Acorn Waldorf School Blog

Introducing the Neighboring Tree Documentary!

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 15:27:41 GMT

We are excited to share a new documentary about the work
the Neighboring Tree Project did with a neighboring Head Start
and the creation of an outdoor forest program
for the children in their care.

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Over the past months, Elia Gilbert , one of Acorn's kindergarten teachers, has been working with the Agri-Business Child Development Center team of educators to produce a 30 minute video which documents their collaborative process in creating an outdoor forest program for the children in their care. We hope this will inspire future Neighboring Tree Project collaborations, as well as other Waldorf educators to reach out to their neighbors in similar ways.

We are now looking for more "branches" to our NT P work, as well as more Waldorf teacher people-power to work on the ground with our neighbors. After seeing the video and getting a sense of our work, please get back to us with any inspirations or feedback. We'd like to hear from our community!

We hope you enjoy this film!

Help Us Celebrate Our 10 Year Anniversary!

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 21:33:31 GMT

Let's Celebrate Together!

Acorn Waldorf School is celebrating its 10 Year Anniversary! We began this wondrous journey with 8 intrepid families who took a chance on a tiny new program and, with their support and the support of so many families in the decade since, have grown into a vibrant center for Waldorf Early Childhood Education in the Hudson Valley.

I can’t think of a better way to mark this auspicious moment in our school’s biography than making a meaningful contribution to the Sunbridge Institute Diversity Fund . During the entire month of June, for each donation to the Sunbridge Institute Diversity Fund, Acorn will give another $25. In the line where it asks, " My connection to Sunbridge is? " Please write " AWS 10 Year Anniversary ". Our hope is to inspire at least 50 individual donations but we will happily go above and beyond!

If you or your family has benefitted from, enjoyed or simply appreciate what’s happening at Acorn, please consider joining me in support of this all important endeavor. This wonderful fund supports BIPOC individuals in the Sunbridge Institute Waldorf teacher education programs, creating a more diverse pool of Waldorf teacher education graduates who will be fully prepared to take on educational and leadership roles in Waldorf classrooms and schools.

We are grateful and awed by Acorn’s continually star-strewn journey. May the next ten years continue to be blessed. Together we can make a difference!

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Neighboring Tree Project

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:46:48 GMT

The Neighboring Tree Project (NTP) is an AWS initiative that aims to create community partnerships with our "neighboring trees," i.e. local early childhood educators, schools and centers who are doing the important work of caring for children from underserved, migrant farming or inner-city backgrounds. In building these relationships, we are working collaboratively to bolster the programming offered, taking individual needs and current staff into consideration. The goal is to empower our neighbors with tools and pedagogical enrichment.

We also hope to learn: we want to get to know our neighbors, the children and families in our region, and learn from whatever is brought to the group together. The forest offers nutrients to all its trees, and one tree shares with another for mutual health of the whole.

Read on to learn about our first two endeavors, Agri-Business Child Development in New Paltz, NY and Meagher Pre-K in Kingston, NY.

"Learning about nature-based play has been an eye-opening experience. In a world where children tend to be surrounded by so much, one realizes that all children need to learn and grow is the freedom and encouragement to safely explore the world around them".

- Lisa, ABCD Teacher

“ Two students were working together to lift a branch, then called over to more friends to help.

All four of them were talking about team working and saying they could do it.”

“ A student was struggling to climb up a hill. Almost all the other students came back and re-climbed the hill with her.

They cheered her on and climbed next to her to show her she could do it. ”

- Meagher Teachers share about how the forest is impacting the children’s play.

AWS continues to look for opportunities to collaborate with local early childhood education programs. To become part of NTP, please contact Director Motria Shuhan at motria@acornws.org

Looking back with deep gratitude...

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 17:59:47 GMT

We made it to the New Year, still smiling and thriving! What an amazing feat was accomplished, against all odds and all in the service of the children. Together and as a community we worked to keep our school, vibrant and safe.

We are grateful...

To our devoted Teachers, who showed up each day, turned on a dime when needed, all the while keeping the children embraced in the warmth of love and rhythm, supported one another through professional & personal trials, and all the while staying cheerful and loving… THANK YOU ��

To our stellar Health Team, who made tough decisions, were available to us all at all hours of the day and night, ready to solve, listen and guide us through stormy weather… THANK YOU ��

To our supportive Parents, who stayed committed to the school, met each week, trusted and supported their teachers, worked on and showed up for the heart driven festivals that warm school life and brought their children to us each day… THANK YOU ��

And finally...

To the little children , who remain delighted, joyful and earnest. THANK YOU ❤️

We wish you a wonder-filled season, full of renewing moments and inspirations. See you in the New Year!

Enjoy a peek into some of the sweet moments from this year...

