How Does Waldorf Teach Grammar in Grade 3?

In Waldorf grade 3, children meet grammar through their bodies and their eyes before they meet the rules. They act out doing words, stamp a foot when they hear one, and write verbs in red and nouns in blue in their main lesson books. The words come from the year's stories, often Adam naming the animals in the garden. By the end of the year, many children can pick out each part of speech in a sentence. They've moved, drawn and colored every one.

Why grammar in grade 3?

Grades 1 and 2 are about letters, sounds and first reading. In grade 3 the child has enough words to start looking at how they work. Many Waldorf teachers link this to the nine-year change, when children become more aware of themselves as separate people.

Catherine and Peter van Alphen wrote an open-source grade 3 manual for Waldorf teacher training in East Africa. They describe the child in grade 3 as entering "a new phase of awakening". They compare language to a house, and say children need to learn how to build it for themselves.

This isn't formal grammar yet. In his 1919 lectures to the first Waldorf teachers, Steiner said it's after the age of twelve that children should become "fully conscious of the value of grammar." So in grade 3 the touch is light. Children use friendly names at first, doing words, naming words and describing words. The Parenting Passageway describes teaching this "little person" version alongside the "bigger people" words, noun and verb.

Doing words first, with the whole body

The van Alphens start with doing words. Young children learn by doing, they explain, and a verb can make a sentence on its own, like "Run!"

A week of doing words might look like this. You tell the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, and your child says what they might have done there: climbed a tree, picked flowers, drunk from a stream. Then your child acts each one out. Or Noah builds the ark, and your child saws the wood, drags the logs and paints on the pitch. Only after the acting do you write the words down.

The manual is full of games for the circle or morning movement time. With one child at home, these work well:

• What are you doing? Your child mimes an action. You ask, "What are you doing?" and they answer, "I am digging." Then you swap.
• Into the ark. Take turns miming animals going into the ark. The tortoise plods. The monkey scampers. The lion stalks. Write down what each animal did.
• The stamping game. Read sentences from yesterday's story. Your child stamps a foot every time they hear a doing word.

In the second week come naming words. The story is Adam naming everything in the garden: the monkey, the deer, the eagle, the mountains and rivers. Now the game has two movements. Your child stamps for a doing word and touches their head for a naming word. In the third week, describing words arrive: the gentle lamb, the cheeky monkey, the dark and heavy clouds after Adam and Eve leave the garden.

Color on the page

After the movement comes the main lesson book. Each kind of word gets its own color, and your child writes it in that color every time.

The van Alphens write doing words in red, "an active color", and naming words in blue, a quiet and thoughtful one. Describing words go in yellow or orange. Waldorfy, a site on Waldorf classroom practice, gives the same reasoning: red for verbs because verbs are active, orange for adverbs because it sits next to red.

A typical page is a sentence your child builds a word at a time, each word underlined in its color:

• Abraham
• Abraham walked
• Faithful Abraham walked
• Faithful Abraham walked bravely

That example is from the Patriarchs block in the table below, which uses blue for nouns, red for verbs, green for adjectives and orange for adverbs. Other curricula choose differently. What matters is that you pick one set and keep it for the whole year, so that red always means doing.

Grammar that grows out of the stories

In most Waldorf schools, grade 3 grammar doesn't have a separate textbook. It grows out of the main lesson. San Francisco Waldorf School and Mountain Laurel Waldorf School both list the parts of speech as part of grade 3 language arts, beside cursive, punctuation and composition. The Parenting Passageway notes that Waldorf schools often bring grammar with Adam naming the animals.

Some schools teach grammar as its own three-week block, as the van Alphens do. Starpath spreads it through the year's Hebrew story blocks instead, so each story block carries a piece of the grammar:

Block	Story	Grammar
Hebrew Creation Story	Creation to the Tower of Babel	Proper and common nouns, verbs, homophones
The Patriarchs	Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph	Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, color-coded
Moses	From the Nile to the Promised Land	Past and present tense, irregular verbs
Kings	Joshua to Solomon	Being verbs and helping verbs

The practical blocks carry smaller pieces: prefixes in Farming and Occupations, suffixes such as -ful, -less and -ness in Fibre Arts, and contractions in Money.

This matters if you're thinking of skipping a story block. If you leave one out, plan another way to cover its grammar. Why Waldorf teaches Old Testament stories in grade 3 goes through the stories themselves.

When the words get muddled

Some words are hard to sort, and that's fine at this age. The van Alphens point out that a child should learn to spot a doing word whether it's sit, sat or was sitting, and that telling the tenses apart can wait. They also let describing words include both adjectives and adverbs in grade 3, as long as the child can hear that the word paints a picture.

So if your child calls "quickly" a describing word, they're right. If they miss "was" as a verb, act it out together and move on. A child who's enjoying the stamping game is learning more than one who's afraid of getting it wrong.

What your child already knows from grade 2

Grade 3 grammar rarely starts from nothing. In the grade 2 blocks that lead into this year, the noun arrives in the Inspiring People block, through a little story about a queen who walks around naming things. Trickster Tales adds verbs and proper and common nouns, and A Hero's Tale brings capitals, speech marks and three kinds of sentence. So on the first day of grade 3, your child is recalling and deepening, not starting over.

If your child is new to Waldorf, spend a morning or two on the doing-word games before you begin the color work.

A grammar morning at home

Here's one way a morning can go in the middle of a story block. It takes about 20 minutes of the main lesson.

1. Move first (5 minutes). Play the stamping game with 5 sentences from yesterday's story.
2. Find the words (5 minutes). Say a sentence aloud. Your child names each doing word and naming word.
3. Write it (10 minutes). Your child copies 2 or 3 sentences into the main lesson book and underlines each word in its color.

Then put the books away and tell the next part of the story. Tomorrow's sentences come from it.

For more on how the pages come together, see what main lesson books are. The Waldorf grade 3 curriculum guide shows where grammar sits in the whole year, and choosing a grade 3 curriculum compares how each one handles it.