Working with Your Hands Does Wonders for Your Brain
New research highlights the fascinating things that happen with your brain when you work with your hands. It gives your active mind a rest by engaging it in a totally different way, which helps your mind relax and recharge. The shift away from “active” thinking often allows you to digest information and process and solve problems in the background while your attention is engaged in your task. That’s why we at Richmond Waldorf School make sure students work with their hands every day through incorporating the arts, movement and practical work throughout our curriculum. Our students engage in woodworking […]
BBC: Is ‘AQ’ more important than intelligence?
With increasingly rapid changes in technology and the nature of work, employers are interested not just in intelligence and social skills, but in an employee’s adaptability quotient–their ability to adapt to new challenges with flexibility, curiosity, problem-solving, courage, and resilience. That’s why in Waldorf Education we deepen rigorous academics through integrating art, outdoor education, music, theater, practical work, movement and hands on-learning. The depth and breadth of our curriculum challenges our students and develops crucial capacities that help them adapt and thrive throughout their lives.
NPR: Greener Childhood Associated With Happier Adulthood
New research indicates that access to the outdoors in childhood is strongly associated with happiness, mental health and well-being in adulthood. That’s one of the many reasons Waldorf schools prioritize outdoor learning and recreation for our students. Not only are outdoor spaces great places to move, discover and develop curiosity, they also help our students feel balanced, refreshed and ready to learn.
Waldorf Schools are Media Literacy Role Models
Originally published in October 2021. Written by Soni Albright for CyberCivics.com As we celebrate Media Literacy Week 2021, it’s hard to believe that Waldorf schools in North America have been leading the way when it comes to Media Literacy education. What’s that? Waldorf schools and “Media” Literacy? Do you mean those schools that are notoriously low-tech, and focus on things like face-to-face communication, hands-on learning, the great outdoors, and an art/music/movement integrated curriculum? Yep, those schools! Cyber Civics was founded at a public charter Waldorf school —Journey School—in 2010. Since its inception, most Waldorf schools (private and public) in […]
To Solve the Environmental Crisis, We Must Foster the Power to Imagine
By Peter Sutoris on September 4, 2021, originally published in Scientific American Toward the end of my senior year at Dartmouth, I watched my peers line up in front of the Career Services building. Waiting for their interviews for corporate jobs, all seemed to be dressed the same—the men wearing navy jackets, the women dark dresses. I thought back to my first day on campus four years earlier when we all wore different colors and dreamed of different futures. It was as if our education, instead of enhancing our individualities and imaginations, had reduced them to sameness. It was not a […]
Boys Who Sit Still Have a Harder Time Learning to Read
BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE UPDATED: JUNE 8, 2017 10:11 AM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: DECEMBER 2, 2016 11:07 AM EST via Time Magazine Anybody who has watched little boys for even five seconds knows that they are exhausting. At school, they tear around the playground, bolt through corridors and ricochet off classroom walls. According to a new Finnish study, this is all helping them to be better at reading. The study, released Nov. 30 in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, found that the more time kids in Grade 1 spent sitting and the less time they spent being physically […]
Studies Support Waldorf Education’s Approach to Reading
Written by Holly Korbey, July 28, 2020 via Edutopia Early in the school year at John Ruhrah Elementary and Middle School, co-teachers Darene Parry and Megan Healy were already diving deep into a lesson about the human heart, showing their fourth graders detailed anatomical diagrams and introducing vocabulary like cardio and circulatory. Surprisingly, the unit on “having a good heart”—rich in scientific dialogue and writing practice—is not part of science class, but English language arts (ELA). “Students see the connections between what we are learning in ELA and other subjects,” said Parry of the interdisciplinary curriculum at their school in Baltimore, Maryland, […]
The Guardian: Instead of rote learning useless facts, children should be taught wellbeing
Written by Alice O’Keefe, March 2, 2020 via The GuardianIn his treatise on the future of humanity, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari offers the young people of today some advice. In order to survive and thrive in adulthood, they should not rely on traditional academic skills such as solving equations or learning computer code. These will soon become obsolete in a world in which computers can perform such techniques more quickly and accurately than humans. All information-based jobs, in fields as diverse as journalism and medicine, will be under threat by 2050.Instead, Harari […]
