Shelter Projects go Beyond the Classroom
“A home provides shelter and protection, but it is also a place where we nurture ourselves, creating a safe place apart from the world. As the third grader continues to move through the nine-year change and the experience of separation from the world, an inner need arises in them to build their own sanctuary. Creating a shelter allows this impulse to find an outer expression.” –Waldorf Teacher Resources, Micheal Seafort, 2020. In Waldorf schools across the world, 3rd graders all work on a shelter-focused project. Students spend time discussing and studying all sorts of different primitive homes created by […]
May Faire Toolkit
Happy May Faire season to you and yours! While we are apart, we want to be sure our community is able to enjoy and celebrate May Faire at home. Below, you will find several resources for celebration ideas including songs, crafts and videos. As we do every year, we celebrate the beauty of spring and its promise of new beginnings. Let’s celebrate all that we are becoming in this time and all that we will be together when we are reunited. We hope to create a slideshow of our community’s remote celebrations this year, too! If you want to […]
Learning from the Bees – A trip to Spikenard Bee Sanctuary
The sixth grade recently spent three days at Spikenard Farm Honey Bee Sanctuary in Floyd, VA. Here is a description of their trip from Class Teacher, Roberto Trostli: The ride down to Floyd County went better than expected, and the children enjoyed the chance to be together on a journey. When we arrived, we ate lunch, unpacked the cars, and set up the tents, only to find that the original plan for which group would get which tent was not going to work. In the end, every group but one had to switch tents, which caused some grumbling, but I told […]
Waldorf = Movement
In a Waldorf school, students learn through a rich sensory experience that brings visual arts, music, performing arts and movement into everyday lessons including reading, math, and science. In Waldorf schools, great care is taken to integrate movement and the arts into the curriculum in a developmentally appropriate way. We believe that through these experiences, students develop the intellectual curiosity, social sensitivity, and physical stamina to meet their full potentials. Matthew Thornton joined the RWS faculty in 2017 to build our Movement Arts program. His teaching pedagogy draws from his experience with dance, physical theatre, martial arts, and mind-body […]
100 Miles for 100 Years
Bringing Medieval History to Life
Waldorf = Connection
Waldorf educators foster a learning environment that is designed to meet the unique needs of each individual student in the class. In this environment, students cultivate a deep connection to learning and to their classmates. The Class Teacher takes an artistic and holistic approach to teaching. For instance, in the lower grades, subjects are blended so that it is hard to tell where math ends and music begins. We meet the needs of the whole child by building connections between subjects and by connecting academic learning to movement, social skills, and art. In the image above, students are […]
Who We Are, What We Believe
We all have values or core beliefs that are important to us, that define who we are and how we engage with the world around us. As human beings, we seek friends, leaders, jobs, and lifestyles that speak to our value system. As parents, we strive to instill strong values in our children, so that they too can grow up with a sense of purpose. When the first Waldorf School opened a century ago, its founders sought to inspire peace, goodness, and humanity in the younger generation of a country that was bitterly divided and almost destroyed by war […]
