Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
Then I explain that a beginning like this can also be found in
other words. I say, “If you say, ‘band,’ you also start like this; if you
say, ‘bow,’ like the bow some people wear in their hair, you again
start in the same way. Have you ever seen a bear in the zoo? When
you begin to say, ‘bear,’ you breathe the same sound. All these words
start with the same sound.” In this way I try to lead the children
from the whole word to the beginning of the word by finding the
transition to the single sound or letter, always taking the initial letter
from the whole word.
It is important that you yourself try to develop the initial letter
in a meaningful way out of the drawing element. You will achieve
this very well if you simply use your imagination. Just think that
the people who first saw such animals as beavers and bears drew the
animal’s back, with its hind paws on the
ground and its forepaws lifted up. They
drew an animal in the act of rising on its
hind legs, and their drawing turned into
a capital B. You will always find that the
initial letter of a word is a drawing, an
animal or plant form or some external
object. You can give your imagination
free reign; there is no need to delve into
cultural histories, which are incomplete in any case. The fact is that
if you go back in history to the most ancient forms of Egyptian writing,
which was still a type of sign writing, you find many copies of
objects and animals in the letters. Not until the transition from the
Egyptian to the Phoenician culture did the change take place that
brought about the development of the picture into a sign representing
a sound. It is this transition that the children must experience
anew. Let us therefore gain a clear idea of the theory of it ourselves.
When writing first began to develop in ancient Egypt, every
detail that was written down was written in picture writing; it was
drawn, although the drawing had to be as simplified as possible. If
someone employed in copying this picture writing made a mistake,
if, for instance, a holy word was misrepresented, the scribe was
condemned to death. We thus see how very, very seriously anything