Educating the Head, Heart and Hands – the integration of thinking, feeling and willing (activity) – is the signature of Waldorf education.  Drama, painting, music, drawing, modeling, etc. are integrated into the academic curriculum, including mathematics and the sciences. Education through the arts awakens imagination and creative powers, bringing vitality and wholeness to learning.  Practical work, like crafts and handwork, are part of the curriculum from kindergarten on.  Textbooks are not used in the elementary grades.  Instead, the teacher creates a presentation and finds beautiful stories to deliver the content. Students make their own work for each subject, recording and illustrating the substance of their lessons.  A rich Oral Language environment – including songs, poems and games – sets the stage in the earliest grades, replicating the natural historical course of human learning. Waldorf Education emphasizes experiential learning over direct cognitive instruction. For example, the teacher sets up an experiment and calls upon the children to observe and discuss their findings so that they can discover the underlying formula or law. As a result, independent thinking and sound judgment develop naturally. Science begins with lots of time outdoors and nature study which leads to keen observation of scientific experiments in the later grades.