wrestling with rudolf steiner

Ella's seventh birthday has come and gone practically without a post because I've been so busy. John has been away at a conference, and I've been limping around on a bad knee. For her seventh birthday I got her a Barbie doll, three Barbie dolls to be exact. She had been visiting a friend and playing Barbies about a month ago, and when she returned home she asked me if I liked her friend's mother. This particular mother is lovely and creative and artistic, and of course I said yes. Ella then says, "Well, she played with Barbies when she was little and you still think that she is a good person?" I don't judge good people on the plastic crap they played with as kids, and went out the next day and bought said plastic crap. I imagined Rudolf Steiner rolling in his grave.

I appreciate most of the basic elements of Waldorf education, and have tried to incorporate them into our home learning. For many years I've have given Ella all the opportunity in the world to expand her imagination and experience the splendor and simplicity of the outside world. She believes in the fairy world all around her, and loves to draw and paint and create. She loves books, stories, and words.

Now in the first grade, she isn't a strong reader. She loves to have books read to her, but she is finding the act of actually reading on her own somewhat difficult. It requires such patience. At the beginning of the school year she awakened to the notion that others in her class were actually far ahead of her in their abilities, and it was a somewhat rude awakening for her. Not so much that she is behind her grade level, but they are so very far ahead. In several subjects her class is grouped by ability, and she is in the lower groups. Am I worried? Not so much worried but wondering. I lose my bearings when she is subjected to various "methods" of evaluating her reading ability, checkmarks and lists of words to be mastered in certain grade levels.

Waldorf teaching would say that she is merely standing at the door at this moment. Seven. Time to begin.