Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Writing
119
You do not need to study the history of civilization, but you can show
children the meaning and spirit of what people wanted to express
in picture writing. Then children will feel at home in their lessons.
For example: Let us take the word Mund—(mouth). Get the
children to draw a mouth, or rather paint it. Let them put on dabs of
red color and then tell them to
pronounce the word; you can
say to them: don’t pronounce
the whole word at first, but
begin only with the sound “M.”
And now you can form the letter
M out of the upper lip. If you follow this process you can get the
letter M out of the mouth that the children first painted.
This is how writing really originated, even though today it is
difficult to recognize from the words themselves that the letters were
once pictures, because the words have all been subject to change in
the course of the evolution of speech. Originally each sound had its
own image and each picture could have but one meaning.
You do not need to go back to these original characters, but you
can invent ways and means of your own.
The teacher must be inventive and must
create out of the spirit of the thing.
Take the word fish. Let the children
draw or paint some kind of fish. Let
them say the beginning of the word: “F ”
and you can gradually get the letter F
out of the picture.
And thus, if you are inventive, you can find pictures for all the
consonants. They can be worked out from a kind of painting-drawing
or drawing-painting. This is more awkward to deal with than the
methods of today. For it is of course necessary that after the children
have been doing this painting for an hour or two you have to clear
it all away. But it just has to be so, there is nothing else to be done.
So you can see how the letters can be developed out of pictures
and the pictures again directly out of life. This is the way you must
do it. On no account should you teach reading first, but proceeding