My 30 year old daughter - now a grade 4 teacher in the Canadian North read at about 9 1/2 and has never stopped - I was a Waldorf high school teacher for 18 years and know many, many kids who read at about 9 or 10 and even a few boys who were not reading easily until about 14 - all fifnished high school reading fluently - and all have gone on to get universoty degrees - one crucial book to read in this are is called Better Late Than Early - not Waldorf but very useful on this whole question.

We have a five year old boy and a three year old girl, both in Waldorf kindergarten, and a one year old girl still at home. Our son is starting to get very interested in writing already, and I am sure he will be figuring it out long before he will encounter writing practice in school.

We as parents are very happy about the non-rush towards early academic achievements in Waldorf, but somehow I question the system’s ability to support an interest when it is already present in the student. I know that no system is perfect, and to our taste Waldorf education is the closest we have found, but still there is that balance between the collective and the individual that I feel can be a bit heavy on the collective side in Waldorf. (At least in our school.) What would be interesting to me would be a merge between the deeper ideas of Waldorf and Montessori, with support both for the artistic/spiritual ideals of Waldorf and the self directed learning Montessori envisioned.

I was just wondering where this whole idea comes from that if a child will start earlier with something they will get better at it when they are adults? I have been touring public school kindergartens and it is amazing how sedentary the children are. Too bad the right to move and play is not guaranteed be the American Constitution...

I was just wondering where this whole idea comes from that if a child will start earlier with something they will get better at it when they are adults?

I have been touring public school kindergartens and it is amazing how sedetary the children are.
Too bad the right to move and play is not guaranteed be the American Constitution...

My oldest turned four in November. I tried to keep him and his siblings as far away from any medium as I could, but with both parents working from home, it's difficult. I only just started sitting down with him and showing him the sounds of letters and sounds of letter combinations, which he understood quickly - albeit I have no one to whom to compare him. We sit on the back porch, reading short sentences that I make up on the fly - on the laptop in TextEdit... totally unWaldorf - while the younger two play in the bushes and trees.

I don't see anything wrong with learning to play before learning to read. Sure, one can learn both simlutaneously, and I guess that's okay, too. I teach piano to kids who started reading at age four, learned piano at age five, but they cannot name two kinds of palm trees or identify the call of a common ground dove. They can't even turn a twig into a person and make him ride on a paddle boat leaf down an imaginary river.

As for the optometrist, I took an eye exam when in grade school, and we didn't have letters to identify. They were all E's, but some were facing the right direction, some were facing up and to the left and down. I had to turn open palm so that it would look like that E.

Dave,

This is an interesting topic. I have an 8 1/2 year old son who has ADHD. He loves knowledge as a whole (aquatic, farms, science, etc...) but would rather get a shot than try to read for more than a few minutes. This is also a boy who scored in the 99th percentile on his CAT6 (California Achievement Test) in math for our state. My wife and I believe he would rather obtain knowledge from hands on experience or TV (yes call me a bad parent, but he learned more from Sesame Street and the Discovery Channel than he did during his first couple of years in public school). Should we push him to read more or should we let him mature to the point where he wants to read Captain Underpants or Harry Potter on his own? I agree that some kids are simply better at certain subjects like art, math, or dance. Most children are not going to challenge themselves to get better at subjects that are difficult for them and will usually opt to play or do things in which they excel. Of course there are exceptions and if you saw "Little Miss Sunshine" and the world of beauty pageants, you know what I mean.

Anyways, my point is this; some kids are ready to read/learn at an early age and some kids mature later. Is one school better than another? I don't think so. I believe it's the teacher and the parents that make the difference.

Getting back to kids with learning disabilities (ADHD, autism, Down syndrome): caregivers should absolutely get their children tested if they feel their child is falling way behind peers. We incorrectly listened to our pediatrician who blithered on about boys learning later in life ya da ya da ya da. It was only after his nursery school teacher kept on prodding us to get him tested that we found out he had water on his ears (he wasn't hearing correctly) and giant adenoids & tonsils that needed removing. The surgery helped dramatically, but he still goes to speech therapy weekly. Sorry for getting off topic, but a parent has to rant and rave every once in a while!

