Waldorf Curriculum Spotlight: What is a Main Lesson Book?

You won’t find textbooks in any of our classrooms. You will however, find each student working and creating their own Main Lesson books, a unique element in Waldorf Education. Main Lesson books are one of the (many) hands on ways that students engage with learning and synthesize material from their daily lessons.

These books, created by hand by each student, not only replace textbooks and worksheets but serve as a space for students to capture the core elements of their lesson and allow for deeper, more dynamic learning. In a New York Times article, A Simple Way to Remember Things, Draw a Picture writer, Tim Herrera, looks at several recent studies that show drawing can help young and old alike remember “word definitions, pictures, and abstract thoughts and ideas.” This is because turning to illustration when processing information relies on more areas of the brain, leading to “a seamless integration of semantic, visual and motor aspects of a memory trace,” which is neuroscience language for “better recall.”

Illustrations, writing, diagrams and more are all intertwined into Main Lesson books which engage both creativity and intention in the students. Please explore a tiny window into Main Lesson books that have started to take shape on the WSRF campus so far this year!