Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
subject. That is something we can consider an ideal, namely to bring
other things in. For example, today I wanted to tease your children in
the third grade with “hurtig toch.”[The Norwegian term for express
train. Steiner would have made a pun by saying hurtig toch quickly,
which sounds like hör’ dich doch—German for “Listen to yourself,”
or “Listen to how you sound.” Steiner lectured in Norway before
the war and returned to lecture there in 1921.—Trans.] That means
“express train.” That is what I mean by doing things with children
between the lines.
[Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner I, p. 82.]
17. Enlivening the Study of Grammar and Punctuation
The main problem now is that if the children go to their final examinations
with the punctuation they now know, it could be very
bad. They use no punctuation at all in the 9b class. Teaching them
punctuation depends upon discussing the structure of a sentence in
an interesting way. That is something you can do well in the course
of teaching them literature.
For example, if you begin with older German language forms,
you can show them in an intriguing way how relative clauses arose
slowly through the transformation of writing into Latin structure.
That could provide the basis for studying commas. You can teach
the use of commas when you first show the children that they need
to enclose every relative clause within commas. It is interesting to
discuss relative clauses because they did not exist in older German.
They also do not exist in dialect. You could go back to the Song of
the Niebelungs and so forth and show how relative clauses began to
come into the language and how it then became necessary to bring
this logic into the language. After you have shown how relative
clauses are enclosed with commas, you can go into a more thorough
discussion of the concept of clauses. The children then need to learn
that every kind of clause is set off by some sort of punctuation. The
other things are not so terribly important.
From there, you can go on to show how elements of thought
developed in language, and thus arrive at the semicolon, which is