Second Grade Language Arts & Drawing Course

In Waldorf Education, we strive to bring every lesson in a meaningful context. With language, this means that we can derive our language lessons out of stories and other imaginative sources that are already familiar to the child. From the images that have lived in the child's imagination, we draw pictures, thus engaging the artistic process with each story. From each story and picture, we derive a sentence that holds a key word.  This key word will be the first example of a word family that we will develop interactively with the student(s).   

This course, of thirty-six total lessons, will present complete lessons of how this process unfolds over the course of three days for each story.  While it is completely possible to copy these lessons for your student(s), it is just as feasible to use these as examples that empower you to create your own lessons in the same ways. So you will have that option for yourself with every lesson. As you observe how much challenge your child needs, the creation of lessons that are more or less advanced may become something you choose to do.  

Because the lesson-building process involves the creation of artwork, these video lessons will guide you through the process of creating the drawings. These drawings will be second-grade level drawings. So if you are new to visual artwork, this is a great course to help you gain confidence and skill. It is also important to remember that many students will surpass us anyway, at some point.  When they are brought to artwork early in life, they have a much easier time later on developing to great heights. It is certainly important that we give them some foundational skills. However, the most important thing we can give the young student is the example of someone who is willing to strive and who does not engage in the detrimental self-critique. We give it our best efforts and move forward. We will definitely see things that we want to improve and we strive to do that in the future. We do not waste any time or energy degrading ourselves for some lack of perfection. When the teacher can embody this everyday--and sometimes it means we have to be able to laugh at ourselves in a healthy way--then we give the young student one of the most important gifts imaginable.  

The story sources used in this course correspond to the stories presented in the Second Grade Storytelling Course. This does not require that you take that course. If you do not, and if you are not familiar with the stories used, you may want to read the stories so that you can understand how the lesson is being derived from the story. Understanding how this works will help you feel more empowered to do the same thing on your own.  

• How to use block crayons to create simple drawings from stories

• How to lead students through the drawing process

• How to derive a language arts lesson from a story imagination, particularly from the drawings

• How to pull simple sentences from the story drawings

• How to create word families interactively with the student(s)

• How to practice with the words and word families to strengthen phonemic awareness

• How to practice to strengthen sound-symbol mastery

• How to systematically introduce spelling rules and spelling conventions so that the child becomes increasingly familiar and comfortable with the written language, whether reading or writing

• How to consistently build the child's sight-word vocabulary, thus increasing reading fluency

• How to customize your language teaching efforts to fit the child at their individual level of development

• 36 Video Drawing Lessons--complete lessons for creating 36 beautiful drawings (from the 36 stories presented in 2nd Grade Storytelling).

• 36 Video Language Arts Lessons--complete language arts lessons to pull 36 language arts lessons integrated with the 36 drawings

• Explanations for how to adjust these lessons to the abilities of the students

• A complete list of Second Grade Language Arts Goals from Simply Waldorf

• A complete Second Grade Year Block Rotation--this can be used as a guideline or simply as an example.  This will help you understand how the language arts and math blocks fit together over a school year.

• Additional resources, video and PDF articles, to deepen your understanding of the course and of Waldorf education