Attempts to adapt Waldorf education in learning situations where the teaching mission is not exclusively Waldorf may be categorized as Waldorf curriculum enrichments or Waldorf curriculum lessons. Any adaptation of Waldorf, in a non-Waldorf learning situation, may be considered a curriculum enrichment, but some minimum elements must be in place if an adaptation is to be considered a Waldorf-like lesson.

If all four of the following elements are not included in a lesson the lesson will be somewhat compromised. Yet, progressively including Waldorf elements, in the reverse sequence of their descriptions below, will progressively enrich lessons.

The Waldorf curriculum weaves together lessons that provide for the development of the human personality and lessons that provide for the acquisition of academic tools. Therefore, the developmental appropriateness of lessons providing for the acquisition of academic tools must be sensitive to the needs of the developing human personality. Waldorf education takes as the foundation of such a curriculum the idea that the development of the human personality recapitulates the development of human culture and consciousness.

Waldorf instructional strategies strive to facilitate the emergence of the three learning activities: willing, feeling and thinking in such a way that the latter emerge from the former. For any given subject area and stage of development the emergence of the learning activities requires some specific organization of the instructional strategies adapted to the needs of students addressed.

When planning a lesson, Waldorf education considers means to minimize student stress therefore maximizing the learning opportunity. Toward this end, three tools structure the lesson: rhythm, ritual and repetition. These tools are the three R's of Waldorf planning.

The Waldorf approach to assessment is performance based and looks at the development of the human personality as well as the acquisition of academic tools. The methods or teaching practices of Waldorf education provide for activities and generates materials for such performance-based assessment. See the Assessment Menu in the appendix. Assessment is not the end of the educational process but a guide to its' continuing renewal.

Currently, in most mainstream learning situations assessment will be the area where Waldorf approaches are least adaptable followed by curriculum development. Most non-Waldorf learning situations will include test-based assessment. When test-based assessment is included in the assessment menu, at least in primary and secondary grades, the other learning activities of the students will tend to be limited to the testing goals. Since most test require a reading and writing modality to assess performance, preceding learning activities are likely to be limited to the same modality to prepare for testing. Such test defined environments limit exploration by students and produces inauthentic instructional strategies. As stated above, Waldorf education takes as the foundation of curriculum development the idea that the development of the human personality recapitulates the development of human culture and consciousness. Therefore academic activities should be sensitive to and reflect human cultural periods associated with specific grades. This view is supported by the success of Waldorf teachers, but research explicitly demonstrating its' advantages has not been conducted. See examples following this section.

A lesson fully incorporating Waldorf instructional strategies and the three R's of Waldorf planning can be achieved. The efficacy of Waldorf instructional strategies is supported by research on how the brain learns. For more details, see the section on Waldorf Educational Strategies. The three R's of Waldorf planning outlines tools for planning a lesson with attention to a specific biorhythmic sequencing of activities. Such sequencing provides support for the learning process intrinsic to the Waldorf instructional strategies and is also supported by research on best brain-based teaching practices. As a minimum, Waldorf instructional strategies and biorhythmic planning must be included for a lesson to have a Waldorf-like quality and efficacy..

A Brief Look at the Waldorf Curriculum for Grades K Through Five.

During kindergarten, children are engaged in activities through imitation and imagination that facilitate sensory-motor integration and sensory-motor imaging. If this sensory-motor integration and imaging is delayed the child will have difficulty engaging their imitative and imaginative capacities for academic work. This delay causes in the child a sense hunger. An impulse to seek sense activity that interrupts their imaginative life. Therefore academic activities are not presented to the child in the Waldorf kindergarten. The children spend their time at imitative and imaginative play in a homelike environment.

