Every year, teams of experienced experts put their heads together to compose their school’s annual timetable. But a Waldorf timetable is more than just a master plan that juggles subjects and teachers, classes and available rooms. It also reflects our overarching aim to do justice to the threefold human nature of mind, body and soul.
Striving to balance the subjects that address the head, hands and heart is particular to the Waldorf School’s timetable and makes its creation all the more demanding.
Is There a Typical Waldorf Timetable?
No. A Waldorf School’s timetable takes different forms, depending on a region’s established customs.
In some countries primary school ends at lunchtime, in others even the youngest classes have lessons in the afternoon.
What is the Waldorf Main Lesson?
The Main Lesson is a block that deals with one topic for approximately one month. And it is also the class teacher’s time with his or her own class at the start of the day. These first two hours have several parts:
- Welcoming the children
- Settling down together with a meditative verse
- Recorder practice, singing, recitation and movement
- Recalling the previous day’s work
- New lesson content and activities
- Individual bookwork on the current topic
- Relaxing by listening to a story
A snack break with outdoor playtime separates Main Lesson from the subject lessons. Depending on the school and the age group, these subject lessons can be of varying length.
My Class 1 in England had subject lessons of 45 minutes, and a double lesson for painting or craftwork:
What About Afternoons?
At our school it was customary to have just one afternoon in Class 1, beginning about halfway through the year. And the class teacher decided when his or her group was ready for this step.
Of course the school provided Afternoon Care for parents who could not collect their children at lunchtime.
Note: The first afternoon is given to free movement and activities for training manual and social skills: Weekly walks in the school’s environment to experience the changing seasons while enjoying free play; dressing up to act out a story on a rainy day, or working together on a more complex craft project.
In Class 2 our timetable was extended by a second afternoon, with a handy double lesson for Handwork:
And each year another afternoon was added, meaning that our school week was not entirely filled until Class 5.
What is Extra ML?
Extra Main Lesson is any slot that remains unclaimed once all the subject lessons have been filled by the school’s timetabling team.
These additional lessons give class teachers a welcome opportunity to deepen their Main Lesson topic of the moment with extra time for activities and bookwork.
How Best to Balance Lessons?
The Waldorf timetable places numeracy, literacy and foreign language lessons in the morning, when the mind is most alert.
After lunch, artistic subjects, Music and movement lessons complement the earlier intellectual activity by developing the human constitution as a harmonious whole.
Perfection or Compromise?
In practice, an ideal timetable for every class is hardly possible. Creating the year’s timetable for a school of many classes is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess.
Compromises have to be made but top priority is given to achieving an ideal sequence of lessons for the youngest children.
Older students are better able to cope with an academic subject on the occasional afternoon.
As seen below, French as the final lesson on Monday was an unfortunate necessity for my Class 4 that year:
What is Games?
Games means gymnastics and team sports lessons. In movement, as in all else, Waldorf pedagogy puts amicable cooperation before ‘survival of the fittest’ competition.
And that is why our Games lessons are far removed from the Darwinist type of physical education you may remember from your own school days.
What About the Middle School?
The Middle School’s timetable has to accommodate an increasing number of subjects. One’s native tongue now gets practice lessons too, usually two per week.
In urban areas with public transport, a school may extend the timetable to 16.00 or 17.00 for older students, who are able to make their own way home. But in rural areas, where families depend on lift-sharing or a school bus, this is not a viable option.
Our school, for example, changed its daily rhythm radically by inserting additional lessons into an immutable timeframe. In a trial period of one year, the timetable for Class 6 looked like this:
It was indeed a trial! Lessons of formerly 45 minutes, now reduced to 35, made everyone feel breathless; and the shortened break times were especially hard on the younger children.
But, on the positive side, more double lessons became available – a blessing for all subjects that need time to set up and tidy away, such as Orchestra, Games, Woodwork and Gardening.
Class 6 had three Extra ML’s that year and used them for an extraordinary amount of creative bookwork. This many pages would not otherwise have been possible.
How to Get More Lessons?
Learning from the trial’s experience, two parallel timetables were adopted the following year: The younger classes reverted to the earlier 45 minute lessons and longer breaks, while Classes 7 to 12 kept shorter breaks and subject lessons of varying length.
Also, five academic lessons were squeezed in after their shortened Main Lesson, to free up time for the range of equally important heart-and-hand subjects that followed.
The purpose of these additional 25-minute lessons was to introduce new learning content; things that could later be revisited in a full lesson, or practised as homework.
In Class 7’s case, it was the German teacher who got the rough deal of two short lessons. Such facts, regrettably without alternative, are logged, and accepted in the knowledge that next year’s timetable will make up for it:
The innovation of two parallel timetables worked very well, and everyone soon got used to the additional bells that announced our different sets of break and lesson times.
It’s so refreshing to see the ‘hands on’ lessons. Main stream schools have some too, but not as much, unfortunately.