Starting in Early Childhood

Tell a story to your child a few times a day; this develops a sense of good language and expression. In the Waldorf approach, telling stories is better than reading them, because the child must imagine his own pictures and the ability to imagine is an important step in preparation for reading. At the same time, reading stories to them is also beneficial!
Introduce your child to songs, poems, finger plays and little puppet shows.
According to the Waldorf approach, children learn to read in the same way they learn to potty train or talk; they learn when they are ready and the age of success varies greatly with the child.
A child learns to talk by listening to others speak and gradually learns by imitation. The vocabulary of the child is greatly enriched by the parents telling them stories and reading to them.

According to Rudolf Steiner, the child recapitulates human cultural evolution in his development. Children do not enter a Waldorf first grade until they are at least 6 1/2 or 7. (No K in Waldorf Schools usually).
At age 6-7 the child is living through the period of human cultural evolution when human beings developed a written, pictorial alphabet, so it makes sense to develop the alphabet using pictures. Human beings had to write something before they could read it. The child is still interested in fantasy and fairy tale, so we develop a picture alphabet using fairy tale stories. From this grows the writing of simple sentences which they have made up. They can “read” what they have written. Probably they have memorized it, but that’s OK. Reading English is mostly memory anyway.
No reading is required in Waldorf schools until the end of grade 3, or later. The Waldorf curriculum is based on the developmental interests of children, and does not require reading in the early grades. Material is presented by the teacher in dramatic, interesting ways and the children make use of the material in their play and hands-on dramatic and artistic activities.

Reading Readiness

Rudolf Steiner had several ways to determine readiness for first grade in a child. One was TEETH: Steiner’s theory was that a child was ready for academic learning, including reading when he was getting his second teeth. Throughout history this has happened around age 7. It seems to be occurring earlier in modern children, so it is not necessarily as good a guide as it used to be. Another is Body proportions – Around age seven, again give or take a year or two, a child’s limbs lengthen and the head becomes smaller in relation to the rest of the body. An infant has a ratio of head to body of 1:4. At around age 7 it becomes 1:6. As a sign of this change, the child becomes able to reach his arm over his head and completely cover his ear with his hand.

• Visible joints, knuckles and kneecaps instead of dimples
• An observable arch in the foot
• Individualized facial features: enlarged chin and nose, loss of fat on cheeks
• S-curve in spine
• Consistent heartbeat of about 60 beats/minute and respiration once for every four heartbeats

Skills:

• Walk a beam forward, maintaining balance
• Catch and throw a large ball
• Climb stairs, alternating feet with each step
• Tie knots and bows, and zip and button clothing
• Hop on either foot
• Skip
• Hop with both feet together
• Habitually walk by swinging opposite arm when stepping out with one foot
• Shake hands by offering hand with thumb outstretched
• Sew, finger knit, play finger games, etc.
• Have established dominance (handedness), although this may not be firm in some children until age 9, and may be a predictor of late reading.
• Have a conscious goal in drawing or painting a picture.</li

How the Brain Develops

The human brain is divided in two halves, the right and the left side. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. In most people, the left side of the brain dominates and the person is right handed. However, in a significant number of people, the right side dominates and those people are left handed. Some people do not have a dominant hand. It is often children who are either left-handed or who are ambidextrous who are also late readers.

The two sides of the brain are connected by a bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum, a late developing organ in the brain. This organ becomes complete somewhere around the age of seven, give or take a year or two. Learning to read is not possible until this organ is fully developed. Late readers are not less intelligent children! If you think about it, it makes sense that a better brain might take longer to develop, and therefore late readers may indeed be more intelligent!
Until the corpus callosum is developed, nearly all children are dyslexic, that is they see p, d, q, and b as the same letter and often reverse them as well as other letters. A person who remains dyslexic is often a person who not only sees things as they are but as they could be, a bit of hindrance in learning to read, but an indispensable talent for a creative inventor, architect, or artist! The interconnectedness of handedness, dyslexia, creativity and brain development is a fascinating subject, one which is largely ignored in our culture’s rush to get children reading at an earlier and earlier age.

Reading English

English is a very difficult language to learn. The phonetic and spelling rules are only correct 50% of the time! That means 50% of the words have to be memorized. So how can one learn to read by phonics alone?!
Phonics can be somewhat useful and a lot of fun if done in a playful way.