Physical Science (Waldorf)

Waldorf science is unusual in the modern landscape — it teaches your child to look at the world long and carefully before reaching for an explanation, and to do their thinking on the page with both words and drawings. This nine-week physical science course follows that tradition all the way through. Each week starts with sensory experience, moves through structured observation and drawing in the main lesson book style, and only then introduces measurement, equations, and the formal vocabulary of physics. The aim is not to skip the science — your seventh grader will calculate density, do KE = ½mv² problems, draw force diagrams, and learn about conservation of energy — but to make sure the science is rooted in something your child has actually seen and felt.

Week 1 begins with a candle flame and a bowl of ice melting in warm water. Two of the simplest physical phenomena anyone can witness, treated as objects worth a full week of attention. Week 2 picks up matter and density — metal next to wood, oil floating on water, the kitchen as a laboratory for measuring what hands have already noticed. Week 3 turns to forces in nature: wind shaping leaning trees over decades, rivers pushing rocks downstream, gravity and friction as everyday companions. Week 4 follows movement and rhythm — the steady arc of a pendulum, the four-beat gait of a horse, the patterns that repeat in nature because the physics underneath repeats too.

Warmth, Sound, Light (Weeks 5-7)

Week 5 is about warmth. A campfire on a cool evening teaches conduction, convection, and radiation more honestly than any diagram, and your child writes about all three after sitting beside one. Sun and shadow on a summer afternoon round out the radiation story. Then the KE calculations make sense, because they’re describing something already understood in the body.

Week 6 turns to sound — the life inside a guitar’s hollow body, the voice that comes back as an echo, the way a struck tuning fork makes water dance on its tines. Vibration first, wave concepts second. Week 7 spends a week on light: a prism splitting sun into colors on a wall, the geometry hidden inside shadows, why blue is the last color visible at dusk. Goethean color observation alongside enough physics to start naming what’s happening.

Transformation and Synthesis (Weeks 8-9)

Week 8 traces energy as it transforms — the potential energy stored above a waterfall converting to kinetic on the way down, the staggering charge in a thunderhead releasing as light, heat, and sound. KE and PE calculations, conservation reasoning, and a great deal of drawing.

Week 9 is a capstone. “A Thunderstorm Over the Lake” and “A River Carving a Canyon” pull in matter, forces, heat, sound, light, and energy transformation as facets of a single physical world. Your child evaluates and connects phenomena, designs an original demonstration, and writes a synthesis worth keeping in the main lesson book.

Every week includes phenomenological passages, observation and drawing activities, main lesson book prompts, and full answer keys with teaching notes for the adult reading alongside.