If children have been allowed to engage in imitative and imaginative play up to the age of about six and a half they will on average have little or no difficulty engaging these capacities for academic work. But, it is essential that academic lessons engage the first graders imitative and imaginative capacities to facilitate the exercising and development of the first graders learning personality. The learning personality arises out of a student's association of feeling content with the fundamental learning procedures, matching, collecting and sorting, necessary for the acquisition of writing, reading and arithmetic. Students at this age, for the most part, are conscious of feeling content as only arising in response to concrete life situations, when listening to stories, and when imitating concrete life situations and stories. To facilitate the development of the learning personality, feeling content will usually be brought using stories or image sequences from nature and traditional fairytales. These image sequences and stories are adapted to motivate and direct the application of learning procedures by students. The learning procedures, as they are applied to specific academic skills, are presented as attributes of the characters of the stories or image sequences. For example collecting things is an attribute of the king that can be adapted to teach simple addition. The students through their imitative and imaginative capacities identify with the king and collecting becomes an attribute of their learning personality. In this way, learning addition becomes a consequence of activities proceeding from the student imagination and interest in the world.

After the learning personality is adequately developed, in the manner suggested, it will become like a hand with which a student will reach out into the world and grasp academic knowledge In such a hand, knowledge is easily held for later use. Now that learning is part of the student's personality it is the task of the teacher to help the student learn to direct their learning personality. In other words, to encourage them to make choices to pursue with their learning personality the work of the class. This capacity involves the holding back and redirection of the learning personality impulses as the class life requires. Working again with the feeling content the writing and reading curriculum is brought through traditional fables and saint stories. The fables present the folly and consequences of certain learning personality impulses, while the saint stories present an ideal toward which the learning personality may aspire. Even so, the directing of the learning personality will be difficult for a student experiencing sense hunger.

Third Grade:

After the learning personality is developed and students have learned to take responsibility for engaging it in the life of the class, their childhood in a sense ends. As mentioned previously until this point, children have for the most part experienced their feelings as only arising in response to concrete life situations, when listening to stories, and when imitating concrete life situations and stories. But now, they notice their feelings may arise in response to inner imagined situations. The exercise of this capacity leads to a child realizing that their feeling life may be independent of their relationships with parent, peer or teacher. Before this time, a child's feelings were like garments that others gave them to wear depending on the weather. Hopefully the garments they were given always kept them warm. But now, they must chose their own garments, and they have little experience at judging the weather. This independence of their feeling life and therefore responsibility for their feeling life causes for children anxiety and a lost of self-confidence. Though if a proper foundation as been set, students this year will conquer writing, reading and arithmetic, they will also study house building, farming and textiles. The application of these academic skills and human-craft will rebuild the self -confidence of students, and stories about leaders such as Noah, Moses and Harriet Tubman who, with an inner source of strength, lead others through difficult situations will support the resolution of rising anxieties.

If all goes well students by the forth grade will have renewed self-confidence and will have resolved anxieties born of the independence of their feeling life. Most likely students will have too much confidence in their independent feeling life, such that their inner picture of the world, motivating their behavior, will be colored with very little objectivity. Therefore, the curriculum strives to build understanding and objectivity through comparisons. Through the study of zoology students begin to understand the adaptations of various phyla, classes and orders of animals by comparing these adaptations to the structure and capacities they, themselves, possess. Fractions are taught to students as exact statements about a comparison relating two objects or quantities, such as this object is one-third as big as that object. In this way, students are encouraged to notice objective relationships to be found among things in the world. The tales of the Norse gods are told to the students so they may experience in their imagination the rise and fall of great beings who create a world to suit their passions, rather than order, which leads to their destruction. But, a new day begins and a new world where passion and reason together enliven and reveal knowledge is anticipated.

In the fourth, grade we encouraged students to observe the world objectively, now we encourage students to begin finding rational patterns in the world. Botany is introduced to the students. First, the form and function of the ideal flower in terms of roots, stem-leaf and blossom is related to the their own physical structure. Then through careful observation and description the forms of various classes of plants can be seen to be adaptations of the ideal form. The base ten number system is explored to reveal how mechanical arithmetic arises from its' decimal patterns. The evolution of polygons from simpler geometric elements is also explored. The development of rational thought is chronicled through the study of ancient history culminating with classical Greece and its' philosophers.