Begins on Aug 31. 2020! Outdoor Roots & Shoots Parent Child Class

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 22:49:41 GMT

Session A

Mondays 9AM - 11AM, $225

Aug 31 & Sept 1, 14, 21, 28 & Oct 5, 12, 19, 26, 2020

Session B

Mondays 9AM - 11AM, $175

Nov 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 & Dec 7, 14, 2020

The Outdoor Roots and Shoots Parent Child class supports parents of very young children by offering a warm and welcoming outdoor environment in which to meet with other parents and an experienced teacher in an online setting. Each week we will gather for lively discussion and time for singing and finger games. We’re nurturing and building a community of like minded parents. Our vision for our new outdoor offering is grounded in the living inquiries of parents today at home with their young children.

Topics include setting up an environment where children are safe and may cultivate the habit of independent play, setting boundaries while remaining calm and establishing a rhythm in which you and your child are thriving.

Expectant parents are also welcome!

Begins on July 6th! Online Roots & Shoots Parent Child Class - July Session

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 22:39:43 GMT

JULY Sessions

MONDAYS at 8PM, $100 - July 6, 13, 20 & 27

FRIDAYS at 10AM, $100 - July 3, 10, 17, 24 & 31

Join HERE !

The Roots and Shoots Online Parent class supports parents of very young children by offering a warm and welcoming environment in which to meet with other parents and an experienced teacher in an online setting. Each week we will gather for lively discussion and time for singing and finger games. We’re nurturing and building a community of like minded parents. Our vision for our new online offering is grounded in the living inquiries of parents today at home with their young children.

Expectant parents are also welcome!

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When In Wilderness

Thu, 28 May 2020 16:38:23 GMT

Applying wilderness wisdom to navigating the current pandemic... by Karl Johnson M.A.

Our present situation with the novel corona-virus has thrust us all into new terrains - a wilderness of uncertainty. When in a wilderness, it’s easy to feel disorientation and even trepidation - especially if one is unaccustomed to traversing such terrains. The complexity of wild environments and shifting variables, such as weather, all necessitate the need to steadfastly and bravely assess and meet new situations head on with commitment. Being in wilderness can also evoke a feeling of excitement and curiosity. The unknown holds opportunities. A sense of adventure can arise. In life, adventures invigorate us.

Here are some guiding thoughts gleaned from many years of leading wilderness experiences. May these be helpful metaphors in navigating our current, uncertain landscapes.

Orient Yourself to Your New Surrounding and to Those with You:

Start to pay attention to what is around you. What resources do you have? Where is your water? What is your orientation to the earth and sky ? Who is with you? Being observant, alert, and identifying your essential resources that will help you survive physically, mentally and spiritually. How do we take stock of what useful resources we have with us right now and what is close at hand?. Have we been practicing for contingencies? Do we have a resource of people in our community we can count on? Is there a way to accentuate strengths right now? Are there new opportunities that we see around us in this new landscape? Remember the essentials. Find the “waters” that will sustain you and protect the source. Make sure you keep practicing as a meditant to keep those “waters” flowing. Trust in life and the guidance of the spiritual world.

Establish your Camp:

Create a safe shelter. Protect oneself from the elements. Be prepared for sudden changes in the weather. Choose your site carefully. A homebase is the foundation of safety in your journey. It allows you protection, support and security. By having a secure base, one can venture forth, but also retreat. There may be dramatic shifts in the “weather,” but you can take shelter in what you have created as a “ base camp.” Safety and security are foundational. Ground yourself nightly in the security of what is your well-made and well-maintained shelter. This can be your actual home, but also the safety and security of one’s nightly practice, which we build up every evening. “Building one’s hut” gives one the opportunity to begin to practice gratitude. Gratitude is the attitude that will change everything.

Quiet your Mind:

Stay calm. Mindfulness, on the trail and at home, is key to being resilient, flexible and centered. Remember you are the “decisive element” in this moment in the wilderness. Practice mindfulness and steadfast courage. As the saying goes, “Worry never lessens tomorrow’s problem, but rather robs today of its strength.” Focus on the positive. Take deep breaths. Cultivate a still mind even amid the thunderstorms of the wilderness.

Listen to All that is Around You:

Listen intently. Attune to what is being intoned in the wilderness around you. Notice the wind. Listen to the “voices” around you. The capacity to listen in many different ways – to yourself, to your body, to others around you and to the world at large is key to helping you stay focused. This includes all who are near and dear to you. And especially the “quiet “voices that we only hear if we ourselves are quiet. There may be other voices clamoring for our attention. We should learn how to listen carefully to dissenting voices. But learn also how to separate what is “essential from what is not essential.” Seek to hear the quiet voice of inner guidance.

