Middle Grades – Grades 6-8
Grade 6: Watercolor Painting
The middle grades at Orchard Valley Waldorf School provide skills for life including self-discipline, independence, mastery of analytical and critical thinking, and reverence for the world’s beauty and wonder. The interweaving of the humanities, sciences, and arts creates a demanding and enriching curriculum that helps students to balance their deepening inner life with the world around and beyond them. Ten- to fourteen-year-olds are hungry for challenge, both academically and artistically. The teachers and the Waldorf curriculum meet them with passion and enthusiasm. For the pre-adolescent looking towards the adult world—who finds himself no longer a child but not yet an adult—this approach is a source of comfort and inspiration. While some effects of a good education are measurable at the time, many of the most important facets are planted as seeds that will continue to grow and bear fruit in later years.
“If you’ve had the experience of binding a book, knitting a sock, playing a recorder, then you feel that you can build a rocket ship, or learn a new software program you’ve never touched. It’s not bravado, just a quiet confidence. There is nothing you can’t do. Why couldn’t you? Why couldn’t anybody?”
— Peter Nitze, Waldorf and Harvard graduate, and director of an aerospace company
humanities
Grade 6: Watercolor Painting, The Colliseum
The Waldorf curriculum mirrors the middle school student’s own stages of development. The sixth grader is immersed in the history of Rome at a time when he is determined to find his own laws. Opportunities to debate arise, just as the student is testing his budding critical thinking skills on those around him, especially his parents and teachers! The Age of Exploration is a seventh grade theme, reflecting the student’s interest in reaching beyond his current environment and making his own discoveries.
Grade 8: Main Lesson Book
The Age of Revolution comes in eighth grade and inspires the student to appreciate the ideals of history’s revolutionaries—those who questioned authority and thought new thoughts. The icons of each age come alive through the teacher’s own storytelling and are preserved in the student’s writing, drawing, and dramatization.
math
7th Grade: Main Lesson Book
Middle school math strengthens the foundation of problem-solving, computation, and practical applications while it explores the mathematical connections with other subjects including art (perspective drawing and the golden ratio), history (biographies of mathematicians and ancient number systems), and science (chemistry and physics). The students learn to derive their own formulae as part of their studies in geometry and algebra. Practical work with business math offers connection to the outer world for the pre-adolescent.
science
6th Grade: Main Lesson Book
Hands-on explorations in physics, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, meteorology, physiology, and anatomy strengthen both observational skills and the student’s ability to form conclusions. At the same time, the Waldorf approach to science is full of opportunities for the student to experience a sense of wonder – with the starry heavens, the earth itself, and his own body. The student is inspired to reflect, as did Hamlet, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties.”
the arts
7th Grade: Main Lesson Book
Opportunities abound throughout the Waldorf student’s experience to express emotional and intellectual responses to his changing inner and outer worlds. The curriculum draws much of its strength from its rich underpinnings in prose and poetry, drama, music, storytelling, debate and discussion, and the visual arts. This rich and varied approach helps the student to create a dynamic relationship to subject matter and a genuine self-confidence as he prepares to enter high school. Students document science experiments with colorful and detailed drawing, study Shakespeare by staging a full-length Shakespearean drama, paint Renaissance themes, plan and sing music from various historical eras, sculpt the human hand, foot or head in anatomy, recite lyric and epic poems, and create three-dimensional shapes as part of their solid geometry block.