Letters are initially introduced imaginatively through pictures and the groundwork is laid for increasingly complex handwriting skills and drawing with form drawing. Alliterative verses reinforce the sounds and are carefully copied into the student’s first readers together with illustrations. As the school year progresses, fairy tales, folk tales and nature stories are told, recalled, discussed and dramatized—honing memory, comprehension and language skills. Utilizing this whole language approach, augmented by traditional phonics techniques, these tales are also written into lesson books, allowing children learn to read from treasured records of their own writing.

The four basic mathematic processes are personified and introduced through engaging stories: poor Minnie Minus seems to lose everything she puts into her pockets through the holes in the bottoms… Multiplication tables are set to music and sung; they are also clapped and stomped to rhythm as well as being read and written. Engaging the body in memory is an effective tool used in Waldorf education.

In the early grades, science is taught through direct experience: nature observation, the creation of pictorial journals, and classroom discussion.