Co-Director's Letter: Spring 2026
Dear Colleagues,
As we navigate a world that often feels uncertain, we hold fast to our trust in the spiritual forces working diligently behind the veil to bring us guidance. We are deeply grateful that our Waldorf schools and communities continue to offer a haven for children, parents, and community members alike.
This issue of our journal focuses on the essential work of the kindergarten and the first grade year—the foundation upon which children build the strength and capacities for the grades and beyond. Within these pages, you will find articles designed to help prepare children for the academic challenges and the depth and breadth of the grade school and high school curricula.
We also pause to honor the legacies of two beautiful souls who have passed over the Threshold in recent months; you will find their lives celebrated here in dedicated memorial pieces.
Furthermore, I am pleased to share my reflections and notes from the World Learning Support Conference that Elyce Perico and I attended last November, offering fresh insights into our collective mission and the vital work of supporting every learner.
May these offerings support and inspire your vital work in the classroom and community.
With gratitude,
Betty Jane Enno
Co-Director, Association for a Healing Education
In Memoriam
Erica Eikenboom-Van Nierop
July 25,1944 - December 24, 2025.
On Christmas Eve 2025, Erica Eikenboom-Van Nierop crossed the threshold with her loving husband Joep by her side. We can imagine that the angels accompanied Erica not only with heavenly music but also with colors, perhaps even colors we cannot see as humans. In her career, Erica deepened her painting therapy work inspired by artist Liane Collot d’Herbois (1907-1999), and shared stories of healing moments for children. Erica and Joep traveled from the Netherlands to do Extra Lesson trainings around the world, sharing their wisdom.
Many of us at AHE had the opportunity to get a glimpse of Collot’s Light, Darkness and Color painting therapy through various Extra Lesson summer conferences when Erica and Joep visited North America, beginning in the 1990’s. In a favorite watercolor painting exercise, Erica led us through the color progression from magenta through the warm fire colors, to the straight downstrokes of viridian green, and into the cooler blues and finally violet. If you were lucky enough to paint under her guidance, it made a lasting impression, as the veils of color magically flowed on the page. Thank you, Erica, for the color experiences we can all use as healing.
Barbara Jean (Young) Patterson
December 30, 1934 - March 16, 2026
We also fondly remember Barbara Patterson, an early childhood teacher, AHE graduate and author. Barbara died early in the morning a few days shy of the spring equinox at the Camphill Community for seniors in Ghent, New York in the Hudson Valley. She lived a full life of parenting, teaching, study, and enjoying friends and family. She was a 60-year partner to Robert Patterson, a Christian Community priest; both were long-time students of Anthroposophy.
Barbara was the author of Crossing the Rainbow Bridge. She had just finished her book in the spring of 2000, when many of us graduated from Cycle 3. Proud to be a published author in her mid-sixties, her book was translated into a few other languages and continues to be a valuable resource today.
I was fortunate to see Barbara a few years ago when I attended a Christian Community service in Hillsdale, NY. Her eyes sparkled just as I remembered from over twenty years earlier. We can be sure that from across the threshold she may be a steady guide to us in our work with young children and their parents, as well as with new teachers.
Connie Helms
AHE Board Member and ESP Program Co-director
Highlights from the International Learning Support Conference at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland
Dear Colleagues,
Elyce Perico and I attended this inspiring International Learning Support conference, and I wanted to share some notes on themes that I thought you would find interesting or helpful.
The Silent Longings of Childhood: Nurturing the Whole Child in a Hurried World
Every child arrives with a silent expectation — a deep, unspoken need to feel that their presence in the world is wanted. Alongside this lives a quiet longing: to be truly seen. Yet in the landscape of modern childhood, these fundamental needs are increasingly difficult to meet. The capacity for empathy in our culture has diminished, and we must ask ourselves honestly: Does the world, as it has been shaped, actually support children?
A World Moving Too Fast
Consider the earliest experiences of a young child. Long before they can move independently, they are driven at high speed through a world of fragmented impressions. Their own developing sense of balance — so essential to feeling at home in the body — is overridden. Sensory impressions flood in without coherence or meaning. Rather than learning to create and explore, children are learning to consume.
Children need time. Time to hear, to digest, to make sense of what surrounds them. The impressions of their environment and what is being taught must be allowed to land gently. Yet we rarely offer this patience.
