Shelters in Waldorf 3rd Grade

It’s my favorite time of year in Portland and our park is so stunning at this time of year!

I also love the inward turn that happens at this time of year. We are feeling the call to focus on our learning and we’re getting right to work.

Last week the 3rd graders and I started our first shelter block. As always, I gave a lot of thought to planning the block.

When I first started looking into it, I put together a list of shelters that I have heard others present or that were recommended for one reason or another. Though they seemed perfectly interesting, it seemed a little odd to me to just choose some random shelters to study with my students. I needed more direction and some sort of framework for them to fit into.

I looked at a few resources to start.

• Live Education — my school has a set of Live Education books for every grade. It is not in my habit to use them, but I found them useful as I was building a list of possible shelters.
• Waldorf Inspirations — I was curious about what the ladies at Waldorf Inspirations would have to say about the shelters block. I had heard that shelters in 3rd grade is one of those “sacred nothings” that they are well-known for pointing out. Apparently the thought is that giving a lot of attention and focus to shelters can take away from the real academic language arts learning that needs to happen. You can read more about their thoughts about the “sacred nothingness” of the block here. Still, they don’t recommend abandoning the block entirely and they have a good collection of suggestions for the shelters block. As I’m going through their site now, I can’t find it, but I know that I got some useful information from WI.
• Waldorf Teacher Resources — I didn’t take too much away from this site, but I did add the shelters Michael used to my list.

Once I had a list of shelters, I sat down and thought about the different ways I could give form to the list. Here’s what I thought about.

• Sort by location/continent. I considered this option at first, but the continents of the world are pretty abstract to my 3rd graders. It just didn’t seem to make sense to organize them this way.
• Sort by climate. I considered this option for a good amount of time and it seemed like it could make a lot of sense, especially because we have 3 different shelter blocks — fall, winter and spring.
• Sort by the 4 elements — earth, air, fire and water. This was my second favorite choice. I often view the world through the lens of the 4 elements. It’s a handy framework and I could think pretty easily of how the shelters would fit into these categories.
• Sort by the 4 kingdoms — mineral, plant, animal and human. In the end, this was the framework I chose and it really made sense with the rest of the block and the basic introduction.

An Introduction to Shelters

We’ve been talking a bit about shelters since the beginning of the year. On our weekly farm trips, one of the favorite activities is fort-building. We also have talked about Adam and Eve and how they needed to protect themselves after the fall from paradise.

And though those stories and experiences gave a nice frame of reference, and helped the students to recognize how much they already knew about shelters, they weren’t quite what I was looking for.

In the end, it wasn’t a story that I told the class that helped them to come to an understanding of shelters, it was a conversation.

The first week of the block, began with the Hebrew holiday of Succot. We worked together to build a sukkah and we enjoyed a lunch together inside the sukkah. Though that experience brought some discussion about the protection that a shelter can give us, that wasn’t what it was really about.

So after the sukkah experience was finished, we had a class discussion. I said to the students. “Imagine you are in the woods and you look overhead and you see storm clouds forming. What do you do?”

I was astonished to see how hands shot into the air and kids started talking about what they would do in this circumstance. Here are some of their most notable suggestions.

• Look around and gather twigs and branches that you can put together to make a fort. (This was what I wanted someone to point out — you look around and see what is there to create a shelter of some sort. It was the very first suggestion — smart kids!)
• Find a hollowed out tree and get inside.
• Dig a hole, climb inside and put branches over top.
• Put on a jacket. (I loved this one! It helped us to realize that our clothing serves the same function as a shelter — protection. It seemed like a silly answer, but made a lot of sense.)
• Find a cave and go inside (but be careful, maybe check it first.)

We then talked about how the situation would look different if you were at the beach. They suggested that you go to higher ground, go inside a lifeguard shelter, knock on the door of a nearby house or use driftwood to create a shelter.

We then talked about how the situation would look different if you were just out in our park. I asked them to imagine all of the children playing and the teachers watching during recess and suddenly it starts raining. What do you see?

• Children hide under the play structures.
• People look for the parts of the park where the ground is dry. That means they are not getting rained on.
• Teachers put up their umbrellas (ooh, an umbrella is a shelter that you can carry around with you!)
• Kids run back inside to get rain gear.

It was such a great conversation and beautifully set the stage for the rest of the block!

We realized out of this conversation, that human beings look around and use the gifts of the particular location to create the protection and shelter that they need. And every place has a different gift. The gifts come from the mineral, plant and animal world. On Friday we had a basic discussion about a kind of shelter that came from each of these gifts. They had an easy time thinking of mineral and plant. Animal was a little more difficult, mainly because they didn’t want to think about killing an animal to create a shelter, but someone did come up with the idea that a tipi or a tent could be made from animal hide.

Week 1 | Mineral Dwellings

After so many weeks of projects and Hebrew festivities, this week we are finally diving in to more typical lessons, stories and review activities (I mean, we were doing them before, but I’m so glad to have the bulk of my attention go towards planning those lessons!)

Yesterday I told them the story of my great-great-grandmother Anna who moved to the great plains with her family when she was a young girl. We talked about their journey, what the plains looked like and how they had to create a home for themselves.

For a lot of our work with shelters and farming, I have been using female protagonists, to balance out the male dominance in the Hebrew Legends. My own family full of great matriarchs who were early settlers in the US are just perfect. I’m having a great time telling the class about my great-grandma Merty and great-great-grandma Anna. Every Sunday night I text my mom with questions about the family, just so I can get the details right.

I have taken creative license with some of the specifics, but I love using my own family to help my students build connection with the content.

As my story went yesterday, Anna’s family came to the US at a time when the president said that they could have the land that they settled in Nebraska, as long as they build a house within 6 months. They were excited to have a piece of land to call their own but were surprised when they got there to find that there were no trees to use to build a house.

They looked around and all they saw was grass. They thought of all of the ways they could use grass to build a shelter and tried different things. But in the end, they realized that the most useful thing was the solid, hard-packed dirt that the grass grew in.

I then described how the cut the sod, made bricks and stacked it up to build the walls. We talked about what a sod house feels like and what the benefits of this kind of dwelling are.

They were fascinated and it was so fun to present this content to them. It reminded me of my middle school days when I would go off and get lost in research in preparation for a lesson. So much fun!

Today, the class wrote compositions about the sod house. The two main questions they answered were “Why would someone build a sod house?” and “How do you build a sod house?”

Once again, I felt grateful that their writing is coming along so nicely. I took some notes from the board and they set right to work. A few of them went to go work with my assistant teacher (as is our habit) but most of them set right to silent work.

So much fun.

Tomorrow, I plan to bring them a story about the caves of Cappadocia — another example of a dwelling that is a gift from the mineral world, but built in a completely different way.

And is it a coincidence that my own shelter is getting a bit of a renovation? I think not!