Teaching Spanish as a world language in Waldorf schools for grades one to eight

Abstract

Waldorf education provides a unique opportunity for students to fully experience their lessons in an integrative, artistic, and purposeful way, and this is certainly true for world language classes. Throughout a typical curriculum, various art forms are utilized along with physical movements and actions, allowing students to live through the lessons in an interesting and enjoyable way. At times, it becomes difficult to separate between songs, poems, skits, gestures, plays, or games, when all of these methods can be interwoven simultaneously. By integrating rhyme, repetition, gestures, music, movement, and visuals, classes become quite lively and interactive. It takes a lot of planning and preparation to teach this way, and Waldorf teachers typically juxtapose songs, poems, skits, plays, games, and activities that reinforce important topics, vocabulary, and themes throughout the year. In addition to memorizing material and delivering enthusiastic, heartfelt, and artistic lessons from memory, the teacher must gather all the various resources for a topic and decide on the best way to present them to the class. This project offers many of those connections for Spanish language lessons in a Waldorf setting, and it can also be altered and adapted for other world languages. Much of the foundational theory is common across different world languages, but it is helpful to find enough authentic and original material in the target language that has not been translated. Specific examples are given for Spanish language classes, as well as many commonly known stories that can be delivered in any language. Goals, activities, topics, skills, and milestones are suggested for each grade. This project provides the world language teacher with a solid outline or template for creating lessons in each grade, with enough material and references to start right away.