Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Language
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important is that these sentences correspond to the child’s actual
understanding. The sentences correspond to that feeling in children
that exists in people who are not educated, and where the soul feels
itself to be at one with the external world. A differentiation between
the I and the external world has not yet been developed. If I say, for
example, “It is raining,” this is based upon an unconscious feeling that
what is occurring as an activity outside of myself continues in that
space within my skin, and that my I does not confront the external
world. When saying something like “It is raining” or “It is lightning,”
we do not feel ourselves separate from the world. In a certain sense,
these subjectless sentences are the original sentences of human nature.
They are simply the first step of language development which arrests
an activity. Originally, we perceived all of the world as an activity,
something we do not consider enough. In a certain sense, in our
youngest childhood, we see everything substantial as a substantiated
verb and accept it simply as it is. Later, what we become aware of,
what is active, is what is active and then occupies our own activity.
Now you might say that contradicts the fact that children first say
“Papa” or something similar. That is not at all a contradiction, since
in speaking the series of sounds, the child brings into life that activity
which the corresponding person presents to the child.
Learning to speak is at first the enlivening of an activity whose
substantiation occurs only afterwards. This is something that, when
we look at dialect, we can certainly take into account. You can attempt
to feel that by having a child say something and then trying
to feel that within yourself. The words in dialect are such that they
are extremely close to what lives in the gesture that accompanies the
word in dialect. To a much greater extent dialect words require the
person to participate, to live into the word. By feeling the word in
dialect you can determine what is an abstraction, and what the subject
and the predicate are. The predicate is derived from the activity,
whereas the subject is actually more of an intellectual abstraction of
the activity. When we have children speak sentences in dialect and we
then consider the pictures they provide us with, and we can see those
as representing what human beings actually feel when we go on to
develop the rules of grammar, we are using instruction in grammar
and sentence structure to help the child to awaken.