Now the conscious engagement with history deepens and the students come to a picture and experience of the ancient worlds and their culture
In Class Five, the narrative element is joined by more observation, excursions, camps and teacher-guided reading as learning experiences. Recall is not just story based but focuses space and time in maps, diaries and observations. The child’s own work may begin to include change of perspective and extension of scope eg a diary entry from the point of view of a settler or convict.
During this age, moving forward with the confidence to meet the world out of their individuality, the children can now freely choose to connect to the other through empathy. A depth of feeling can be noticed and a sense of personal responsibility, of moral compass.
English
The connectedness is developed further in the overview of the world literature of Ancient Times. Although the broad sweep of time is studied the children are in essence at the height of Ancient Greece in their emergent thinking, sense of beauty and their physical balance.
The children are given symptomatic examples of major changes in human consciousness. The mythologies and outer events give pictures of inner processes beneath the surface. The children recapitulate the stages of consciousness in a direct arts-integrated experience through story, verse, dance, art and drama.
Mathematics
In Class Five, the children become increasingly competent in mathematical skills and independent of pictorial representation. They solve problems, choose strategies and work with decimals. They are interested in discovering the properties of numbers which can still fill them with wonder.
In Geometry they are able to complete complex constructions and begin to work with instruments.The beauty of form of the geometry speaks to the children. The more accurate their constructions the greater their aesthetic quality. Colour highlights the creative form.
History
Children listen to myths of Brahma and the Indian Creation story, excerpts from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. They retell stories focusing on key images and moments of potency. The children recite passages from the texts in chorus and alone. They illustrate stories in Indian style. They make costumes and act out excerpts of stories. Indian music and dance may be done in morning circle work and in movement lessons. They map and model India as an ancient land, identifying rivers and mountains, scenes of stories and surrounding seas.
They experience the cultural and social life of this civilisation and the implicit spirit. In addition to the stories of Ancient India, students may also learn through stories of Ancient Persia, Babylon, Egypt and Greece.
Having lived in the world of the fairy-tale, legend and myth in the first four years the children now are ready for the borderland between mythology and history proper.
A. Jacobson
Sourced from Australian Steiner Curriculum Framework