Good teachers know that one of the best ways to teach is through a play.   Children love to perform, and with the theatre’s ability to bring together words, music, and movement, the result can be nothing short of thrilling.  The Waldorf School of Princeton is one of the hundreds of schools in the international Waldorf movement begun in Germany in the 1920s.   These plays were performed at Princeton beginning in 1998.   In the Waldorf curriculum, children study Old Testament stories in third grade, the Norse myths in fourth, the Greeks in fifth, the Romans and Middle Ages in sixth, the Age of Exploration in the seventh.   Each play was written with a specific class in mind and in consultation with the teacher to ensure that they were developmentally appropriate.   Consequently the themes of the plays are important to the children:  their love of adventure, the courage to face adversity, the ability to draw on inner strength, the need for greater understanding of different cultures.   In addition, the plays bring beautiful words to the children.

Each play met with enormous success within the Princeton school community.   Children, teachers, and parents found the experience exhilarating.   Over the past years over 200 schools have performed the plays or added them to their libraries, from the United States, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.

The first play in the list, The Land of Sounds, is an amusing tale of sound-creatures looking for letters.  It reinforces the letter-sound correspondences the children are just beginning to learn in first grade, and would be a good review in the first part of the second grade.  The third grade play, The Story of Moses is entirely in rhymed couplets to help with memorization.   The fourth grade play, Loki and Sif’s Golden Hair, is based on one of the Norse myths, and mirrors that literature’s sense of fun at the expense of their gods.   It is composed mostly in rhyme with a special emphasis on alliteration as in the original poems.  The fifth grade play, the story of  Perseus’ and his mother’s heroic deeds, is written in iambic pentameter in order to familiarize students at this age with the rhythms of Shakespeare. The sixth grade play, Crusader, Muslim, and Jew, a retelling of Nathan the Wise, one of Germany's classic plays, met with an especially positive response in the community.  Its theme of tolerance and understanding between Muslims, Jews and Christians in 12th century Jerusalem is especially timely in our own unsettled age.  The seventh grade play follows the exploits of Magellan in his attempt to circle the globe, with folktales from around the world interpolated into the story.

     The play that was performed in the eighth grade, The House of the Four Temperaments, is a full-length, two-act play translated the German of Austria’s foremost comic playwright, Johann Nestroy.   Written in 1837, this classic farce offers excellent parts for 20 actors (and 3 to 6 smaller parts) and proved to be a terrific hit for the actors, as well as for the children and adults in the audience.  Most recently, another Nestroy play, The Sleepwalkers, has been translated as well.  This is another unknown gem, a farce with lots of good parts for a large cast—great fun for any age.

 

Links to Other Websites:  USA Plays for Kids