The Body as Foundation
The physical body of a young child is still in a state of metamorphosis. Its immaturity is not a limitation to be overcome but a developmental reality to be honoured and supported. The senses and the physical environment shape the body after birth. Through imitation, the body is further formed, and the soul's capacities begin to awaken.
When adults are truly present — not merely nearby, but inwardly available — the child's self-initiated play becomes the ground through which spirit and soul work into the developing being. Children need to feel at home in their bodies, and this sense of belonging arises through their own desire to move, to grasp, to explore.
The environment, then, should not impose itself upon the child. It should be simple and supportive of natural development. Slowness, patience, and tolerance from the caregivers generate warmth — a kind of nest in which the child can feel secure and nurtured.
The Crisis of Sleep - a lecture by Dr. Karin Michael
Parents often believe their children sleep longer than they actually do. They estimate ten hours when the reality may be closer to eight. This gap matters enormously. During sleep, the sense impressions of the day are taken up and processed by the life forces of the body. When there is too much stimulation — particularly from blue light and screens — these forces become confused. The body is overstimulated, and restful sleep becomes difficult to achieve.
What helps is ritual. A nightly practice of beauty and calm assists the child in making the transition into sleep. The message, carried not only in words but in the mood of the evening, should be this: the world is good, you are secure, and you may lay yourself down and go over into sleep. Without such rituals, media and anxiety could fill the space instead.
Rhythm in the Grades Classroom (a tip from Dr. Michael)
A lesson should last no more than twenty to twenty-five minutes before a shift is needed — singing, clapping, movement — something that allows the child to experience what might be called a "small sleep," a gentle release before the next period of focused attention. The soul needs these rhythmic pauses to absorb and integrate.
The Image of the Boat - Philip Ruebeke
Philip Ruebeke offered a thoughtful image for the incarnating child: a boat, upright and sailing steadfastly over the waters, representing the physical body of the child. This image once served as the logo for the Association for a Healing Education, and it remains a powerful one. If we carry this picture — the boat's shape, its stability, a vessel strong enough to sail through stormy seas — then it is the foundational senses that build this boat. The careful work of child observation and child study is what allows us, as adults, to support this image as well.
Our task is not to rush the child toward some imagined destination. It is to build the vessel, tend the waters, and trust that the child, given warmth and time, will find their way.
This sweet cow family, often on the lawn, would brighten our morning walk to classes in the Goetheanum.
-Betty Jane Enno
Co-Director, Association for Healing Education
Whole-Class Extra Lesson Activities in First Grade
In a Waldorf first grade, education reaches far beyond the delivery of the curriculum; it is a cultivation of space for movement, rhythm, and relationship. Learning at this age is living in the entire child; it emerges in the body, the heart, and the imagination. The Extra Lesson activities can be woven into the fabric of the day to support developmental growth. Intentional movement, fine motor engagement, and watercolor painting exercises become opportunities to strengthen incarnation, coordination, and creative exploration.
The Magic of String Games
In a first grade Waldorf classroom, something quietly transformative unfolds with a simple loop of string. Between two hands, a world of movement, pattern, and discovery comes alive. Games such as Owl Eyes, Fishing Net, Jacob’s Ladder, Tea Cup, Open the Gates, Siberian House, and Sewing Machine invite children to explore coordination, focus, and geometric thinking, while developing “intelligent fingers.”
Each string figure is a small puzzle: the child can observe and follow directions such as, “thumbs move over the first string, under the second” or “pick up the pinkie string” and in doing so, children strengthen fine motor activity to enhance skills for writing, handwork, and playing a pentatonic flute. These games offer the opportunity to cross the midline and awaken spatial awareness. At the same time, they cultivate body geography, distinguishing right from left, near and far, forwards and backwards, under and over.
There are many moments of uncertainty or even frustration when initially encountering a string game, followed by a surprising satisfaction when the form appears. These “aha” moments, repeated over time, lay the groundwork for sequential thinking. Children are also gently reminded that skills take practice, fostering patience and perseverance. Frequently, students who learn a game by heart will become teachers to others, strengthening the classroom community. When a game becomes well known, it can then be attempted with eyes closed!
Many string games carry cultural stories, connecting children to traditions beyond their own. World language teachers might offer a string game instruction in their language to add another layer. The games can be revisited during transitions, during language lessons, or in quiet moments, offering opportunities of focus throughout the day.