Be Aware of the Sun:

When and where is the sun rising? When and where is it setting? What is its arc during the day? Can you orient to the sun and find the right daily rhythms? The path of the sun through our days and regular daily rhythms are essential in new (and even in familiar) environments. In rhythm is strength. Be aware of the “Sun” - the big picture of guiding forces in our lives. Remember there are larger patterns in motion. Through these larger motions, seek to find your rhythms and steadfastly maintain them. Rhythm replaces strength - and rhythm awakens life. We also benefit greatly when we remember that “wisdom lives in the light.” Focus on the light.

Tend Your Fires:

At the end of every day, the night will come. Have you gathered your woodpile? Have you kept your tinder dry? Warmth is an essential of survival – whether in the wilderness or in your daily life. Especially when the new technology provides no supportive physical warmth – like a fire that won't stay lit or burns too small. When the light fades, we can tend our fire. Through the darkness, can we remember our core passions? What actually inspires and motivates us? How do we attend to those motivations when darkness encroaches? Remember, we need some preparation beforehand. Gather and sort the resources of your “woodpile.” Lay your fire well. Start small and feed it carefully. If we are not careful our “fire” can easily become wild. A well-laid and well-tended fire will burn steadily and then, at evening's end, we can enjoy the abiding, glowing embers of our efforts.

Notice the Stars:

When the fire dies away, gaze upward. The stars, which have always been there, will now be revealed. Take time to marvel and ponder. A sense of wonder and awe are not just gifts but significant aspects of any journey. The stars are always above us at night, but do we take the time to notice? What secrets are arrayed before us in their nightly sweep?

What are the patterns which have “constellated” for us in this lifetime? Can we truly “re-member?” In other words, can we integrate all those parts of ourselves - even from pre-earthly existence - and remember what we said we would do in this lifetime? In so many ways, life is about remembering what we said we would do - before this incarnation - and doing it. The stars can help us “re-member”...

Karl Johnson , presently the Pedagogical Chair for the Santa Fe Waldorf School, is approaching his 35th year as a Waldorf Educator. He has also been an Outdoor Educator for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and founded the Santa Fe Waldorf High School Wilderness Experience Program. If you are planning real wilderness journeys for yourself or for your school or if you need help navigating the strange, new world we are experiencing, feel free to contact Karl for some advice. A guide is always helpful. An experienced mentor, consultant, and trainer, Karl Johnson has mentored and trained teachers at dozens of schools in the U.S. and internationally. He still goes out to rejuvenate himself in the wilderness at every opportunity.

kjohnsoneducator@gmail.com

www.karljohnsoneducator.com

Summer Camp update

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 19:22:07 GMT

Acorn WS Summer Camp Update!

At Acorn WS we are committed, first and foremost, to the safety of our children, community and faculty. As we attempt to see into the future and determine how to proceed with our beloved Summer Camp, we are also aware that families would like to have some idea of what we are considering.

Our school program has been closed since March 13th and our families have been managing without the important support of a school day for their little ones. With this in mind, we have decided that if NYS allows a re-opening of schools and/or summer programs, we will be offering a Summer School program with enrollment open to our school year families first. We will then keep a wait list for summer camp families from the greater community and if there is space, open enrollment to that wait list on a first come, first serve basis.

Timing for the start of this new offering is entirely dependent on NYS guidelines, so we have no way of knowing when Summer School might begin. How far into the summer we might continue is decided on staff availability and the unfolding pandemic situation. Cost may also be different than the usual summer camp pricing and will be decided once we have permission to open up again.

If you are interested to be included on our Summer School wait list, please fill out this FORM or email us at camp@acornws.org . Once space opens you would be contacted and required to pay your program choice in full.

We hope this helps clarify our summer possibilities and appreciate your patience and understanding!

Stay safe, be kind and we miss you all!

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How Do I Find and Create Goodness for My Children?

Fri, 17 Apr 2020 17:50:33 GMT

More than ever, we as protectors of young children, are called upon to locate and embrace goodness in the world. A child’s connection to the adults around them is so essential and powerful that young children can sense deeply the joy and distress in our inner lives. Can we find and elevate the helper humans in our families and communities, near and far?

This profound essay by Waldorf educator, Susan Weber, written in 2011 following the tsunami tragedy in Japan, speaks to this deep connection. In life we will continue to live through difficult and challenging times and I hope you find it inspiring and supportive.

How Do I Find and Create Goodness for My Children?

In difficult times such as these with environmental disaster of almost unprecedented scale and concern about friends and others in Japan at the forefront of our thoughts, it is not easy to feel the goodness in life. In an external crisis, our urge is often to listen and see the news and to share our feelings with other adults. As a consequence, it is easy for the children around us to be exposed to things that they cannot understand, to become fearful about situations they will never see and cannot change even if we think that the media or adult conversations are not attended to by the children. Even pre- verbal children can sense profoundly the distress in our inner being.

But nothing brings stamina for life and daily well being to our children more directly and strongly than surrounding them and immersing them into an atmosphere of goodness and joy. For us as adults, the message they seek from us is this: I am happy to be alive, I am interested in the world around me and I want to find a place for myself within it. Children are born with an openness to meet what their lives will bring. Despite their individual destinies and challenges, this openness is present and as the adults in the child’s world, we have tremendous potential to cultivate this openness.

