Hard Day's Work: Spring Garden Waldorf School in Copley Provides Students With Practical Life Skills

Third grade students spent an hour several days a week for several months using measuring tapes, saws, hammers, levels, screw-drivers and more with adult supervision to construct a playhouse last year as part of Spring Garden Waldorf School’s practical life curriculum.

“This is hard work humans have been doing for thousands of years,” says Miriam Daniel, who taught the subject last school year and is now a fourth grade teacher at the Copley school. “We live in nice houses, and we take that for granted. This is a long, arduous process.”

The practical life curriculum focuses on what humans need to provide for themselves and survive including shelter, clothing and food. For shelter, they learned about historical shelters in the area, starting with indigenous settlers who built temporary shelters and how those and other shelters evolved.

As a project, students chose to build a new playhouse. A parent created a blueprint that each student got a copy of, and students used their math skills to measure pieces and then label them before cutting them and putting them together with adult help.They put a few coats of paint on the playhouse, and adults helped finish painting the gray yellow-rimmed playhouse with yellow heart-shaped windows. Students also learned about how shelters are built for their environments, so they added a pitched roof to withstand the rain, snow and wind of Northeast Ohio. It’s rewarding seeing kids play in the structure at recess.

“They’re very proud,” Daniel says. “They recognize it’s something that they would expect an adult had done yet they were able to do as a 9-year-old.

”For clothing, a teacher sheered wool from sheep. Students carted it in, washed it several times and used drop spindles to pull the fibers out and form yarn and then make it two-ply. From that, students wove together pouches. To learn about providing food, students planted beans, peas, head lettuce and radishes in a hoop house and planted butternut squash, kale, tomatoes, green beans and carrots in a garden. Students picked and washed them, making salads to eat. They learned that the better you care for crops, the more abundant the harvest is, as is the same for all aspects of practical life.

“They’ve seen how much work it is to grow foods,” Daniel says. “There’s a lot of work that goes into making clothing. There’s an appreciation for those things and a real honoring of what our place is in the world.”