A Path of Discovery is a curriculum resource written by Australian Waldorf teacher Eric Fairman. I have found his work to be inspiring and full of great ideas. From Bob and Nancy’s Bookshop website,
Eric Fairman is a delightfully creative (and amazingly well-organized!) Waldorf grade school teacher in Australia who has done us all a great service by publishing the lesson notes he has kept through the years. In this as in all the Path of Discovery books, you will find suggested lessons, examples of ways of presenting the subject matter, verses, poems, songs – and, most importantly, a priceless amount of support and inspiration.
He has written a volume for each grade, in addition to an overview of the math curriculum and a book titled Food, Nutrition and Health that is dedicated to the eighth grade chemistry block. The books are affordably priced (just $21.00 each) and provide a wonderful framework for each block.
When I taught 7th grade I used A Path of Discovery as a resource and found it quite helpful when it came to planning the block. Though there is a fair amount of information in each book, I did not find the information so thorough that it could exist on its own. Instead, I mostly used A Path of Discovery as a planning resource and then I gathered information from other resources to provide the content of the block. All through my teaching I found this to be necessary. There were certain books that were excellent at providing the framework for a block, giving me enough information to know what to look for at the library. If you’re looking for a book that you’ll be able to open up to page one and begin teaching from, A Path of Discovery is not it. I never found it satisfying to teach in this manner, though, and I enjoyed the search for information.
What A Path of Discovery does very well, though, is provide inspiring, interesting ways to work with the material. As Fairman describes his experience teaching the block to his students he describes activities that they did that helped to bring the material in a new, interesting and holistic way. There are any number of books at the public library that can provide factual information for every block, but resources that inspire new and creative ideas of working with material are few and far between and these are the Waldorf-specific resources that are worth spending a little extra on.
At least in the upper grades, A Path of Discovery does not provide material on every block that must be taught in the year. The seventh grade book, for example, covers Chemistry, Physiology, and Physics, in addition to child development information, verses and poems, a reading list, block test samples, a bibliography and information on a few other various topics including morse code, Pythagoras and Thales. It does not, though, cover Astronomy, Algebra, History or Creative Writing, blocks that are important and should be covered in seventh grade. What it does cover, though, it does quite well and if you are a teacher who finds the sciences to be a weak spot, A Path of Discovery can help you find the new, inspiring and interesting way to bring the sciences to your students.