For the child just beginning life, there is one single mantra that needs to guide those early steps and years: the world is good. No other belief will carry him forward through the tumbles and stumbles, through the mysteries of his encounters with confidence and eagerness. Without this overarching rainbow of trust in life around and above them, children shrink back into themselves, lose the shine in their eyes, forgo the impulse to experiment, to see things as the adults around them never have, to imagine new solutions to the simplest experiments – piling blocks, washing a dish, dressing themselves upside down. The world is good – and therefore I enter into it, explore it, wonder, stop and look, touch, encounter, meet what comes to me with interest and growing confidence.

Fear paralyzes children — it reverses children’s natural gesture of trust, openness, and interest in the world. To develop in any way – cognitively, emotionally, physically – children need to be able to enter easily into life around them. They need to feel welcome, and above all, safe. For who of us is able to take risks, try new things, when we have a question about the safety of our surroundings?

There are times when circumstances beyond our control create uncertainty or worse for our families. In addition, we could also say that our times are, in fact, uncertain times. At the same time, however, our children are just beginning their lives. We owe to them their birthright: the world is good and I am grateful and happy to be in it. It is a safe place for me to grow in. And later, much later, I will be able to take on its pain and burdens. But give me time, peace, and space in which to discover the goodness in life for myself, in which to grow strong, capable, brave, and enthusiastic for life. Protect me from the challenges of adulthood until I am ready.

How can we do this for them?

We can protect them from information that they cannot comprehend or digest – saving our adult conversations for later, turning off televisions and radios in their presence.
Give them the strength building elements of rhythm, form in daily life, predictability, that reassure them of the goodness and security of each day.

I was once told that young children are very good observers, but poor interpreters. I, and many parents as well, have found this to be true.

Whether it be the large world and its sphere of difficulties, political situations near and far, our professional work and its daily challenges, our own personal frustrations, angers and fears – young children are not able to interpret any of these. None of these are a suitable menu for young children who cannot digest it. It all then goes inside of them to then be expressed in ways that we ourselves may not correlate with what they might have heard, for information about these realms of life will often bring anxiety, nervousness, fear, withdrawal, sleepless nights, or aggressive behavior.

As the adults in their lives, we have the possibility to stand there beside the children with confidence for life offering them a model for imitation. We lead them out into our world: we walk alongside them. We have seen much, experienced much. It is an amalgam of joy, of pain, suffering, discovery, celebration, disappointment – and at times of fear, questioning. All these experiences and feelings will have come to us by the time we reach parenthood. As adults, we have tremendous freedom to explore these feelings, to reflect upon our own experiences.

I f we as adults listen to the outer world as it often presents itself, how do we then find our own paths to believing confidently in the goodness of the world? It is of utmost significance that we strive toward this belief, for our children look to us for signals, for images of where to begin seeking their places in the world. They imitate our deepest inmost feelings and beliefs, and these carry them far as pillars of strength when they require it.

Take a walk, find your way into nature, hold deep in memory the most recent good thing we have encountered. Begin and end your day with gratitude for the good in our lives – however challenging this may feel at moments. Pick a tiny bouquet of wildflowers or seasonal things from the nature just outside our doors – the wonder of one snowdrop or crocus in spring bloom emerging through the receding snow, a single acorn, one brightly polished apple – each of these can remind us of the wonder and miracles of the universe. Look up at the stars in the heavens, and ponder the miracle that all over the earth human beings are united by experiencing the same starry heavens above them. Find a poem, even if you have never thought of poetry as your interest – just a few lines – copy it onto a piece of paper and put it on your refrigerator. Recall a human relationship that has helped you along your way. And see if, step by tiny step, you can rediscover, in difficult times, that the world truly is good.

Rudolf Steiner offers us a verse that can bring us strength in difficult times:

Steadfast I stand in the world

With certainty I tread the path of life

Love I cherish in the core of my being

Hope I carry into every deed

Confidence I imprint upon my thinking.

These five lead me to my goal

These five give me my existence.

Enrolling now! Acorn Waldorf School Forest Kindergarten & Nursery!

Wed, 04 Mar 2020 22:12:04 GMT

HERE is more information and enrollment application! Space is limited.

"...we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a “wild” way."

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 21:12:14 GMT

“Bye kids, come back when you’re hungry,” our parents said as we walked out the door for our adventures. “Don’t fall off a cliff!” Ah, what unimaginable liberty."

https://nyti.ms/2umlMYd

New York Times - Opinion By Cressida Cowell , Feb. 7, 2020

- Ms. Cowell is the author and illustrator of the “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Wizards of Once” series of children’s books.

