Creative Pathways

Creative Pathways: Activities that Strengthen the Child’s Cognitive Forces

Right out of Waldorf educational practice and supported by recent brain research comes a book with specific activities designed to build the brain to its maximum capacity for learning for life! Parents and teachers can find ideas here for helping children of all sorts to engage in the world actively while enhancing brain development. Based on the Waldorf school plan, so arts are in the essence of the ideas. Brain research shows that only the art light up the whole brain in a child for maximum neuron development, maximum myelination of these neurons.

This book goes age-by-age and grade-by-grade with clear pictures of what to do and why to do them at what point in a child’s development and budding capacities. Music, painting, drawing, playacting, dance, imaginative free play have been proven to enhance memory, intelligence, fluidity and flexibility of thinking, and engagement in learning.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Creativity
The Early Years:
Grade One
Grade Two
Grade Three
Grade Four
Grade Five
Middle School:
Grade Six
Grade Seven
Grade Eight

Appendices:
Main Lesson Book Binding
Painting the Hebrew Myth of Creation
Veiling the Cave
Navajo Loom Instructions
Grade Four Dioramas
Resources
Bibliography

About the Author

Elizabeth Auer and her husband Arthur have been members of the Pine Hill Waldorf School and Temple/Wilton Farm Communities for more than thirty years, and have taught at Pine Hill for almost twenty years. Elizabeth teaches drawing, painting, and clay modeling. She has illustrated several books and is a freelance artist, specializing in scratchboard art and watercolor paintings for children.