How do Waldorf children draw in grade 1?

Waldorf children in grade 1 mostly draw from the story. The day after you tell a story, your child draws one picture from it in the main lesson book, using beeswax block crayons. The bear, the sun, the golden goose. They build each shape out of areas of color instead of drawing an outline and filling it in, and you often draw alongside, step by step. This picture drawing sits next to form drawing but isn't the same thing. Form drawing practises moving lines like the straight line and the curve. Picture drawing makes an image.

Here's how a drawing lesson goes, why color comes before line, and how to tell the two kinds of drawing apart.

How do Waldorf children draw in grade 1?

Picture a morning in the second week of a letter block. Yesterday you told Snow-White and Rose-Red, and the great black bear knocked at the cottage door in the snow. This morning your child tells the story back. Then you both open your main lesson books and take out the block crayons.

You start with the bear's back, one tall brown band made with the side of the crayon. Your child makes one too. Then the round head, then the round belly, each a patch of color that grows from the middle out. A little blue-grey snow at the bottom of the page. No black outline goes round the bear. Its edges are simply where the brown stops and the white of the page or the blue of the snow begins.

That's the shape of most grade 1 drawing. The Waldorf Resources curriculum for class 1, from the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum, says drawings "are always built up from bringing together areas of color, never from lines." Children use wax blocks or crayons for these pictures, and colored pencils later.

Lavender's Blue sums up how grade 1 letters work: "The letters come from pictures that you draw from the fairy tales." In Starpath's grade 1 alphabet guide, the bear's straight back and two curves become the capital B on the facing page. Our article on how Waldorf teaches letters follows one letter from story to page.

It isn't only letters. In a nature block, your child draws what they saw on a walk, in its real colors. In a math block, they draw the characters from the number stories. Waldorf nature stories has more on the walks behind those pictures.

Why color and not outline?

Look at a tree out of the window. There's no black line round it. You see green leaves against blue sky, and a brown trunk against the grass. The edge is where one color meets another.

Steiner put a lot of weight on this. Steve Sagarin at Waldorf Today quotes his talks to teachers. Steiner suggested that children "go right into color, and, on their own, gradually produce form from color." He also described how, when children work this way, "the form arises without any drawing involved, from color." For a 6 or 7 year old, that means starting a picture with a patch of yellow, not a pencil sketch.

Barbara Dewey of Waldorf Without Walls describes the grade 1 block crayon method as "creating the form with color, rather than drawing a line and then coloring it in." She says a good Waldorf crayon drawing shows no lines at the edges of its shapes at all.

The block crayon helps. It's hard to make a thin outline with a flat block, and easy to lay down a wide, soft band. Stockmar's crayons are partly beeswax, so the color is a little see-through, and a layer of blue over yellow makes green on the page. Block crayons or stick crayons explains which crayon does which job.

It's the same idea your child meets in wet-on-wet watercolor, where shapes grow out of colors meeting on wet paper.

How to teach a drawing from the story

Your child learns the block crayon by watching you use it. Diane Power, a Waldorf teacher quoted by Earthschooling, describes children imitating how the teacher uses the different sides of the crayon to make different shapes and textures. So draw with your child, not for them.

1. Hear the story back first. Let your child tell you what happened. Choose one picture from what they remember.
2. Start with the biggest color. Sky, ground or the main figure's body, with the long side of the block.
3. Add one shape at a time. You draw a shape in your book, your child draws it in theirs. Build from the middle of each shape outward.
4. Let colors meet. Bring the sky down to touch the hill, rather than drawing a line between them.
5. Small details last. Eyes, a flower, a bird. A corner of the block or a stick crayon works for these.
6. Stop while it's still fresh. One picture is plenty for a morning.

A sun is a lovely first picture. Golden yellow in the middle, pressed a little harder, and lighter as you move out. Then bring light blue in from the edges of the page until it meets the yellow. Nothing is outlined, and it still looks like a sun.

Your child's bear won't look like yours, and that's how it should be. The drawing you make together is a way of remembering the story, not a test. A Waldorf Journey's teacher describes her guided drawings as "a fun way to remember stories together, while still having a skill-building lesson."

How is it different from form drawing?

Both happen in grade 1, both use crayons and both end up in the main lesson book, so they're easy to mix up.

Form drawing doesn't draw anything. It practises pure forms: the straight line and the curve first, then circles, spirals, waves and running forms. Your child usually walks a form on the floor or draws it in the air before it goes onto paper. Lavender's Blue says the drawing itself "is usually only the last and shortest part of the lesson." The line is drawn with a stick crayon, often a light yellow first, then gone over in a deeper color. The line is the whole point.

Picture drawing is the other way round. There's no outline at all, the tool is usually the block, and the point is the image from the story.

The two support each other. Form drawing trains the hand and eye for the lines inside letters and numbers. Picture drawing brings the story and color onto the page, and in the letter blocks it's the picture that holds the letter. The grade 1 form drawing sequence lays out the forms in order.

Guided drawing or free drawing?

Both have a place, but usually not in the same book.

The main lesson book holds guided drawings. You draw step by step and your child draws beside you. A Waldorf Journey's teacher keeps free drawing out of the main lesson book. She allows it "on occasion, but it is with a lot of intention, and not in their main lesson books."

Free drawing still matters in grade 1. A basket of crayons and plain paper where your child can reach them, any afternoon, is enough. Nobody guides these drawings or looks at them with a teacher's eye.

If your child wants to outline everything, you don't need to stop them in free drawing. In the main lesson book, show the color way again, gently, by drawing it yourself.

How much drawing in a grade 1 week?

Most grade 1 mornings end with a page in the main lesson book, and most of those pages have a picture. So your child draws a little almost every day, and the picture usually takes most of the bookwork time, because the words are still short.

Some teachers also keep one morning a week for a longer guided drawing. A Waldorf Journey's teacher does hers on Thursdays. Simply Waldorf's grade 1 course builds its whole language arts year around pictures, words and consonant letters drawn from 21 stories.

For the whole year, blocks and all, see the grade 1 curriculum guide, and the grade 1 curriculum comparison shows how different programs set out the drawing. For page layouts that go with the drawings, main lesson book ideas by grade has examples.

Tomorrow, try a sun. Golden yellow in the middle, blue from the edges, and your own book open beside your child's.

Related reading

• What is Waldorf grade 1 curriculum?
• How Waldorf teaches letters in grade 1
• What is form drawing in Waldorf education?
• Waldorf nature stories in grade 1
• What is wet-on-wet watercolor?