What can we bring to our students that will give them the strength, compassion, and fearless hope to face their futures? A deep and abiding love of the world through a passion for the diversity and complexity of life and the environment that supports it so that as an adult they can comprehend how humanity can move with enlightenment to heal our earth.
Fifth Grade offers a way for the curriculum to expand the traditional Botany Block into an ecologically exciting exploration of the students’ immediate environment. We will take time for local field trips, drawing lessons, descriptive writing, classifications that lead to informed inquiry of non-flowering plants, fungi, flowering plants, arthropods with a focus on insects, amphibians, and reptiles. We will be learning how to develop the skills needed to transform painting and drawing skills to meet the curriculum of fifth and sixth grades.
In sixth grade we continue this theme by looking at how it is that over millennia life has adapted to the changing earth and has shaped it in turn. We will explore how plate tectonics, ice ages, single celled organisms, different forms of life that once lived, volcanoes and earthquakes, summer and winter, oceans and mountains, plants and animals living now, and humankind have interacted to create the world we live in now.
This course is for Waldorf teachers as well as for those who are in teacher training and anticipate teaching these subjects during the course of their career. Together we can engender such enthusiasm for these subjects that what we will bring to our students will be transformative not only to them but to us as teachers.
MATERIALS FEE: $25
DARCY DRAYTON, fifth grade class teacher at Pine Hill Waldorf School, also teaches art to the eighth grade students. Prior to Pine Hill she taught woodworking and middle school art in the Waldorf School in Lexington where she was, prior to her teaching responsibilities, also the business manager for four years. She studied nursing and science at Northeastern University and got her Waldorf training at Antioch University. Weekends she volunteers regularly in prison facilitating “Alternatives to Violence” workshops and for many years worked with a Quaker School in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya.
BRIAN DRAYTON, who will participate as a guest lecturer, earned his PhD in Biology from Boston University. He is a center director and principal investigator at the nationally renowned educational research and development center, TERC, located in Cambridge, MA.
