Nimble fingers5/21/2023 ![]() The aim here is both an artistic and a utilitarian one. What is produced, is meant for use in everyday life, from kettle holders and house shoes to shirts and shoes. During this same stage of development, boys and girls learn to sew, to crochet and to knit. While playing, they watch the teacher's movements and listen to the sound they themselves are producing. There, the exact positioning of the fingers is essential - and easily observed by the players themselves. From school entry, Waldorf classes are taught to play wooden flutes. This form of training is continued in other subjects of the curriculum. From the first grade, painting with water colours - which takes place once a week during Main Lessons - develops artistic sensitivity at the same time as it calls for finger skills. Poems and verses which are learnt are often also run rhythmically around the classroom or tapped with the fingers. Multiplication tables and the alphabet are acquired with the help of rhythmic walking, skipping or clapping. Class teachers practise body geography with their classes during the first grades of school. Educators play little finger games with the children while speaking nursery rhymes or singing simple songs over and over again. In Waldorf Kindergartens and in the first grades of Waldorf schools, great stress is laid on the development of finger skills. Many Waldorf schools also work in this way. In Waldorf Schools many special-needs teachers and curative eurythmists work in this way. A large number of therapists make use of movement in order to treat developmental problems. The developmental stage of speech in an individual child can be seen by the observation of the mobility of the fingers. Speech development depends on skilful finger movement. Simultaneously, the finer structures of the nervous system are being developed. In play, children acquire an unconscious image of the movements in question. These are replaced by intentional movements, whose character is subtler than that of the first, innate type. They find their way from play to work.Ĭhildren overcome their innate primitive reflexes and movements by means of their own activity. ![]() Practice becomes an important element of their lives. Children have an urge toward perfecting their abilities. That is why they should experience actions around them which express love and a reasoned approach to life. The first concepts are "grasped" and formed in this way.ĭuring their first years, children learn by imitating everything and everybody they encounter. What their hands and fingers can touch and get hold of is truly "grasped". Young children grasp their environment with their senses and with their own individual activity. Their first experiences are still pre-conscious. ![]() Young children first learn to walk, then to speak and then to think. Kant in his time already pointed to the hands as being the brain transferred to the outside. Children's sense perceptions are increasingly observed to be impaired in various ways. ![]() Many processes are too rapid for the eye to follow, or are hidden by complex electronic mechanisms. Children are often surrounded by machines that do the work. There are ever fewer opportunities for imitating and practising movements that are in themselves healthy. This is not always easy to achieve given that in our modern environment, increasing emphasis is placed on intellectual work and manual work is on the decline. Waldorf education is essentially concerned with the healthy development of body, soul and spirit. ![]()
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