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Waldorf News

The Medieval Festival

February 22, 2022

During these cold days of winter sixth grade teachers everywhere are beginning to put together a celebration that has become a cornerstone of the curriculum, the Medieval Festival. It has evolved quite a bit over the years; it didn’t even exist when my first two classes came through sixth grade. Those classes had a rousing experience of Medieval Games but no knighting ceremony. Happily for my next group, a few years before they would be sixth graders a colleague brought a new model for a more meaningful festival to our school that a friend had developed for her school, and so a new tradition began. More »

Research Reveals Long-Term Harm of State Pre-K Program: In this first-ever controlled study of public pre-K, the control group did best

February 15, 2022

If there was ever a time to attend seriously to research concerning effects of early childhood education, this is it. If President Biden’s plan for universal state-run preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds is approved, the results could be disastrous. I have previously summarized several well-controlled studies showing that academic training in preschool or in kindergarten, while improving test scores in the short term, causes long-term harm (here). One of those, which bears reviewing here before I move on to the recent study in Tennessee, was a government-sponsored study conducted in Germany in the 1970s (described by Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 1992). The German government was trying to decide whether it would be a good idea, or not, to start teaching academic skills in kindergarten rather than maintain kindergarten as purely a place for play, stories, singing, and the like, as it had always been before. So, they conducted a controlled experiment involving 100 kindergarten classrooms. They introduced some academic training into 50 of them and not into the other 50. More »

‘A spectacular place’: Parents laud Camphill Steiner School for ‘transformation’ of son with Down’s syndrome 

January 10, 2022

The parents of a 21-year-old with Down’s syndrome have spoken of their amazement at his transformation over three years at Aberdeen’s Camphill Steiner School. Niall Mulligan went from using a wheelchair almost every time he left the house to walking alpacas around their paddock, and even mucking in with the gardening. It is a change that his mum and dad Aloyise and Hilary could never have imagined when they first brought him to the facility in August 2018. More »

Courage in Many Forms: The Many Faces of Michael

December 6, 2021

After eight Michaelmas seasons our beloved dragon had begun to falter and crumble. During the course of one of the most courage-testing school years many of us have ever experienced, all talk of dragons and their portents was not a topic that leapt to the forefront of the faculty meetings. Despite the uncertainty of the school year, there was still hope that we would once again be able to gather as a community to honor the seasons and to celebrate each other more frequently in the following school year. Summer came and among the blooms an idea was blossoming in my heart about the meaning of our festivals. How does our current time and place on the Earth need to play a larger role in those festivals? If we are to deeply honor the land beneath our feet and to celebrate our human experiences and heal together, perhaps our festival could afford to be reexamined. Does a traditional Michaelmas still strengthen the souls of today’s children? Does our earth and community need more than the meteoric fortifying of the season? More »

HiBAR co-founders and Waldorf parents drawn together by sense of purpose

November 29, 2021

Their children attended the City of Lakes Waldorf School in Minneapolis. When Nora saw fellow parent Ward Johnson in the school parking lot one day, she chased him down. She knew he had recently sold his business, a natural pet food company, and that he had a good business head on his shoulders. The three of them started brainstorming about business ideas, and soon bumped into another Waldorf parent, Dion Hughes, at a social gathering. Nora said, “Dion had just come back from a vacation, a trip to Mexico, where he’d seen plastic strewn beaches first-hand. He was very motivated to start working for environmental change. Dion is a creative brand builder, an inventive thinker, and a brilliant marketer. Before we knew it, we had our leadership team.” More »

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