We here at AHE wish you all a restful and restorative summertime. We have had an inspiring and rewarding year through our online consulting program ( see below), monthly Pop-Up sessions featuring many of our ESP grads, and our final year of work with Cycle 13 of our ESP program. We thank our enthusiastic participants.

www.youandyourchildshealth.org

Audrey McAllen, in her book the Extra Lesson, only published those exercises with an archetypal quality, so that these exercises can be used for all children and are not depending on the individual spiritual relationship between teacher and child. The exercises are developed according the neurological and movement development of the child, and based on the movement patterns in the human being and the planet earth, as Rudolf Steiner has described in the ‘1909 Lectures.

Students come to Waldorf schools because we have something they need. The assumption that they, their angels and parents have is that we will provide it. What is that ‘it’? How do we provide it? The first question arises when we teachers look more deeply into the pedagogy we practice; the second is the teachers’ cries for help in educating the many students who have different learning styles.

Developed over thirty years ago by a Waldorf school educator from England named Audrey McAllen, the Extra Lesson is an assessment plus a series of movement, drawing, and painting exercises. The premise is that difficulties in reading, writing, and math could be due to inadequate spatial orientation, poor body geography and to sensory integration difficulties if a person has missed a stage in the first seven years of development. Afterwards, a program of specific movement exer