While relishing October’s warm sunny days and cool damp mornings that encourage the trees to don crimson cloaks, it would be wise to remember that early whispers of Autumn soon give way to Jack Frosts earnest howls.

It’s the first day of school and a brand new class of kindergarteners are seeing the Waldorf School of Baltimore’s newest classroom for the first time. Fourteen sets of wide, wonder-filled eyes take in the newly constructed space as they are warmly welcomed by their teachers, Ms. Lida Lawrence and Ms. Haley Snyder. In this classroom, students find a beautiful play kitchen (built by a loving grandparent), open ended play materials, child-sized stools, and new wooden tables ready for snack time and art projects. No one can deny this is a beautiful space to learn.

Form drawing, or Dynamic Drawing, as it was originally termed by Waldorf Education’s founder, Rudolf Steiner, is an interesting and integral part of the Waldorf Curriculum. Starting with the simplest of forms in first grade as a type of pre-writing exercise, WSB students advance to complicated geometric drawings by their middle school years. A recent visit to Ms. Angelie Guilbaud’ s first grade main lesson block finds us at the very beginning of that exciting trajectory with an exploration of straight and curved lines.

Check out a nature studies blog where Ms. Jung takes the first grade class onto a Nature Studies trek through the forest.

First graders have been very interested in foraging edible plants. We have learned how to find some common ones in the woods, and have talked about how you can eat them. We learned about a list of plants that tells you if you can pick an edible plant or not.