The Wise Enchanter

As some of you know, Natalie is being taught the alphabet by someone else and I'm trying to figure out how to reinforce it at home & make it compatible somewhat with the Waldorf method. Originally I was going to use the LMNOP wall cards with stories alongside that corresponded with each illustration (and had been planning on doing an exhaustive reading of The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales to find stories) but I'm having a hard time taping the wall cards to her bedroom wall. They are laminated, so it's not a question of the tape ruining the card, but they aren't level and they aren't spaced evenly and that makes me crazy. I was okay getting M and N close to each other but once it got to putting B all the way across the room and guessing where it ought to go once the whole alphabet was up, I just got twitchy. My perfectionism rearing its ugly head I guess. My recommendation to people planning to make a border of alphabet cards around a classroom is that you put up a piece of molding and simply lean them up there. That way they can be taken down to spell words or so your child can look at them more closely or to be used as "flashcards" with no hassles.

We are, instead, going to read Shelley Davidow's wonderful book The Wise Enchanter: A Journey through the Alphabet. This is the book I have traditionally recommended for people whose children learned the alphabet already in a conventional kindergarten and when the family switches to Waldorf they want to introduce the letters again in a more holistic way. Funny that I forgot to apply that advice to myself! I had forgotten completely that I owned the book, actually, until I saw a posting on the waldorfcurriculum-supplies Yahoo group. So if you're looking for a used copy, check there right away. I needed a new bedtime story option, in fact, since I had just bought a copy of Uncle Wiggly's Story Book to be Natalie's next read-aloud and then found out that her kindergarten teacher is using it as their naptime chapter book! Oops. :-) I am excited to share The Wise Enchanter with Natalie and I think it'll work out really well for us.



P.S. If you are interested in my previous project of assigning Grimm's fairy tales to the complementary illustrations in LMNOP (he doesn't have a story to go with each letter, just an alliterative verse), please contact me and we can work on it together. I am working on my new consulting website and will post the link here as soon as it is up.