 1:If that continues on and on and on and yet no one quite knows what to do, right, right, and so you know, I think we're all, many of us are attracted to Waldorf because, I mean, they're probably different reasons, but there's the beauty, there's color, there's art, there's nature and the love of the natural world, the stories, the songs and all the things and probably the look of a Waldorf classroom, even if beautiful, yeah, yes, the aesthetic, even if they haven't visited one. They've seen pictures, right, and I think you were the one when I talked about this, I think I spoke about this at the Atlanta conference and how far removed, like your example of the bins, right, and how far removed. I often say we're at least three times removed from the original school, because we're trying to copy today's Waldorf schools that are copying the earlier Waldorf schools, that are copying the first Waldorf school, and there's a lot that gets lost in translation here, and I think you're the one who came up with the analogy of the game of telephone.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's a terrible game of telephone.
Speaker 1:It's a terrible game of telephone, yeah, and so I think that you know, just as an example like yes, we want to preserve childhood, that's just one tiny little thing, but we don't want to isolate our children from the world and live in a bubble right. And so learning to, for us as the adults and the teachers, to customize, to personalize the approach is just so important to bring it new life, to gather, you know, a sense of creativity and a spark To keep it, living to keep it alive, so that it's not this dead thing.
Speaker 1:To keep it living, to keep it alive so that it's not this dead thing. Which is so interesting because that is exactly why Rudolf Steiner created the approach in the first place, because he felt like teaching at the time was too abstract was the word he used, and that it was boring and not alive. Right, he wanted to bring it alive with the lively arts. So I remember earlier on in my journey, also, at some point so probably a few years after, I started looking at information about the first Waldorf School. Oh, and in fact I actually looked this up in 2008, stephen Segarin published the first article that he calls Playing. Steiner Says yes, oh my gosh. So it's Love his work, love his work. So he's busting these myths and I'm going to give a couple of examples here in a sec, but I just want to give a little background.
Speaker 1:So, steven Segarin, high school Waldorf teacher. He also taught elementary earlier on, but he's taught in many of the recognizably named Waldorf schools around the country in the United States, and I'll be sure to link to the two articles that he still has on his blog, on his website. The first one is Planksteiner says 22 myths about Waldorf education, and then he has a second one, nine more, and here's a quote. I just want to read this quote from his first article that was published in 2008. And when I discovered this, I felt so liberated. Yeah, so freeing, it's so freeing. So here's a quote. Right, yeah, so freeing, it's so freeing. So here's a quote. Understandably, but not necessarily happily, waldorf education is known primarily by its external characteristics and trappings, characteristics about which, surprisingly often, rudolf Steiner himself had little or nothing to say. Or what he had to say about teaching and learning is not what we find in practice today, or what he had to say leaves open many more possibilities than are available in practice today.
Speaker 2:Think into that for a moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, think into that for a moment. Yeah, you can relax. Yeah, take a deep breath, take a deep breath. So here are just a couple of examples in these articles. These are practices in Waldorf schools that now a lot of homeschoolers do too.
Speaker 2:I'm just going to name three the first is and I have one too we'll see. Actually I have a couple, but we'll see if we can hit them.
Speaker 1:Oh good, so the first one is festivals. I always find this to be so interesting because Steiner did talk about festivals a lot, but they were in his broader lectures to people who came from all over the world just to listen to him speak, so it wasn't specific to the schools, to starting the school. So, yes, festivals are wonderful, but it does not have to happen in a school setting. I find that to be a bit of a relief to some homeschoolers who are trying to make these perfect festivals. Math gnomes I just think it's hilarious that math gnomes were really invented by Dorothy Hare at one of the first schools in the US. Steiner did not talk about math gnomes. He actually suggested beginning to teach arithmetic with division by bringing in pieces of paper or beans.
Speaker 2:Yep, or like rocks, or you know acorns that you found on the way to school. I just love that.
Speaker 1:And then of course, circle time. I talk about this a lot. That circle time was not a Steiner invention, it really came about. It's sort of a mashup of nursery schools in the UK and preschools and even public schools, and so there's nothing wrong with circle time. But at home it can sometimes feel really self-conscious and can go on. It's hard to do a circle with two people or three people?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Barbara Dewey's line about that is she's she homeschooled one of her grandchildren and he said to her one morning grandma, this isn't a circle, it was just the two of them, this isn't a circle, this is a line, a line, line time. So yes to movement, but we can weave it in throughout lessons and throughout the day, yeah. So those are my examples.
Speaker 2:Both of my examples kind of have to do with the same thing, which is what we tend to assume. Steiner said about the stories that need to be used in each specific grade, and so there seems to be this assumption that in the second grade we studied the saints. We look at the stories from the Catholic saints, and in truth he never said that what he, what the indication he did give was to use fables from the animal kingdom, fables related to the animal kingdom, and he didn't even say specifically Aesop's fables, he just said fables. And so, if you think about it, there isn't a culture in the world that doesn't have their own fables related to the animal kingdom, to the animal world. And so suddenly we're free from having to do.
