Description

The highlight of Waldorf Geometry for grade eight is the study of geometric solids. Like much of the other work for geometry in the Waldorf pedagogy, this exploration of the solids is an experiential one with lots of drawing and art. Throughout the thread of geometry through the middle grades, our lessons lead us through the quality of numbers again and touching base to where we find these shapes and their significance in nature.

This product is the explicit notes and main lesson pages as well as the a gallery of our work in an effort to make it as easy as possible for you to repeat our work. After reviewing the work from serious years, we start into our exploration of the solids. Our main focus the Platonic solids. Much of the work is hands on including the exploration of the duals through a transformation of clay from one the cube to its dual the octahedron.

We also explore the solids and their duals through the work of Bradford Hansen-Smith in Folding the Circle. This exploration reviews previous years work with angles, triangles, and quadrilaterals. We then move into our exploration of solids with nets of the tetrahedron and octahedron. We look at their arrangements into fractals such as Sierpinski’s Triangle. A couple of these solids are stellated and the vertices connected so that we can easily see their duals once again.

From here we move into our final work with the dodecahedron where our seventh grade geometry is reviewed through the pentagon, pentagram, and the golden ratio. The Fibonacci’s  sequence is explored to also illustrate the golden ratio and the contraction of the golden spiral. We end on the high note of the icosahedron, learning about the relationship to the dodecahedron and thus the golden ratio.

I’ve written the notes in a way that allows you to repeat the work that we did. They are lengthy and explicit. I’ve also included a list of resources including books that we used for our work, blog posts that I wrote for this project, other lesson plans that I gained inspiration from, and the Whole Movement website that contains videos of Hansen-Smith’s work.