January/February 2003
Feature Articles
Holistic Health Q & A
by Dr. Ruth E. Bradley
Of quantum physics, vibrational energy
and the power of our thoughts.
The Treasures of the Amazon Rainforest
by Lenny Rader
The story of the pioneers who uncovered
the real treasures of the Amazon: healing, life-enhancing plants.
What is... Human Growth Hormone?
by Marjorie Williams
Research proves natural growth hormone
to be powerful anti-aging weapon that helps reduce body fat, increase energy
and much more.
UnCommon Sense!
by David Findlay
The War on Terrorism.
Articles on the theme "Talents & Abilities"
A Misuse of Talents & Abilities
by Lela Lilyquist and John R. Lee MD
How the Medical Establishment has been
corrupted, becoming a pawn of the drug companies.
Every Child Can Sing
by Barbara Bedingfield
An education that brings out the innate
abilities in every child.
Developing Musical Ability
by Bob & Claire Franki
Regardless of natural talent, it is
training that enables musical ability in children to shine.
Your Genius
by Linda Gaylord
Ways to discover and develop your unique
talents and gifts.
From Russia with Passion
by Oksana Kolesnikova
A talented young pianist and composer's
personal story.
Nature versus Nurture
by Charles Larsen
We all have talents and abilities,
but some are less obvious than others.
Every Child Can Sing
by Barbara Bedingfield
My drawing abilities stopped at third grade when, before moving from H. Clay Evans School in Chattanooga, my teacher, Mrs. Matusich, demonstrated exactly how to draw a row of trees along a wooden fence in perspective with each tree and each post successively smaller. I drew that picture over and over and over, even after arriving in Alabama where I entered Hartselle Elementary School in beautiful Miss Beth Howell's Third Grade. There were no more drawing lessons, even on into high school, and from that time onward I believed that I simply could not draw.
This belief stayed with me until, at age 51, I entered Waldorf teacher training at Antioch New England Graduate School in New Hampshire. There, as part of teacher training, I learned to draw with beeswax crayons and colored pencils, to model with clay, to do wet-on-wet watercolor painting and to make blackboard drawings with soft colored chalk. I still remember the cold terror I felt when I first had to put brush to paint and bring the watercolors across that pristine white paper. It seemed that many of my classmates, all participating in this three-summer Waldorf intensive training, had undergraduate degrees in the fine arts. They laughed and enjoyed themselves, thinking nothing about this painting exercise. To me it was a monumental task and I was sweating! But by the third summer I was feeling much more relaxed about drawing and modeling and painting. I even managed to model a human head and I was finding pleasure in painting with the watercolors.
It was during my second summer of training that a small Waldorf initiative in Brandon, Florida, asked if I would be their teacher for the kindergarten they planned to open in the fall of 1995. I accepted the opportunity to put my teaching skills to work (even though it meant driving an hour each way every day) and it was in that little kindergarten that I discovered the real joy of watercolor painting the Waldorf way. I led those young children who came to me in this remarkable method of using liquid watercolors on wet paper. The colors literally shimmer and the children discover on their own how when 'sad blue' finally agrees to play with 'happy yellow' he has such peace with green bringing them together! I relaxed into the liquid colors swimming together on the paper and I stopped worrying about making forms. Soon, I surprised myself with the watercolor creations that came so naturally out of the colors. Now, seven years later, with my third and fourth grade classes I lead them in painting once a week as I have since they were in first grade. I marvel at their ease with painting, their lack of inhibition and fear, and I am very pleased that I have had a part in bringing them to this place of confidence and enjoyment.
I had to do my first "blackboard drawing" during my ten-week internship at the Washington Waldorf School outside Washington D.C. (Blackboard pictures must be unique for Waldorf schools because now schools seem to use green boards or white plastic boards that require smelly colored pens.) Since I was teaching a "main lesson" in Norse mythology for the 4th graders, I drew a picture of Odin as he hung upside down from a tree and discovered the runes. I spent an hour and a half putting those soft beautifully colored chalks to the blackboard, thinking to myself, "If it takes me this long to do a blackboard drawing, I'll never make it as a Waldorf teacher." The next morning I had my reward as the children came into the classroom and went immediately up to the board to admire my drawing. After the presentation of the lesson on the runes they entered the same drawing into their main lessons books with their beeswax crayons and colored pencils. Even though every student was copying the same picture I had drawn from the board, every picture was individual in its style and interpretation. And so it has been since I began with my first graders at School of the Suncoast. The highest reward I receive is to see how my children love drawing from my blackboard pictures and how they always make the pictures their own. So together we have drawn the curriculum of the Waldorf school of fairy tales, fables, legends, math gnomes, the seven grains, primitive houses of the world, the map of Florida, Indian villages, and soon pictures from the Norse mythologies and animals for our Human Being and Animal block.