I was 9 years old, hanging on as tightly as I could to my father’s legs as he dangled over the edge of a gigantic sea cliff on a tiny little island off the west coast of Scotland. He was trying to see whether the bird’s nest some 15 feet below was being inhabited by a white-tailed sea eagle or a buzzard.

The answer was important to my father. Sea eagles had only just been reintroduced into the Hebrides, and a nest would be a sign that they might be able to re-establish themselves in that part of the world. What was more important to me was that the gale whistling briskly off the Atlantic sea should not blow us off the cliff entirely: If I lost hold of my father’s legs, he would plunge to his death on the rocks below.

I remember wondering, as the cold rain lashed my face and the wind tore at my flapping anorak: “Why on earth is my father so unconcerned? What would make him trust his life to my puny little 9-year-old arms? How can I possibly be related to this wonderful but crazily fearless man?” When a sudden gust of wind made him sway a few moments later, my heart stopped. I could feel myself losing my grip on his legs.

The adventure on the cliff top was just one of many exciting but terrifying experiences in my gloriously wild childhood. There was the time my father accidentally tied the boat to a lobster pot instead of a buoy and we were blown out to sea. There was a trip out in a storm where the waves turned into great hills, and we had to bail out the water coming over the side of the boat. When I was a child, these experiences had been scary. But when I look back as an adult, I realize how much I owe to the freedom to explore nature that my parents allowed and encouraged.

It troubles me that children of today do not have that same freedom. What might that mean for their future creativity and their relationship to the natural world? As we face the threat of the climate crisis and the slow destruction of habitats around the world, we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a “wild” way, so that they learn to preserve the natural world around us.

The sea-wilderness of the Scottish Hebrides, the woods of the English South Downs and the windswept marshlands of eastern England — these are ancient landscapes that have been inhabited by human beings and their stories for so long that you might not be terribly surprised to meet a Roman legionary striding across the hillside, or to see a Viking ship nosing its way down the coastline.

I spent a great deal of time as a child on a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The island had no roads or electricity — just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea birds and heather. My family and I would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman for the summer holidays and picked up again weeks later. While we were staying on the island, we had no way of contacting the outside world.

Because there wasn’t any electricity, the house was lit by candlelight. Without a telephone or a television, I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evenings, my father told me and my siblings tales of the Vikings who invaded the island 1,200 years before, of the quarrelsome ancient British tribes who fought one another and of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs of the island. That was when I first started writing stories about dragons and Vikings, way back when I was 9 years old, by candlelight on that little island. These were the stories that later turned into “How to Train Your Dragon.”

My siblings and I — growing up in the 1970s — had a freedom children today do not. “Bye kids, come back when you’re hungry,” our parents said as we walked out the door for our adventures. “Don’t fall off a cliff!” Ah, what unimaginable liberty.

On other holidays, roaming unaccompanied on my bicycle near my grandmother’s house in the English countryside, I used to play on the top of an Iron Age hill fort called the “Trundle.” The view was extraordinary — I could see for miles and miles — and I had a strong feeling of what J.R.R. Tolkien called “the heart-racking sense of the vanished past.” It made me wonder: Who were the people who lived here, long ago? What were their lost histories?

From the hill fort, I had a good view of Levin Down, an extraordinarily eerie, wondrous place that we called the “Fairy Hill.” It stood out from the quiet country fields around it in an ominous and striking fashion, like the back of a whale surfacing in the ocean. The trees had blown there by chance, rather than being planted by human hands, and some were yew trees: I was warned not to touch them. There were places I could not go and “Beware” signs (which I always found exciting) because the area had been used as a training ground during World War II. To a sensitive child like myself, it was easy to believe that this hill was enchanted. It was intriguing, eerie, exciting and beautiful all at the same time.

The hill was covered with strange grassy mounds about the size of molehills. The adults had no idea what they were — which was very exciting to me, realizing that there were things in the world that not even the adults understood. So I filled in the blanks for myself and decided they must be burial mounds for fairies. This was the magical landscape that inspired my book “The Wizards of Once.”

For the wildwood in that book, I took particular inspiration from the ancient wood of Kingley Vale in Sussex. Its trees have gnarled, expressive faces, and roots that embed into the earth with an almost visceral power. The more you learn about trees, the more magical you realize they are. Did you know, for example, that trees can communicate with each other through their roots, even when they are many miles apart?

Trees grow throughout children’s books. From “Peter Pan” to “A Monster Calls,” “The Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter,” trees are refuges, prisons and symbols of nature’s potency. They can be a friendly home, like the Hundred Acre Wood in “Winnie-the-Pooh,” or give a sense of menace, like the snowy forest in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” They can also be symbolic, like the cement-filled dying tree in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The writers I loved when I was a child were similarly inspired by magical landscapes and nature: Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Diana Wynne Jones, Lloyd Alexander, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.H. White — and so many others.

