ABSTRACT
The Symphony had provided a grand narrative structure for the term and had enabled Sybil to devise a method, the symphonic method. One such stimulus was the Sixth Symphony of Beethoven, the Pastoral Symphony. Beethoven had written of the symphony that it was 'more a matter of feeling than of painting sounds'. The creative work that flowed from experiencing Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony had been rooted in long phases of learning about the environment, rural cultures of the past, gratitude and provenance, pastoral poetry, how to interpret biblical text and how to apply skills of reading and writing learnt separately. The report as a whole endorses a developmental view of the child and encourages the teacher to experiment and to work out their own philosophy and educational aims. The metaphor of the growing body served to illustrate the naturalness of what is latent within the child.
