What Is the Waldorf Grade 5 Botany Block?

The Waldorf grade 5 botany block is the year's main science lesson, and it looks at the whole plant kingdom. Your child meets mushrooms, mosses, ferns, conifers and flowering plants in order, from the simplest to the most complex. Each one is studied where it grows, in relation to the earth below and the sun above. Waldorf teachers often go one step further and compare the plant groups with stages of a child's own growing up. At home, the block is mostly walks and close looking, with drawing and painting, over three or four weeks.

Why plants come in grade 5

Botany follows naturally from grade 4. In the human and animal block, your child looked at the cow, the eagle and the lion and saw something of the human being in each. In grade 5, the class turns to the plant world.

The order goes back to the first Waldorf school. In a meeting with its teachers in Stuttgart in 1919, Steiner said that plant study should come after the animals, and that "most of the children are in their eleventh year when we begin this subject." That's the age of a grade 5 child.

Halton Waldorf School puts the grade 5 aim simply: "Students learn about plants in context to their environment." The block doesn't start with Latin names or cell diagrams. It starts with a child looking at a real plant, where it grows.

Plants between the earth and the sun

This is the part of Waldorf botany that differs most from a textbook. Steiner asked teachers to "give the children a clear idea of how the plant exists between Sun and Earth." He wanted them to describe "the way air, heat, light, and water work on the plant," and to put less weight on the details of fertilization at this age.

He gave the teachers an example to try with children. Think of a dandelion across the year. In spring there are only jagged green leaves. Later, yellow flowers open at the top of the stem. Later still, the seed heads blow away when you breathe on them. "What we see at these three different times is all exactly the same plant!" Steiner linked each stage to the world around the plant. The leaves belong to the air and the blossom to the summer warmth. The fruit comes with the warmth that rises back up from the ground later in the year.

He also offered a picture that children often find easy to hold. A tree is like the earth pushing itself up and out into the light. A mushroom is the opposite: the earth keeps its growing power inside, and only a small cap comes up above the ground.

Put simply, the question in every lesson is less "what are the parts of this plant?" and more "how does this plant live between the ground and the sky?"

Plants and the growing child

Here is the idea many Waldorf teachers build the whole block on. In another of the 1919 meetings, Steiner suggested showing children "the whole external plant world as a picture of a developing child's soul." He set it out in stages:

• Mushrooms and fungi: the sleeping soul of a baby, whose greatest joy is milk.
• Algae and mosses: early childhood, when feelings, joys and sorrows begin to wake up.
• Ferns: the time a small child first wakes up to being a self.
• Conifers: the years from about 5 up to school age.
• Plants with parallel-veined leaves, like grasses and lilies: the first school years.
• Flowering plants with net-veined leaves, like the rose: the years around 11 and after.

In practice, a teacher might say: when you were a baby, you were a little like a mushroom in the dark wood, fast asleep. Your baby sister still is. And the flowering rose with its open petals is where you're heading now.

Waldorfish, a Waldorf homeschool resource, describes the same shape in its grade 5 block: "Simple to complex, dependence to more freedom, soft and magical to more formed and realistic." Lichens and mosses cling to a tree trunk. Trees and flowers stand on their own.

This is a picture for the child, not a claim that biology works this way. Many Waldorf teachers find it gives 10 and 11 year olds a reason to care about a moss, because it says something about them.

How the block usually runs

Most teachers go from simple to complex, one plant group every few days. Charles Kovacs taught at the Rudolf Steiner School in Edinburgh for twenty years. His Botany (Floris Books), written for classes 5 and 6, moves from fungi, algae and lichens up to the lily and rose families.

A three to four week block might run like this:

1. Week 1: the forest floor. Fungi, then lichens, algae and mosses. Where they grow, what they need, why they stay low and damp.
2. Week 2: ferns and conifers. A fern unrolling, the cone of a pine, the difference between a needle and a leaf.
3. Week 3: the flowering plants. Grasses and lilies with their straight, parallel veins. Then the rose family, with its net of veins and its five petals.
4. Week 4 (if you have it): trees, and the plant year. One tree watched closely, and the dandelion story told across the seasons.

Waldorfish describes splitting this in two: the simpler plants in an autumn block, trees and flowers in a spring block. That can work well at home, because the spring block then arrives just as the flowers do.

The main lesson block rhythm stays the same as other years. Your child recalls yesterday's plant, works in the main lesson book, and hears about the next plant at the end of the morning.

Botany at home: what to actually do

This block needs you outside more than it needs a book.

One walk a week, to the same place. A patch of woods, a park, a stream bank. Bring a hand lens and a sketchbook. Children begin to notice what's changed since last week, which is the heart of the block.

Find each plant before you teach it. Turn over a rotting log for fungi (look, don't eat). Find moss on a north-facing wall and look at it through the lens. Watch a fern unroll over two weeks. Collect three kinds of cone.

Compare leaves. Lay a grass blade next to a rose leaf. Ask your child to trace the veins with a finger. Straight lines on one, a branching net on the other. It's the simplest way into the difference between the two great groups of flowering plants.

Draw and paint. Carrie at The Parenting Passageway describes her own grade 5 botany at home with field sketches, clay ferns, beeswax flowers and wet-on-wet paintings. A wet-on-wet watercolor of a mushroom in dark blues and browns, and a later one of a sunflower in yellows, show the whole idea of the block without a word.

Keep a dandelion page. Draw the same dandelion plant in leaf, in flower and in seed, over several weeks. Your child sees Steiner's example happen for themselves.

Bring it to the table. Moss, a fern frond and a pine cone on the nature table keep the block alive between lessons.

Grow something. The guest writer on The Parenting Passageway suggests garden work: planting, weeding and harvesting. A pot of beans on the windowsill counts.

Books for the block

Kovacs's Botany was written for Waldorf teachers and homeschoolers of this age. The Parenting Passageway also lists Donna Simmons's Botany from Christopherus. For plant facts, the Parenting Passageway guest post recommends Anna Comstock's Handbook of Nature Study. A simple field guide to your region's plants is worth having too, so your child can put a name to what they drew.

A note on the science

Some parents worry the Waldorf picture of plants isn't "real" science. The block does cover the real plant groups, their parts and how they grow, drawn from close observation. What it leaves out at this age is the detail of plant reproduction and germination. In 1919, Steiner said that younger children "cannot yet fully understand the germinating process" and suggested saving it for age fifteen or sixteen. Later grades return to plants with more precision.

Where botany sits in the year

Botany can sit in the autumn, the spring or both. It pairs well with freehand geometry: the five petals of a wild rose are a good first pentagon to draw. And it connects with the Greek myths, where Persephone's months underground are an old Greek picture of the plant year.

To see how botany fits with the rest of the year, from ancient India to decimals, read the full guide: what's in the Waldorf grade 5 curriculum?