Today, children have much less unsupervised access to the countryside. I worry that they may never know the magic of the wilderness, the power of trees and the thrilling excitement of exploring nature without an adult hovering behind them. And so I write books for children who will never know what the freedom of my childhood was like.

My father never found out whether the nest in the cliff belonged to a white-tailed sea eagle or a buzzard. The gust of wind that scared me brought him to his senses, and he scrambled back up the side of the cliff before I could lose my grip. We staggered back through the gale to the little stone house on the island where, in the candlelight, we dried out in front of the fire.

You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing. Just show up!

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 01:16:23 GMT

Do you really "see" your child? Helicopter parenting has become the American norm
but it may not be the best way to connect with our kids...

By Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.

Jan. 6, 2020

https://parenting.nytimes.com

Take a moment and fast forward in your mind to a day in the future when your child, now an adult, looks back and talks about whether she felt truly seen and embraced by you. Maybe she’s talking to a spouse, a friend or a therapist — someone with whom she can be totally, brutally honest. Perhaps she’s saying, “My mom, she wasn’t perfect, but I always knew she loved me just as I was.” Or, “My dad really got me, and he was always in my corner, even when I did something wrong.” Would your child say something like that? Or would she end up talking about how her parents always wanted her to be something she wasn’t, or didn’t take the time to really understand her, or wanted her to act in ways that weren’t authentic in order to play a particular role in the family or come across a certain way?

Put another way, do our kids feel seen by us? Do they feel truly seen for who they are — not for who we’d like them to be, and not filtered through our own fears or desires?

Parents in the United States today feel increasing pressure to practice some form of “hyper-parenting,” a time- and resource-intensive style of child-rearing also known as helicopter parenting. Even though a majority of parents now see it as the optimal approach, hyper-parenting is mainly practiced by the affluent, who spend huge amounts of time and money in an effort to give their kids every possible advantage — from baby Mandarin classes and private oboe lessons to travel soccer teams and SAT tutoring.

Intensive parenting is problematic not only because of the pressure it puts on parents, but because some research suggests that all this exhausting parental striving may not be the best way to raise children. In fact, our research and experience suggest that raising happy, healthy, flourishing kids requires parents to do just one key thing. It’s not about reading all the parenting best sellers or signing your kids up for all the right activities. You don’t even have to know exactly what you’re doing. Just show up.

Showing up means bringing your whole being — your attention and awareness — into this moment with your child. When we show up, we are mentally and emotionally present for our child right now. Naturally, no one can do this for everyone all the time, but as we explain in our new book, “The Power of Showing Up,” the idea is to approach parenting being present and aware in your interactions with your child — and to make repairs when that doesn’t happen.

Longitudinal research on child development suggests that one of the best predictors for how any child turns out — in terms of happiness, social and emotional development, meaningful relationships, and even academic and career success — is having received sensitive, supportive care early in life. We believe the key element is an adult who supported the child by offering what we call the “Four S’s” — helping them feel 1) safe — where they feel protected and sheltered from harm; 2) seen — where they know you care about them and pay attention to them as they really are; 3) soothed — where they know you’ll be there for them when they’re hurting; and 4) secure — which develops from the other S’s so they trust you to predictably help them feel “at home” in the world.

In the world of intensive hyper-parenting, the third S — “seen” — often seems to get left behind. We all know we should keep our kids safe and secure, and most of us believe we should soothe them when they’re upset. But what about really seeing them?

You know the clichés of the dad who pushes his disinterested son to be an athlete, or the mom who rides her child to make straight A’s, regardless of the child’s inclinations. These are parents failing to see who their kids really are. If they happen occasionally over the course of a childhood they won’t make a huge difference — no one can truly see a child 100% of the time. But over time the child’s sense of not being seen can not only harm the child, but the parent and the relationship.

That sets up a heartbreaking reality: there are kids who live a majority of their childhoods not being seen. Never feeling understood. Rarely having the experience that someone feels their feelings, takes on their perspective, knows their likes and dislikes. Imagine how these children feel — invisible and alone. When they think about their teachers, their peers, even their parents, one thought can run through their minds: “They don’t get me at all.”

What keeps a child from feeling seen and understood? Sometimes, it’s when we see the child through a lens that has more to do with our own desires, fears, and issues than with our child’s individual personality, passions, and behavior. Maybe we become fixated on a label and say, “He’s the baby,” or “She’s the athletic (or shy or artistic) one.” Or “He’s stubborn, just like his dad.” When we define our kids like this, using labels or comparisons to capture and categorize them, we prevent ourselves from seeing them for who they are.

Even in our most well-meaning moments, we can fall into the trap of hoping our kids will be something other than who they really are. We might want our child to be studious or athletic or artistic or neat or achievement-oriented or something else. But what if he just doesn’t care about kicking a ball into a net? Or is even unable to do so? What if she has no interest in playing the flute? What if it doesn’t seem important to get straight A’s, or it feels inauthentic to conform to gender norms?