The Movement Life of the Classroom
Extra Lesson activities are inseparable from the movement life of the first grade classroom. Intentional exercises help children enter their bodies fully. At the start of the day, walking heel-to-toe along a balance beam with a beanbag on the head or balancing on a wobble board can strengthen coordination, balance, and focus.
The beanbag activities from Take Time, as well as the Extra Lesson Zoo Exercises, are vital components to include during the morning circle to assist with integration of retained reflexes and midline barriers. Rhythmic clapping games are paired with playful rhymes (favorites include Peas Porridge Hot, Miss Lucy, and Mary Mack) to build coordination, integrate midline barriers and foster social awareness. Careful intention is placed to ensure they are not clapping too hard, not too soft, but aiming to connect with each other as they work with a partner. These moments support self-regulation, social connection, and the development of timing and sequence.
During circle time, imaginative games blend movement, rhythm, and story together. In this playful game, children imagine themselves as cranes with a verse:
Standing in a lake are the tall, tall cranes,
Little fishies in the water, in and out again.
With their feet they gather all their food for the day,
As many little fishies as the tall crane may.
Gemstones are scattered across the floor and become the fish to be gathered. Children become fully engaged with their bare feet as they pick up the gems. By inviting children to explore movements with their toes, the game is both strengthening and enlivening. Initially, many children find it difficult to grasp a gemstone with their toes. After a few practices, they become increasingly adept, with fewer indications of overflow, like wagging tongues or fists that clench when toes clench. As a rule, they must walk with the gemstone grasped in their toes, rather than try to hop to deliver it into a basket. Also, it is helpful to guide students to alternate using the right foot then the left foot.
Body geography exercises are incorporated as part of transitions, to further strengthen spatial orientation and attention, while adding peaceful focus to these moments of change. A teacher might ask, “Touch your right knee with your right hand,” or “Touch your left eyebrow with your left pinkie,” developmentally mindful that in first grade, body geography can remain homolateral or can touch to the midline. Instructions might be offered through a game of Simon Says to encourage attentive listening, mindfulness, and body awareness. Similarly, these activities may be offered not just by the Class Teacher, but also during World Language classes in another language.
Joep Eikenboom brought us Dorothea Beigel’s series of five balance exercises (click here to watch the YouTube video), which reinforce these capacities, ensuring that movement breaks remain joyful, intentional, and accessible throughout the day to reinforce a child’s own capacity for self-regulation. With regular practice, these repeated, rhythmic movements allow children to inhabit their bodies with improved regulation, confidence and awareness. The classroom becomes a vessel for integration, as the child’s nervous system is gently supported through their day.
Color, Story, and Form: The Sun in the Blue Sky
After watercolor painting has been introduced in the first grade, children can progress into this Extra Lesson exercise as a whole class activity, ideal for first grade. As a first step, the Class Teacher would take time to introduce all of the colors individually, with the color’s own mood story. It is helpful to ensure at least a few lessons with every color. During this time, there is an emphasis on ensuring proper posture, grip and painting technique with the paintbrush. To support healthy posture in first grade, consider offering a gentle rhyme:
Sitting royally in our chairs, as Kings and Queens doth do,
Feet are firm upon the floor, together are the two.
After the colors have been introduced, the Extra Lesson painting series can be presented. Students should be seated with feet on the floor. The Swedish painting paper is helpful for this activity, as first grade students can wet it easily themselves with a painting sponge, dampening the front, then the back side of the paper, then the front again, ensuring that all “puddles and bubbles” are smoothed away. Audrey McAllen shares detailed instructions for the painting in The Extra Lesson. The sun is painted first in the center of the paper, gradually fading outward. Then ultramarine blue is applied from the edges, blending gently toward the sun, without forming green. For the following lesson, the students begin with the blue at the periphery and leave space for the golden sun. In this way, moving from point to periphery and periphery to point, the class fully engages in a breathing rhythm. Layers are built over subsequent weeks: brighter yellow at the center, deeper blue at the edges, and finally, the addition of objects such as birds, trees, or mountains.
This activity strengthens concentration, eye-hand coordination, and a sense of rhythm, while cultivating patience, focus, and a calm, upright posture. Children deeply engage with the archetypical experience of the sun in the sky. More than a painting, it is a holistic exercise in observation, imagination, and self-expression.
A Living Approach to the Day
What emerges through movement, string games, and painting is not a separate program, but a way of teaching that supports children in developing self-regulation throughout the day. Rhythm, gesture, and attentive observation prepare the child for formal learning. Each activity supports focus, body awareness, sequencing, and imaginative engagement.