We are born with some talents and I was born with an ability to sing. At the very young age of five my cousin, Susie, and I discovered that we could actually make money by singing for a particular elderly lady in a nearby apartment building. Our specialty was "Oh, Buttermilk Sky." When I was about ten years old I suddenly discovered that I could sing the harmony part to "Mockingbird Hill." Many other songs followed. My younger sister, Betsy, and I drove our mother crazy with our singing at the kitchen sink when we were supposed to be getting the dishes done. I learned to read music when our high-school band director, Mr. James, invited me to be in the band. "Well, I don't read music," I said and he replied, "I'll teach you." "I don't have an instrument," I continued. "I'll get you one." "Well, I live out in the country," came my last protest. "I'll drive out and get you," he declared. He did just that and over the summer I learned to read music and that fall I was marching with the band and playing a very large tenor saxophone. How often have I said a prayer of gratitude for Mr. Hollis James and his persistence with a little country girl. Being able to read music and singing "Honeybun" from South Pacific on a Birmingham television station got me a music scholarship to college. And years later singing in the Unitarian Universalist Chorale got me to Europe twice singing concerts in famed cathedrals and churches.
So for me, the music part of the Waldorf training was easy and fun. It came natural to me. Some of my classmates were sweating as we sang and learned to play the pentatonic wooden flute something all first graders in Waldorf schools learn to do. But I was in my element. Teaching children to sing beautiful pieces of music and to play the flute has been a joyful and easy part of my teaching. It has been awe-inspiring to experience how children can sing a song from memory after hearing it only once or twice.
All children can sing! I have had children who, when they first entered my class were monotones, but through singing everyday (which we do) they learned to match tones and they did, in the end, sing with beautiful high childlike voices. Children need only the model of a human voice, the opportunity to sing daily and the singing of quality music.
As I watch my students knit, crochet, learn the chain stitch and the back stitch, embroidery, model with beeswax, cook, and chisel a spoon out of wood, I envy the capabilities that they are developing for a lifetime. They will grow up feeling that they can do anything. The confidence they gain in the arts and in these handwork classes carries over into their academic work. Today I was eyewitness to a student who had done so well in violin class and had felt such pride that his writing and his spelling during the spelling test was his best ever! Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf schools, remarked that a philosopher was not worth much if he couldn't sew on a button and so it was that all Waldorf schools were instituted with handwork, woodworking, metalworking and bookbinding as essential parts of the curriculum.
All children are artists, all children can sing. All children can learn to knit and play the flute in first grade. My own Waldorf teacher training and my experience in bringing education through the arts has taught me first hand that all children, not just a gifted few, can sing, play music, draw, paint and model and work with their hands.
Rudolf Steiner stated that it was not his intention to populate the world with Waldorf schools, but to bring a renewal into all of education with the recognition, among other things, that the arts are essential for the education of children. The arts enhance academic learning, the arts are therapeutic, the arts nourish the soul.
I have not even mentioned learning the art of storytelling or all of the speech work I received during my training things that I incorporate into every day of my teaching.
I wish that every teacher could have the kind of training that is offered at the Waldorf Institutes of training. I had capabilities I was not even aware of until my good teachers, through the wisdom of Rudolf Steiner, brought them out. And this is what education should be not the filling of an empty bucket with information, but the igniting of a spark that fires the human will to reach its full potential.
Children should be educated in such a way that they will have thinking that is warmed with imagination, that they will have a sturdy life of feeling, and that they will have capabilities that will help them feel at home in the world. This is education of the head, heart and hands. Every child deserves it.
Barbara Bedingfield is a founder of School of the Suncoast, a developing Waldorf school in Clearwater FL that is part of the worldwide Waldorf School Movement first begun in 1919. (727) 532-0696.
Copyright (c) 2003 Altnewtimes,
Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this web site my be reproduced without written permission of Altnewtimes, Inc.
E-mail info@altnewtimes.com