Seeing our kids also means being willing to look beyond our initial assumptions and interpretations. If your child is quiet when she meets an adult, you might assume she is being impolite and try to improve her social skills. But she may simply be feeling shy or anxious. Rather than immediately correcting manners, you should first observe where she is right now, and work to understand the feelings behind the behavior.

The point is to develop an attitude of curiosity rather than immediate judgment. When your toddler plays the “let’s push the plate of spaghetti off the highchair” game, your initial assumption might be that he’s trying to press your buttons. But if you look at his face and notice how fascinated he is by the red splatter on the floor and the wall, you might feel and respond differently. You might be just as frustrated about having to clean it up, but maybe you could pause and ask yourself, “I wonder why he did that?” If your curiosity can lead you to see him as a young researcher gathering data as he explores this world that’s so new to him, you can respond with intentionality and patience, even as you clean up his experiment. (And perhaps draw your own conclusion and put a towel down the next time you serve pasta.)

Each child is an individual. When our own desires and assumptions lead us to perceive that child as something other than who they are, we are unable to see them clearly. And if we can’t see our kids, then what do we really mean when we say we love them? How can we embrace them as the individuals they are?

In the end, truly seeing your kids isn’t about being some sort of super-parent. You don’t have to read minds or transcend your shortcomings or achieve spiritual enlightenment. And you certainly don’t have to drive yourself and your family insane trying to attend every available enrichment activity. You just have to show up, allowing your kids to feel that you get them and that you’ll be there for them, no matter what. When you do that, you’ll be teaching them how to love, and how relationships work. They’ll be more likely to choose friends and partners who will see and show up for them, and they’ll learn how to do it for others, meaning they’ll build skills for healthy relationships, including with their own kids, who can then pass the lesson on down the line through future generations. That’s what it means to see — really see — your children.

Then, maybe someday, they’ll sit down with you for that cup of coffee and let you know how grateful they are for the way you saw them for who they were, and for the ways you showed up in their life.

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. are the authors of “ The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired .”

Simplicity Parenting Workshop!

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 22:54:11 GMT

Come join us for this wonderful opportunity to work with expert

Simplicity Parenting facilitator, Stephanie Cleary .

This work is based on Kim John Payne 's work towards understanding what children need as they grow.

Explore the extraordinary power of LESS to raise calmer, happier and more secure children.

Parents employing the principles of Simplicity Parenting find that their children...

* Are calmer and happier
* Do better socially and emotionally
* Are more focused at school
* Find it easier to comply with family rules
* Become less-picky eaters

In these workshops you will learn about the effects of too much too soon, and focus on an area you would like to transform in your family life. Our topics will include...

* Toys, Books and Clothes
* Meals and Bedtime
* Schedules
* And how to filter media and the adult world

EACH SESSION BEGINS AT 4PM AND IS 2 HOURS LONG. PLEASE RSVP TO PARENTCOUNCIL@ACORNWS.ORG !

Stephanie Cleary is an Early Childhood Waldorf Educator, Simplicity Parenting coach, Simplicity family counselor, Discipline and Guidance Coach and a mentor to Waldorf Schools.

Spend lovely morning with the Roots & Shoots Parent Child Program at Acorn Waldorf School

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:36:44 GMT

Supporting parents by offering a beautiful and welcoming environment in which to meet with other parents and a facilitating teacher. Each week we will gather for quiet observation and lively discussion around the living questions of those in the group. There will be time for singing and finger games, indoor and outdoor play for the older little ones, as well as seasonal handwork projects for parents. Expectant parents are also welcome! Let us know if you are interested in joining Motria Shuhan for a morning designed for children aged birth to 24 months and their parent or caregiver. For more information contact us at motria@acornws.org

Lovely to think about summer camp on a spring day

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:36:43 GMT

How To Get Your Kids To Do Chores (Without Resenting It)

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:30:32 GMT

by MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

Back in the early 1990s, psychologist Suzanne Gaskins was living in a small Maya village near Valladolid, Yucatán, when she struck up a conversation with two sisters, ages 7 and 9.

The girls started telling her — with great pride — about all the chores they did after school. “I wash my own clothes,” the 7-year-old said. The older sister then one-upped her and declared, “I wash my clothes and my baby brother’s clothes.”

Gaskins was so impressed by the girls’ enthusiasm for helping around the house that she started to study how kids in the village spend their time. She quickly realized that the young kids not only made big contributions to household chores, but also that they often did so without being told. In fact, many times, helping out was their idea.

In the past 30 years, Gaskins and a handful of other psychologists have been documenting a remarkable phenomenon in indigenous families in Mexico and Guatemala: Young children in these homes are extremely helpful around the house.

They help do the laundry, help cook meals, help wash dishes. And they often do chores without being told. No gold stars or tie-ins to allowances needed.