In this living rhythm, children develop the foundations not only for literacy and numeracy but also for self-confidence, coordination, and a sense of being at home in their bodies. Whole-class Extra Lesson activities also offer the teacher a lens for careful observation, while providing children repeated opportunities to cultivate attention, balance, and joy. In the first grade, these practices invite children to inhabit their bodies more fully so that they may deeply engage with the curriculum, through story, movement, and color.
Resources:
Michael Taylor, Finger Strings, A Book of Cat’s Cradles and String Figures
Mary Nash-Wortham & Jean Hunt, Take Time : Movement Exercises for Parents, Teachers and Therapists of Children With Difficulties in Speaking, Reading, Writing and Spelling
Joep Eikenboom: Joep 5 Exercises - Extra Lesson - Waldorf Education (watch YouTube video)
Audrey McAllen, The Extra Lesson
Early Literacy: Giving Children Time
Carol Toole, trained as a Waldorf Early Childhood teacher and Learning and Dyslexia Specialist, served the Austin Waldorf School for over 40 years as a kindergarten teacher, Enrollment Director, and Student Support Teacher and Coordinator. She developed and oversaw the school’s literacy and dyslexia program. She is author of the book, What is This Childhood, Finding the Spirit of Early Childhood in Language and Creative Living with our Families, SteinerBooks.
A Waldorf parent once shared her daughter’s question, “How does my teacher know the exact stories I will love each year?” A profound aspect of Waldorf education is the view that child development reflects the stages of humanity’s evolution. The curriculum, designed to meet what is unfolding at each phase, enhances the foundational capacities that brought us to this present day. When considering the span of time humans have inhabited the planet, widespread literacy has existed for a mere eye blink. Let’s consider human consciousness in the 100,000 years when an oral culture prevailed, and its relationship to the young child.
For the ancients, language held power; it was alive and generative. In creation myths, the world was sung into being. Spells and chants brought connection, healing, and affected others even from afar. Vestiges of living language exist today in words where sounds elicit a direct, sensory experience or image. For example, whirlpool, splash, rustle, cricket, or expressions such as pining away (the mournful sound of wind in the pines) or making something shipshape (think of all the knots to be tied for a seaworthy vessel).
Without the written word, each culture’s heritage was passed on through recitation of long epic poems and participating in vivid re-enactments and storytelling, calling on capacities of memory and imagination. Keen observation allowed early humans to travel through harsh landscapes, tracking game and finding hidden sources of water and food. Heightened listening allowed some tribes to receive messages from companions in distress over great distances. The discovery of medicinal plants and sustainable farming and hunting practices showed an attuned and intuitive relationship to their environment.
At first, writing also reflected a direct experience of the world. Egyptian pictographs needed thousands of pictures to convey objects and ideas. For efficiency, these gradually became stylized, eventually morphing into rebus writing—a symbol standing for a word part or syllable. Finally, our phonetic alphabet emerged with merely 26 letters and 44 sounds. Yet, this system of a letter representing one sound in our language is highly abstract. Good readers first map the smallest sounds of speech onto each letter or letters. Language is broken into parts before making it whole again toward instant recognition of a word.
MaryAnn Wolf, in her book Proust and the Squid, outlines this tremendous shift in the human brain from using visual circuits for object recognition and oral language to forming new pathways to linguistic areas needed for deciphering abstract symbols and written language. What took humanity 2000 years to achieve, every child must acquire in a few short years. Learning to read is an arduous journey for many, and this leap into a linear and analytical task eventually dims the sensory, pictorial, and intuitive relationship to the environment innate to both our children and our ancestors. We certainly see this in our next evolutionary phase to digital literacy.
This explains some children’s antipathy to mere lines and curves, “skeletal and bloodless” as described by the writer Thomas Wolfe. As one dyslexic and artistically gifted student lamented, “I don’t like looking at letters, they’re not pretty.” For her, the code was cracked when she drew characters for each letter, each with their own biography—Rosy R ate radishes and wore a ruby necklace, a wreath of roses, and red rubber boots in the rain!