In response to Olga's statement. The child psychologist Piaget had what he termed the American Question, which was, "How can my children move more quickly through the developmental stages (he theorized about)?" Piaget said that only in America was this question posed to him.

Alfie Kohn has some good stuff to say about how practice and homework don't make kids better at whatever they're working on. It's a myth that Americans hold onto, deeply rooted in our pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-immigrant culture (IMHO).

As much as I try to relax and let my daughter concentrate on what she is interested in, I've felt a little anxiety over reading lately. She's 4 1/2 and EVERYONE thinks she'll be an early reader, but there are times where it just doesn't feel like she's progressing as quickly as I would like. She'll have periods of voraciously devouring books with me or walking around telling stories with books in hand, then she'll go for long times without doing that. While I would like to see continuous progress towards reading, the fact of the matter is that the spurt and plateau approach to child development is a valid one. So, I end up where I started, believing that if she truly discovers what she is interested in, then I don't need to interfere very much.

And don't even get me started on public school recess... the public school my daughter will NOT be attending next year would have her for 7 hours a day with 1 (I repeat, 1) 25 minute recess!!

I guess that will be really helpfull to take a look at the patterns in their writing skills
and to compare it with the patterns of a kid that
had learned to read/write in a traditional school

I hope that you find my comment usefull
and excuse me if I'm wrong with my english grammar.
(I'm Argentinian and I had never really studied
english language)

I'm commenting on this rather late, having just discovered your blog.

I was homeschooled with fairly standard commercially available materials, however, looking back I have reason to believe my parents either instinctively or deliberately used some of Waldorf's methods in the way we were taught. I started reading fluently relatively early, I think around age eight. But neither of my brothers was comfortable reading until they were more like ten and eleven. Little sister, being the classic youngest child, learned to read the earliest of all because she wanted to be just like the big kids.
Though our parents spent big bucks on the ciriculum, we didn't use it intensively until we were in second or even third grade....up to that point we spent a lot of time learning through hands on and exploration. We all learned fractions, for example, early and easily because mom took us into the kitchen and had us help her cook, especially baking where fractions matter a lot.

I think kids learn to love reading and learning in general when they are able to set their own pace. I think my families experiences bear that out and I hope to convey the same attitudes and desires to my children.

perhaps because i'm not a parent, this is absolutely beyond me. my parents read to me and with me constantly from birth and, as a result, i was reading by 5 and have never once in my life had an issue with reading, writing, or verbal communication. my playing was entwined in the books that i read, the stories i wrote and told to other children, the songs i could sing. my progress in other areas (sports, maths, sciences, technology) was helped purely by the fact that i could explain, clearly and eloquently, why i didn't understand. i think being an early and competent reader was the best possible gift my parents could have given me.

having your kids learn to play and be creative is just as important as learning to read and i wouldn't agree that pressuring children into jumping through academic hoops (my own progress at school was a happy by product, but not my parents' intention)is right. these things should be nurtured in balance, none at the expense of the other. but no matter how quickly your children will pick up reading and writing when they eventually come to it, how exactly can that make up for the several years they have lost?

denying children such a massive part of their development until the age of eleven seems instinctively wrong to me. i hate to sound so negative but could someone tell me, what is the benefit of doing this?

Good points, Fiona. I should point out that I read to my kids every night too. Tonight, I read another chapter of "Treasure Island" to G-, and earlier read a "Tessy and Tab" and Scooby-Doo book to K- before she fell asleep. But reading books doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to learn how to read. They're into it, but there's really no rush. My 11yo, A- is a voracious reader, amusingly so: she can read a book like Inkheart or Harry Potter in just a day or two. Just like I was as a kid!

Hi. Just wondering if anyone has experienced children with Down Syndrome in a Waldorf classroom? Sounds like a perfect environment for children with DS to learn in. Thanks