Speaker 2:There's nothing wrong with the stories of the saints. You can absolutely include those in your second grade year if it makes your child's eyes light up, but you could also use fables from different parts of the world if that's more relevant to you. And then the other example is similar this notion that we're supposed to study Norse mythology in the fourth grade, that every fourth grade around the world should be studying Norse mythology. And in truth he did not specifically say Norse mythology. He said stories from ancient history, and so suddenly think about what that means. It means if you're in India, they have their own stories from ancient history that are way more relevant to them than Norse mythology in China, in Africa, you know. So, knowing those things, suddenly there's all this freedom and there's just not really a need for the dogma of we do it this way because this is how it's always been done and I just love that.
Speaker 1:I love it so much because, also from a teacher's perspective, the reality is that those practices of saints in second grade have become customs, and there is interesting reason for the custom right. It's to contrast the sort of our reaching for the divine and being the best we can be with the foibles of the animal characteristics right that we have some similarities to, and then to contrast both of those to sort of call us, to call our children to be the best version of themselves. So that's an interesting teaching approach, right. And again, I think that's where what we're saying, and what I love about Sigaran's work too, is it doesn't mean that, if Steiner didn't say it, you have to ditch it all together. It just means that you don't have to keep doing it without questioning it.
Speaker 2:You don't have to do it just because.
Speaker 1:Just because, and so we can always circle back to looking at our children in front of us. Yeah, I just think that's so. Again, it's so freeing and, from an educational perspective, a very effective way right to teach. Oh, I do want to mention that Sigarin has a new book out that has some of these myths, and so Robin and I, when we came on the call, both held up our book. Here we go and one of the wonderful things so a lot of the myths, like the articles that I mentioned, are incorporated into the book and he comes up with. This is one of my favorite parts of it. He has this matrix in the book where he gives these three categories for a subject, and one is the past. The book is called how the Future Can Save Us and he has three columns for a given topic, and the columns are about the past Did Steiner say this or something about this or not?
Speaker 1:And then about the present what is the present practice in schools today? And then about the future. Should we continue that practice? So fascinating to me? I love this because it reminded me of Waldorfish and your work. But that Steiner said painting on both white and colored and tinted paper was enlivening right For children, for children. And then his comment about the present is that many teachers don't even know this, aren't even aware. That's said this, and so, for the future, we should strongly consider making this a part of our practice. Right slash, episode 200.
Speaker 1:A couple other things that I want to mention are that, first of all, I do think that the dogma within the Waldorf community movement has begun to shift right. It has begun to kind of break loose, and I think it started with the 100th anniversary. So in 2019, that marked 100 the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America they talked about, in celebration of the 100th anniversary, this phrase kept coming up of responsible innovation, yes, and so I want to read a quote, and then I want to hear your thoughts on this, robin. So here's a quote from an article I'll also link to this. In the show notes, an author, beverly Amico, shares about conversations at the conference, and she concludes the article with this quote Together, we can shift paradigms around the way things quote have always been, and make learning experiences relevant to our students, responsive to their unique identities and tailored to their abilities. Oh, yes. So isn't it wonderful that within the movement, this is happening, this shift is happening too?
Speaker 2:Yes, I remember that year I attended a local meeting of many Waldorf minds and the topic of the two days, I think, was responsible innovation and what does that mean? And I think I mean it translates directly into homeschooling as well. I don't see any walls between that, between the classroom and homeschool, as far as what responsible innovation means. And I think the most important thing to remember is that when we say responsibly innovate, we're not saying wing it, we're not saying do whatever you feel like it's fine. Steiner didn't say you know Right, and we're not throwing it all out right, no, right, right.
Speaker 2:What it means is to, based on an understanding of the foundation and an understanding of your child's developmental stage, then you can sort of launch from there and create learning opportunities based on the specific child or children in front of you. And, of course, you and I are biased and we think that homeschooling is the far more ideal scenario in which to responsibly innovate, right Versus a classroom that has to do with a variety of factors. But responsibly innovating is just that being very responsible about how you tweak, change, modify what you already know as like the basis or the foundation, and then tweaking it, changing it to meet the child in front of you.
Speaker 1:It's so exciting. It is so exciting and I really think I have somewhere I wish I had in front of you. It's so exciting, it is so exciting and I really think I have somewhere I wish I had in front of me and I don't. But I have somewhere, a one sentence the elevator pitch of Waldorf education.
Speaker 1:And it's something like Waldorf education is an approach that incorporates rhythm, the lively arts, child development and our own inner work into the lessons that we create for our children. And to me, just like you said, when we can get to the point in our journey and it might not be right at the beginning because we're still trying to understand, right, what this program is about but then we we get to a point in our journey where we're ready to begin to think about well, how do I want to do this for my children, right?
Speaker 1:And yeah, and recognize that there is no one right way and that we can truly be Waldorf inspired, right, yeah, I just think that's so much fun. Okay, so I want us to wrap up with tips for ditching the dogma. Let's call it that. So the first one I'm going to say is and you already really said this was homeschool your kids. Yeah, a hundred percent yeah, because this is the best setting in which to, just like you said, be able to innovate responsibly and really bring the freedom that Steiner talked about.
