Five: Painting Vowel Images The next step was to connect the sound and emotion with the written image. I was intrigued with a description Rudolf Steiner gave of painting emotions using colour, out of which the related forms could be made. “...we do not begin by introducing the alphabet directly, nor reading as a subject, but... we start with painting. Consequently, when young students enter our school, we introduce them first to the world of flowing colors with watercolor painting.... The children learn how to work with paints, and through the use of color the teacher can guide them toward definite forms. With the necessary skill, the teacher can allow the shapes of the letters to evolve from such painted forms. In this way, the children gain a direct relationship to the various shapes of the letters. It is possible to develop the written vowels A or U so that first one paints the mood..., finally allowing the picture to assume the form of the appropriate letters. All teaching must have an artistic quality based on the pictorial element. The first step is to involve the whole being of the child in the effort of painting, which is subsequently transformed into writing.” (Steiner, 1996, P. 198-200) Wanting to experiment with this concept, I began to research Goethe’s colour wheel, and match emotions to colours. The list below is of the colours I used for this project: A - satisfaction, relief – yellow, gold-yellow E - searching, reaching out – green, yellow-green I – repulsion - violet O – shock – red, vermillion U - disgust, disappointment – blue, indigo I chose the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, Sweet Porridge[1], as a context for the paintings, and the next main lesson block. Within the story, I identified the five emotions and an illustrative image for each of the five vowel sounds. As a variation, we painted the letter forms out of these story images with the designated colours for each emotion. This time the vowels were presented in a different order. These vowel form paintings are illustrated below with a picture of the class paintings and a brief description. [1] See Appendix B for story with vowel verses.