Preparing for the First Day of School
Your child will adjust with enthusiasm to their new environment and their classmates – and will do so more quickly if you maintain a confident and relaxed attitude.
Let Children Experience Boredom
Waldorf education takes an active approach to supporting children’s imaginations, and a large part of that approach is allowing children unstructured playtime. The free mind, unbound by prescriptive activity, can envision, create, and dream. These are crucial real-life skills, with important benefits that pay off for an entire lifetime when solving problems, approaching divergent thinking, and even managing boredom.
Helping Young Children Learn Through Play
How do parents provide Pre-K and Kindergarten students with rich, open-ended play and work opportunities at home? Here are a few, very simple things parents can do to keep their young children learning at home.
Creating a World of Wonder: The Gift of Developing Imagination
In Waldorf education, early childhood teachers give children a great gift -- the time and space to live fully into their imaginations. Fostering children’s imagination and awe allows them to master their will and develop empathy.
The True Purpose of Preschool
What is the true purpose education? What is the purpose of greater learning and does this purpose shift by grade or from childhood to adulthood? According to Waldorf Early Childhood expert educator, Kasea Myers, the answer to all these questions - the purpose of education and learning across the board - is to open a person up to all of life’s wonders. We live to learn and learning to learn is the purpose of education.
Building Forts and Minds: The Importance of Child Built Space
Educational and environmental psychologists have taken a keen interest in fort building. It’s a constant presence in early and middle childhood, the creation of secret places, often in plain site, and the experts agree that den, fort or secret space creation offers a host of cognitive and psychological benefits for the developing child.
Waldorf Education and the Nature Connection
What does it look like to cultivate a nature connection in Waldorf curriculum? There are the obvious hallmarks - school gardens, multiple outdoor recess times and science classes outdoors -- but each age group of students connects in a special way with nature according to their developmental needs and their curriculum.
Character Education in Waldorf Schools
Andy Warhol famously said that, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” And in the age of Youtube, Vine, Periscope and other all-access broadcast channels, it seems he may be correct. This quote turned concept has embedded itself in the modern American psyche to the point where many of us, and our children, strive to cultivate our personalities, and our successes, more so than our characters. This was not always the case.