The Waldorf play/movement oriented kindergarten prioritizes oral language, the natural realm of the young child whose sense for language is playful and alive. Sound, poetry, and story foster this direct, open-ended experience of the world and lay strong foundations for literacy. Abundant rhymes and alliteration attune children to sounds at the beginning and ending of words. A well developed phonological awareness allows the child to hear individual sounds in words, a skill needed to eventually map sound onto symbols, to hold them in order for decoding, and to recognize chunks such as suffix endings. Hearing fairy and folk tales over time develops their attention span, memory, and picture making capacities. Kindergarteners become familiar with complex vocabulary, sentences, and story structure. Fairy tales' neat packaging of repetitive trials seeds the concept of conflict, cause and effect, and resolution.
Play allows the child to develop inner speech, a key ingredient of executive functioning and metacognition. Movement and time in nature strengthen visual tracking skills (eyes that skip on the page tire easily) and help connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain, both needed for the tasks of sounding out words and comprehension. In first grade when direct reading instruction starts, a mature sensory system will more readily begin to integrate the visual, verbal, auditory, and semantic cues in a word in the milliseconds needed to have energy left over to imagine distant lands, try on the experience of others, connect their personal journey, and simply wonder.
It takes time to journey from learning to read to reading to learn. In Literacy Researcher Jeanne Chall’s Stages of Reading Development, fluency emerges in approximately grades 2-3 and proficiency for reading to learn new material in grades 4-8. Children in a Waldorf School are given the time to preserve vital capacities and to land gently from a concrete world of perception and meaning to more abstract, logical thinking. This richness of language and experience will serve to enhance lifelong joy in reading and writing.
Some rhyming and phonemic awareness games:
Rhyme omission (poem courtesy of Ogden Nash):
God in his wisdom Invented the fly,
Then forgot to tell us ______. (why)
In the following, for each repetition, replace the animal and discover its rhyme:
A-hunting we will go
Heigh ho, the derry-o,
A-hunting we will go.
A-hunting we will go,
A-hunting we will go,
We’ll catch a fox
And put him in a _____, (box)
And then we’ll let him go!
Finally, slow motion words: Give your child instructions such as “put on your shoes", “carry your lunch box” speaking very slowly, almost separating each sound.
For further exploration:
Jeanne Chall, Stages of Reading Development
Stanislas Dehaene, Reading and the Brain: The New Science of How We Read
Sally Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
A Look at a Different Kind of First Grade Classroom from an Extra Lesson Lens: Nurturing Reading Readiness: A Waldorf Extra--Lesson–Inspired First Grade Model
In a Waldorf first grade, the foundations for literacy are laid not only through letters and stories but through the child’s whole-body experience of learning. Reading arises most healthfully when the child’s senses, movement patterns, and early developmental stages have been met with care. When these healing elements are joined with the structured, multisensory strengths of an Orton–Gillingham (OG) trained reading teacher and the developmental insight of two Extra Lesson practitioners, a classroom emerges that is truly therapeutic, inclusive, and aligned with the child’s unfolding incarnation.
In this model, the OG-trained reading teacher serves as the lead, holding the arc of explicit literacy instruction with clarity, warmth, and attuned pacing. Lessons retain the beauty and imagination of Waldorf pedagogy while remaining grounded in evidence-based multisensory practice. Sand trays, beeswax, form drawing, rhythmic movement, and tactile letter work are used intentionally to stimulate visual, auditory, and kinesthetic pathways. The explicitness of OG blends seamlessly with the pictorial, artistic qualities of Waldorf, allowing children to build strong phonological awareness while staying rooted in imagination and story.
The Extra Lesson trained teachers form a healing, developmental foundation beneath this literacy work. Their therapeutic lens brings attention to early movement patterns and reflex integration, those foundational steps in the child’s neurological development that deeply influence reading readiness. Many children enter first grade with retained reflexes such as the ATNR, STNR, or Moro reflex still active in their systems. These retained patterns can make tasks more challenging, such as tracking across a page, crossing the midline, stabilizing the core, or coordinating the eyes and hands.
Through purposeful rhythmic activities, crawling, creeping, balance sequences, spatial orientation games, and midline integration work, the Extra Lesson teachers help gently support the integration or mitigation of these retained reflexes. When early movement patterns are given a pathway toward resolution, the body becomes more available for the upright, focused tasks of reading and writing. The result is not simply improved literacy skills but a more grounded, regulated, and confident child.