Speaker 2:That's why he?
Speaker 1:created this right he wanted.
Speaker 2:And homeschooling your kids. I'm just going to totally interrupt you here. It doesn't mean that we're saying you have to teach them every single thing, just means you're pulling them out of the larger system and then creating an educational experience for them. That might involve lots of other teachers and lots of other resources, but you're tailoring it, you are responsibly innovating it, to meet their needs.
Speaker 1:So yes, and I love that, and so that could include courses from Waldorf no-transcript to homeschoolers at that point. So we were very hopeful. But in the end what the district decided was, even though they gave what we notified them and in the state of Ohio the language is that we, then our children, were excused from compulsory attendance we were not allowed to enroll them part-time at the school district. So, just like you said, piecing together different things, if we wanted them, for example, to take even studio art or to take math right At the local public high school, we were not allowed to count that toward the required hours. So it's like okay it makes no sense.
Speaker 1:We get to choose, but we can't choose you like that. Yeah, that's very confusing. It is very confusing, but homeschooling is the place to innovate. So do you have any other tips? I have a couple jotted down here that are kind of a summary of what we've talked about.
Speaker 2:I always find it very reassuring and very helpful to do things like go back and look at Steven Segarin's book as one example and just to be reminded, because he has put in so much work into researching what did Steiner actually say versus what did he never say and I find looking at his writing so reassuring and so encouraging and like sort of buoys me up again to just be like okay, I am on the right track, it's okay if I choose not to do this one thing but instead choose to innovate, and even in talking to you over the years as another example, like find a friend, talk to a friend who's been doing this, maybe just a tiny bit longer than you or not longer than you, it doesn't really even matter, but just find somebody to talk to, find somebody's work to read. Those have always been really helpful for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then to sort of wrap up some of the examples that we mentioned, you know, use a purchase curriculum if you have one, as a resource, not a lockstep. Do this, this, this and this, right, right.
Speaker 2:As a foundation.
Speaker 1:I say that just all the time to homeschoolers like make some decisions yourself first about what you want your year to look like, what you want this month to look like, and then pull some of the things that resonate with you from the curriculum. You can use online courses from Waldorfish and also those stories. Like you mentioned choosing the stories, I have a list on my website of the list that Steiner made on the chalkboard for those very first teachers, and he named one type of story per grade. So fairy tales in first grade, fables from the animal kingdom in second grade, like that's it One type of story, and there's so much more freedom in that.
Speaker 1:Yes, we can use library books instead of memorizing stories, because Steiner actually talked about. Yes, telling a story from memory is a wonderful thing, and he talked to the very first teachers about how to read stories to the children. All right, well, those are some of the tips, and I hope that all of you listeners have really taken this to heart and recognize that you're on a journey too, and we don't want to do things just because that's the way they've always been done. Right? I'm sure that this is what Steiner would have wanted, right? He asked to those very first teachers in that first school to teach the children in that particular community in which they were working. He wanted them to create their own curriculum based on observations of those children in front of them, and there was no written curriculum. He didn't ever write a curriculum down because he didn't want it to become too fixed.
Speaker 2:There were no. Yeah, exactly, there were no fixed standards that he ever presented.
Speaker 1:He wanted teachers to find what lights them up and create the stories, or find the stories to create the lessons themselves. So no one person gets to dictate right how children are taught. We get to observe them and then create something fashioned just for them so we can strip away all that baggage of we're supposed to do it a certain way, I know.
Speaker 2:Scrapping shoulders again.
Speaker 1:Any final thoughts or comments that you want to share.
Speaker 2:I think we should get together. When you record your 300th episode and your 400th episode, we should circle back to this idea, this theme, and see what else we have to say. I love that I always love talking with you, Jean.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love talking with you too, robin, and I think our both of our work in the world is so compatible and comes from a similar place of helping homeschoolers craft and teachers craft something that's truly authentic and really meets the needs of the children in the parents' or teachers' care Teachers Care. So I want to invite all the listeners to just ask yourself what are the golden nuggets of Waldorf for you? That's what I want you to ask yourself, and start there. You don't have to tear it all down and build it back up. It's just a journey, so start with those golden nuggets. Thank you so much, robin, for joining me, so tell everyone where they can find you.
Speaker 2:Thank, you for having me. We are. Walderfishcom Online is our website, where you can find all of our different courses that we offer, and then on Instagram and Facebook, we are at Walderfish.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. Thank you so much. So thanks for listening everyone, and remember that you can find the show notes and I'll have links to everything we mentioned in those show notes at artofhomeschoolingcom slash episode 200. And remember, you can ditch the dogma and make Waldorf work for your. Thanks for listening the dogma and make Waldorf work for you. Thanks for listening. That's all for today, my friend, but here's what I want you to remember Rather than perfection, let's focus on connection. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you on the next episode of the Art of Homeschooling podcast.