Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
this directly. Such a person might say that here we have a student;
he makes throaty sounds in this way, sounds with his lips in this way,
and with the gums in this way. This student can make sounds with
his gums more easily than lip sounds and so forth. This can become
a very intensive science; however, it is a science that points in all its
details to what develops as a soul-body or body-soul in the child.
Those capable of observing them can see the transformations
that speech undergoes between the ages of seven and fifteen, which
people normally do not notice, as accomplished by the soul acting
upon language. This is something that is lost if you have learned to
observe without the help of spiritual science. Those who can observe
this will then find that in the first years of life until the change of
teeth, conceptualization was completely occupied with the forming
our teeth; after the change of teeth, it can then act to form itself. At
that time conceptualization, our ability to picture our thoughts, in
a sense pulls back from the physical body and becomes something
independent in the soul. Later, from the change of teeth until puberty,
although this can sometimes be seen earlier, it is what we call
the will that withdraws from the entirety of the child and becomes
localized in the larynx, in the organs of speech. Just as the imaginative
life withdraws and becomes an independent part of the soul, in
the same way around the age of fourteen or fifteen the element of
will localizes and concentrates in what becomes speech and its associated
organs. The transformation a boy’s larynx undergoes is where
the will culminates. We will speak more about the corresponding
phenomenon in girls.
In other words, if we look at things from a spiritual-scientific
perspective, conceptualization and will cease to be so abstract. We
cannot, of course, form a connection between these abstractions and
a quite differently formed body. If, however, we learn to observe and
recognize how very different the nature of a child is, where we see how
the child speaks quite differently with the lips than with the gums and
the throaty sounds are quite different also, we can recognize how the
forces of conceptualization work in the physical body during the first
seven years of life. We can recognize the external, physical revelation
of a spirit-soul aspect and to recognize that the will is localized in the