State-Journal.com - Frankfort Face: Outside the box

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Ida Palmer-Ball (State Journal/Hilly Schiffer)

Ida Palmer-Ball walks in a circle with her first-grade students each morning to start their day off in the gym at Good Shepherd School. During circle time, the class sings and moves around together all of which is part of the Waldorf teaching method. Waldorf incorporates art, dance, song and movement into traditional school subjects like math, science and reading. “If you get into their hands, you hook them in and they get interested,” she said. “And when their heart’s invested, it sinks in their brain.” (State Journal/Hilly Schiffer)

Ida Palmer-Ball, a first-grade teacher at Good Shepherd School, helps her class paint while learning about the color blue. Ida, a 30-year teaching veteran, adopted the Waldorf teaching method four years ago. Waldorf incorporates art, dance, song and movement into traditional school subjects like math, science and reading. “If you get into their hands, you hook them in and they get interested,” she said. “And when their heart’s invested, it sinks in their brain.” (State Journal/Hilly Schiffer)

Armed with heavy watercolor paper, paintbrushes, sea sponges and plastic cups full of water, the kids in Ida Palmer-Ball’s first-grade class met the color blue last week.

With her own sheet of paper hung on an easel, Ida asked her students to interpret the color as if it were just another kid on the playground – shy and reserved, represented by a big, open circle.

“If blue were a person, he would kind of walk around the edge of the playground to check things out,” said the Good Shepherd School teacher, a 30-year veteran who adopted the Waldorf teaching method four years ago.

Waldorf incorporates art, dance, song and movement into traditional school subjects like math, science and reading.

“I suppose when you’ve been doing something as long as I have, you need a shot in the arm every once in a while,” she said.

“If it’s not a job change, it might be just a new focus.”

Ida, who grew up on a Louisville dairy farm, worked at a summer camp as a teenager. The part-time job became the inspiration for a lifelong career.

She went to college to study education, but she never wanted to teach first grade – she was daunted by the responsibility of teaching the little ones to read.

Then she got her first job in 1976, teaching first-graders at Louisville’s Holy Trinity School. She realized her personality was suited for working with kids that age.

“Pretty soon, that (worry) was out the window,” she said. “They’re like little sponges – they absorb everything, which is scary.”

It happened just last week, she said, when her kids learned a new song in a day.

“They just take it in,” she said. “It’s really awesome what kids do.”

Ida married and moved south, teaching first- and second-graders in public schools in Alabama and Mississippi for 19 years.

“Then I went through a divorce, 9/11 came along, and I decided I needed to be back in Kentucky closer to my mom.”

She moved home and worked in public schools for two more years. She considered becoming a special education teacher, but a job opened up at Good Shepherd.

“I feel like I’ve come around full circle,” she said.

Ida discovered the Waldorf teaching method from an article in The Courier-Journal about a school in inner-city Louisville that had benefited from it. She enrolled in a four-year series of classes – two weeks every summer – at Bellarmine University, where she learned how to incorporate the arts and movement into her regular lessons.

She studied in Sacramento, Calif., at Rudolph Steiner College, which is dedicated to the Waldorf method. She also meets with nearby Waldorf teachers for workshops throughout the year.

“I brought a little more each year to my class,” she said.

Ida doesn’t lead a full-on Waldorf classroom.

For one thing, Waldorf students might spend several hours working on one lesson, but that won’t work at Good Shepherd or a public school – there’s too much to do, she said.

Waldorf teachers also follow their students from kindergarten through graduation. Ida gets a new crop of kids each August.

So she balances a traditional Catholic school curriculum with the creative methods advocated by Waldorf. Her students sing songs to help with math, and they paint the plants they learn about in science class.

“Instead of doing workbook pages, I’ve taken the workbook page and made a game out of them, so they’re not sitting in their desks doing pencil and paper work.”

“It’s just starting to think outside the box.”

Movement is a big part of Waldorf. The kids stand to paint, and hand motions accompany the verses they memorize and the songs they sing. They might run across the gym to match states with their capitals.

“Sometimes we go into the gym, and we have learning games,” first-grader Carter Harbin said.

They meet in the school gym every morning for circle time, sitting together and singing and moving around.

“The brain does work better with all these things, and it’s way more fun,” Ida said. “Who wants to sit there and listen to a lecture?”

Last year, she finally “got up the nerve” to incorporate painting into her lesson plans. The kids don’t just paint for the sake of painting – they depict what they learn about in science, religion class and story time.

On the morning that Ida introduced the color blue, the kids stood ready behind their desks, dressed in oversized T-shirts from their parents’ closets. They recited a verse to warm up, repeating after Ida and swinging their hands to go with the words.

Then they diligently cleaned their painting boards and wetted their watercolor paper before picking up their paintbrushes.

“Give it a drink,” Ida told them, as they dampened the textured, off-white paper with a sea sponge.

Ida warned the kids that the paint was left over from last year, and it was a little smelly. When they opened the baby food jars on their desks, the scent of eggs drifted around the classroom.

“Now if blue were a person, we wouldn’t say ‘You stink,’” Ida said. “So we shouldn’t say it today either.”

A little girl in the back row patted the top of her jar, as if to say, “it’s OK.”

Then the 18 first-graders stirred the blue paint, and the gentle tinkling of metal tapping on glass filled the classroom.

“Art is a peace of mind,” said Maya Judy, after she finished painting her blue circle. “It’s better for you to paint on your desk (than the floor).”

The yellow paintings they made last week hung from clothespins along a window. The kids study their classmates’ artwork and answer questions about yellow’s personality.

“Yellow is all over the place, and blue is shy,” Kaitlyn Luebbers said.

Later their work will become more advanced, as they meet more colors and study more subjects. They will learn that blue is also loving and caring, the color of Mary. They will paint cacti in the desert and mountaintops in Asia.

The Waldorf method encourages teachers to “reach the head through a child’s hands and heart,” Ida said.

“If you get into their hands, you hook them in and they get interested,” she said. “And when their heart’s invested, it sinks in their brain.”

Ida says she doesn’t have any scientific evidence to back up Waldorf’s success in her classroom. But she thinks it reaches kids who might otherwise have trouble in school or specific subjects – and it’s more fun than a behind-the-desk school day.

“I think they’re having a lot more fun,” she said. “I think that they’re achieving a little bit more, and I think that they’re becoming more well rounded as individuals.”

Her first-graders agree that their teacher is “fun and nice.”

“Ms. Palmer-Ball is fun,” Abbey Grimes said. “We play with jewels, and we sing songs and paint.”

“Every day after lunch we read stories,” Allison Harrod said.

Ida says she plans to keep teaching as long as she’s able, though she says it can be tough to go to work when her husband is retired. They live on a farm with a large garden, she said.

“You can’t be after lots of money,” she said of her teaching career. “I love it, but I have about a million other interests too.”

At 6 feet tall, Ida is an avid swimmer, hitting the YMCA pool after work. She also spends her time quilting, knitting, sewing and binding books. In the summers, she teaches at a camp.

Ida never had kids – she says the ones at school are enough. Many of the children she taught in Alabama and Mississippi needed “a lot of love” that they weren’t getting at home, she said.

Since remarrying, she has three stepchildren. Six weeks after she and her husband were married, she became a grandmother when one of them gave birth.

Until she retires, Ida plans to keep learning more about the Waldorf method, and encouraging her fellow teachers to adopt elements of it into their classrooms. One of her colleagues has already started doing more learning games with her students.

After several years of Waldorf, Ida says it isn’t really any easier than when she started.

“In a way, the longer I do it, the better I want to be,” she said. “So I’m still working at it.”

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.