Waldorf First Grade Play Success!

Spring break just started here in Portland and I was so happy to close out the term with a successful first class play!

Waldorf First Grade Play

We performed the Grimms’ story The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing. It’s one of those Grimms’ stories that has a little bit of everything. A giant. A golden apple. A lion. And, of course, a prince.

If you’re looking for a play to perform with your first graders,

We knew that in our class both girls and boys would be playing the role of the main character, so we changed the title to the king’s “child.”

I was not excited about writing the play myself, but I found so few first grade plays to choose from that I ended up deciding there was no way around it.

There were some good benefits to writing it myself, though.

1. I could incorporate a lot of the songs and circle activities we already knew. Our final play included two of our every day songs and a clapping game that we’ve been practicing for awhile.
2. I got to choose as much or as little of the story as I wanted. “The King’s Son . . . ” is a story where all of the usual Grimms’ tropes have been thrown in and there are several pieces to the story. I ended up writing each section of the play as we were ready to learn something new in class. Each week there was a new section to learn. I ended up leaving off the last journey in the story because it would have been too much for the first graders to learn (unless we had an extra week, I guess). Our version still had a delightful ending with a nice message.
3. I was able to consider movement and therapeutic activities in the process.

This was the part of our play that I loved the most. I’ve got a fairly physical bunch so our play involved wrestling and children playing giant bowling pins that were knocked over each other by a giant yoga ball. This meant that it was fun, appropriate and good for us to practice every day.

We had so much fun and they did a fantastic job. In the final performance, they started speaking together and I was blown away by the power of their voices. But then, they completely shocked me. In each performance there was a moment or two when their circle would get a bit off-center and I needed to help them re-balance. In this performance, somehow, without saying a word, they together realized they needed to fix the circle and all at once they re-centered. I was stunned.

It’s the stuff Waldorf teacher dreams are made of.

Now that it’s spring break, I’m mapping out the rest of our year and getting myself ready to write end-of-year reports. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing some assessment to see where the children are with letter and sound identification.

After the break we’ll be heading into a math block, which is good. We’ve done so much work with letters this year, and we had lots of illness during our last math block, so it’ll be good to review the four processes and create some number sentences together.

And, by the way, I plan on sprucing up my version of The King’s Son Who Feared Nothing and making it available here, eventually. So keep your eye on this space, or drop me a note at meredith@awaldorfjourney.com if you don’t see it yet.