These verses were written for the students I taught at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley, MA from 1991 to 1999. They were inspired by the indications in Heinz Millers, Healing Forces in the Words and it's Rhythms. Students were given the verse on their birthdays or half-birthdays for those who had summer birthdays. For the following year, the students recited their birthday verse in class on the day of the week on which they were born, with Saturday and Sunday birthdays distributed among the other days.

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Download the article: Bread Making in Parent-Child Groups

by Letitia Costain
Published in Kindling, Issue 8, Autumn 2005 (UK)

Bread making is one of the most satisfying activities to do in Parent and Child groups,
not only for the child but for the parents and carers.
It is one of the most basic ancient and comforting tasks that humans have created
through many transformations of ways of making it, owing to the fact that changes in
human consciousness bring about dietary change. To read more about this very
interesting journey Rudolf Hauschka’s book on Nutrition is very revealing about all
aspects of diet.

Download the play Briar Rose

by Roberto Trostli
Briar Rose, a play for First Grade

Author's note: This play is one of a group of plays written for the classes I taught at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York from 1982–1991 and at The Hartsbrook School in Hadley, MA from 1991-1999. The theme of each play was chosen to address a particular class’s issues and interests, and the characters were rendered with specific students in mind.

When other teachers and classes have performed my plays, I have encouraged them to adapt or revise the play as necessary to derive the maximum pedagogical value from it. Other class’s performances have showed me artistic dimensions of my plays that I could not have imagined, and I have always been grateful to see that my work has taken on new life.

I have posted my plays on the Online Waldorf Library as Microsoft Word documents (contact the OWL for a Word version)so that they can easily be downloaded and changed. I have purposely given few stage directions so that teachers and students will make the plays more their own.

Dear Colleagues: I hope that these plays will serve you well as inspiration, as a scaffold on which to
build your own creation, or as a script to make your own. Please don’t hesitate to take whatever
liberties you wish so that the play may serve you in your work.

Keyword: plays, fairy tales, drama, 1st grade

Download the article: Bringing the Will into Thinking in Adolescence

by Betty Staley
Originally published in Waldorf Journal Project # 13, Educating the Will

As we teachers work with adolescents, we experience the changes they go through in relation to their thinking, feeling, and willing. With the freeing of the astral body, new possibilities occur which change the relationship between the adolescent and the world. It is as if the young person is thrown into the world without a sense of direction. Yet the world of the early 21st century is very different from the one we teachers entered during our own adolescence.

Our generation experienced the dropping of the atom bomb. From that time on, no generation in humanity would live in security; but there would always be the possibility that the earth could be destroyed. All the images from science fiction about the destruction of the planet could really come true. The movie The Last Day confronted our generation with the terrible things that could happen if there is nuclear war.

Today’s generation is living with just as much insecurity, but in a different way. There is not so much the fear that an enemy could use a bomb to destroy the earth, but that we ourselves, we human beings are destroying the earth through our life style, through our greed for energy, for material goods, and for comfort. We have not only affected the extinguishing of species, but we are responsible for changing climate and geography. This is the condition that our young people face today.

Such a condition has several different influences on an adolescent’s will forces. Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, is the movie of our students’ generation. Because it is being shown all over the world, adolescents in many countries are united in their awareness of this dire situation. What kind of influence does this have on their will forces?

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