We have been a Waldorf homeschooling family for 10 years. Waldorf resources, ideas and curriculum have helped my children to have a magical childhood. We live in Alaska on a modest peice of land not too far from a library. My oldest child is in 9th grade and my youngest is 2. In the beginning, I had so many questions and I often could not find the answers I wanted. High school is still unchartered territory for me but I have navigated kindergarten, first grade and second grade four times.
I have so much information I would like to pass on if there is anyone out there who could use this. When I began homeschooling my first child, we lived in rural Alaska (meaning no internet) and I was armed with Oak Meadows and a box of beeswax crayons. Alaska supports home schooling by buying supplies and curriculum for children and I was given the choice between Oak Meadows and Calvert. By the time my son was in third grade, I had found the right niche. We actually fell into Waldorf, pushed there by the way our life in Alaska moves. The seasons shape everything here, daylight changes dramatically and we spend a lot of time outside chopping wood, working in the garden and taking walks. I wanted my children to have a magical childhood.
We switched to Live Education! which is a beautiful but somewhat hard to understand curriculum. I love it but I have watched others really struggle with the ideas. It is sometimes hard to read. Some of the lessons and lesson blocks are just not a good fit. A lot of the books they suggest are out of print and hard to find – and so they are expensive.
Over the years, I have met people who have asked me for suggestions on home schooling so many kids at once. We do different lessons. Sometimes they overlap but they always need to be age appropriate and kids need to be old enough to remember or you have to do it again. I know this from experience.
So that is the purpose of my blog – to share all the things it took me nine years and four children to learn, I bet I have almost every Waldorf book you can buy, including many out of print books. Some I loved and some were not so great. Some I sold on ebay.
I have no idea how to go about posting all of this information so I am just going to keep a daily log of what we do and how it goes and what comes to mind. Right now, I have a ninth grader, a seventh grader, a fifth grader, a second grader and a first grader – and a two year old baby. My second grader was born at the end of August and he could have started kindergarten before he turned 5 but we chose to wait a year. I wish I had done that with my seventh grader – also a late summer baby. I work at home (besides home school and general chores).
There are all kinds of issues that pop up in our house. My daughter has only a few friends (there are so many boys here!). My first grader wants goats so much she wishes on a star every single night for goats. The baby eats the beeswax crayons. High school is a strange new world.