This collaborative model transforms the flow of the day: transitions become therapeutic openings for movement repetition; circle activities are shaped to support vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile integration; and the entire classroom rhythm is designed to strengthen the child’s sense of embodiment. Teachers observe that when the nervous system is settled and the reflex system is supported, children meet academic challenges with more ease, curiosity, and resilience.
Schools adopting this approach often notice a profound shift. Teachers feel supported by shared wisdom, children display fuller engagement and self-regulation, and the classroom becomes a truly therapeutic space where developmental readiness and academic instruction interweave seamlessly.
This model stands as an inspiring path for other Waldorf communities, demonstrating how an Orton–Gillingham reading specialist and Extra Lesson practitioners can work in harmony to create a first grade where literacy, movement, and healing form one unified, health-giving whole.
Drawing on the insights of Stephanie Johnson’s Baby Bare: A Bottom-up Approach to Growing Strong Brains and Bodies, this model also recognizes the profound impact of early, floor-based movement on later academic readiness. Johnson’s work highlights how simple sequential experiences like; lifting the head and knees to center, rolling, belly time, pushing up and supporting, crawling and creeping; lay the neurological and sensory groundwork for higher cognitive functions. When these developmental stages are skipped, rushed, or not revisited, the child may enter school with gaps in proprioception, vestibular stability, visual tracking, and emotional regulation. By bringing this awareness into first grade practice, our teachers can compassionately observe where a child may need support to complete integration of early movement patterns. Through foundational Extra Lesson activities children can further strengthen the development of strong sensory-motor pathways that mirror those foundational milestones, children receive a second chance to build strong sensory–motor pathways, making literacy learning not only more accessible but more joyful. Imaginatively joining animal friends, the children happily crawl like a bear, leap like a frog, creep like a lizard, and balance like a flamingo, offering a playful way to strengthen core stability, integrate midlines and refine bilateral coordination.
Alongside this reverent approach to literacy, numeracy is cultivated as a living, bodily experience. As is typical in Waldorf first grade classes, mathematics is not introduced as abstraction, but as rhythm, gesture, and relationship, both bodily and numerically. Before symbols are fixed on the page, the quality of the number is discovered, then stepped, clapped, tossed, balanced, and breathed.
Following the Waldorf curriculum’s emphasis on making math visible and relational, the children walk the qualities of numbers in large floor patterns, strengthening midline integration spatial orientation and vestibular integration as they internalize numerical relationships. Counting arises through coordinated movement, beanbag passes across the midline, rhythmic skip-counting while bouncing, stepping forward and back along a number path, supporting bilateral integration and core stability while building number sense. Quantities are composed and decomposed with tangible materials: stones gathered from the playground, wooden rods, shells, and fingers that press firmly into beeswax forms. The four processes, gathering, separating, sharing, and comparing,are experienced as dynamic gestures, mirroring the child’s lived social experience. Meanwhile, the Extra Lesson perspective ensures that underlying developmental capacities are supported: gently support reflex integration, eye convergence for tracking columns, postural strength for upright written work, and rhythmic balance for understanding patterns and sequences. Activities such as crossing midline during counting games or tracing large lemniscates while skip-counting by twos and fives gently support reflex integration while simultaneously strengthening early arithmetic fluency.
In this way, numeracy becomes a therapeutic art. The classroom rhythm carries mathematical patterning through the day—calendar work, nature observation charts, movement sequences, and practical tasks like setting tables or organizing materials. Children come to experience number as trustworthy and embodied, not hurried or abstract. When the nervous system is regulated and the body integrated, mathematical thinking unfolds with clarity and confidence. Thus, as with literacy, mathematics in this model is not merely taught; it is lived—rooted in movement, relationship, and the joyful discovery of order within the world.
Imaginatively joining animal friends, the children happily crawl like a bear, leap like a frog, creep like a lizard, and balance like a flamingo, offering a playful way to strengthen core stability, integrate midlines and refine bilateral coordination. Circle time thus becomes a daily, living remedy; helping to organize the nervous system, regulate energy and gently prepare the child for the focused literacy work that follows.
The exercises we have used:
Stephanie Johnson’s Early Movement work from Baby Bare: A Bottom-up Approach to Growing Strong Brains and Bodies
Anne Green Gilbert’s “Brain Dance”
Extra Lesson exercises
Painting the sun and the blue sky
Bean bag exercises
Bal A-Vis-X
Writing with bare feet
Individual vestibular work
Bringing in the ego even more, on the balance beam holding a full cup of water with a bean bag on the head