In one study, psychologist Barbara Rogoff and her colleague Lucia Alcala, at Cal State, Fullerton, interviewed moms in Guadalajara, Mexico, who had indigenous ancestry. The researchers asked the moms what their children, who were all between the ages of 6 and 8, do to help around the house and how often they do these tasks voluntarily.

The study — published in 2014 — contains some of the most remarkable quotes I have ever seen in a research article.

For example, one mother said her 8-year-old daughter comes home from school and declares: “Mom, I’m going to help you do everything.” Then she “picks up the entire house, voluntarily,” the study reported.

“Another time, the mom comes home from work, and she’s really tired,” says Rogoff of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “She just plops herself down on the couch. And the daughter, says, ‘Mom you’re really tired, but we need to clean up the house. How about I turn on the radio and I take care of the kitchen and you take care of the living room and we’ll have it all cleaned up?’ ”

Volunteering to help is such an important trait in kids that Mexican families even have a term for it: acomedido.

“It’s a really complex term,” says Andrew Coppens, an education researcher at the University of New Hampshire, who collaborates with Rogoff. “It’s not just doing what you’re told, and it’s not just helping out. It’s knowing the kind of help that is situationally appropriate because you’re paying attention.”

And the phenomenon isn’t limited to children in Mexico. When families with indigenous roots move to the U.S., the parents keep the same approach to chores.

In many Maya communities, children see themselves as partners with their parents when it comes to working around the house, says psychologist Suzanne Gaskins. Susy, 12, says she voluntarily washes the dishes sometimes because she wants to help her mom.

A few years ago, Coppens and his colleagues interviewed Mexican-American moms in Watsonville, Calif., about how often their children do chores. They then compared these moms’ responses with those from middle-class families in Silicon Valley with European ancestry.

Although there was a lot a variation within each culture, Coppens says, a clear pattern emerged: “The Mexican-American kids, aged 6 to 7, were doing about twice as much around the house as the middle-class European-American kids, on average,” he says. “And they were doing so, much, much more voluntarily.”

So what on earth is these parents’ secret?

This may come as a surprise, but over and over again, researchers said one thing is key: embracing the power of toddlers.

Yes, I’m talking about 1- to 3-year-olds who, in our culture, are more often associated with the term “terrible” than “helpful.”

If you look around the world — whether the parents are hunting and gathering in Ecuador, raising cattle in the Himalayas or developing software in Silicon Valley — their toddlers have a few things in common.

The first is tantrums. Yes, toddler tantrums are pretty much unavoidable, no matter where you live, the ethnographic record shows.

But the second commonality is more positive: “Toddlers are very eager to be helpful,” says David Lancy, an anthropologist at Utah State University, who documented this universality in his new book, Anthropology Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers.

Toddlers are born assistants. Need help sweeping up the kitchen? Rinsing a dish? Or cracking an egg? No worries. Toddlers Inc. will be there on the double.

In one study, 20-month-olds actually stopped playing with a new toy and walked across the room to help an adult pick up something from the floor.

Even small tasks, like raking leaves, can give kids a sense of pride and accomplishment, psychologists say. The key is to be sure the tasks make a real contribution to the household and aren’t just “mock work.”

And they didn’t need a reward for their assistance. In fact, the toddlers were less likely to help a second time if they were given a toy afterward, the study found.

“Children appear to have an intrinsic motivation to help,” psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello concluded. “And extrinsic rewards seem to undermine it.”

No one understands exactly why toddlers have this innate desire to be helpful (or why rewards diminish it). But it could stem from their strong drive to be around their family, says Rebeca Mejia-Arauz, a psychologist at ITESO University in Guadalajara.

“I think this point is really key,” she says. “Doing things with other people makes them happy and is important for their emotional development. They see what their mom or siblings are doing, and they want to do it.”

Messy toddler today, helpful kid later?

Sure, toddlers may want to help, but let’s face reality here. At first, they really can’t do much. They can be clumsy, destructive and even enraging. Their involvement in chores often slows things down or makes a mess.

For this reason, many parents in Western culture rebuff a toddler’s offer to help, Mejia-Arauz says.

“We have mothers tell us things like, 'I need to do a chore very quickly, and if my toddler tries to help, he makes a mess. So I’d rather do it myself than having them helping,’ ” she says.

In many instances, Western moms tell the toddlers to go and play while they do the chores, she says.

But moms with indigenous heritage often do the exact opposite.

First, they give toddlers the opportunity to watch the chores as often as possible. “They invite them over by saying something like, 'Come, my child, and help me while I wash the dishes,’ ” Mejia-Arauz says.

Then if the child wants to participate, “they are welcome,” she says, even if it means going more slowly or if the mom has to redo the task.

“For example, one mom told us: 'When my toddler was doing the dishes, at the beginning, the water was all over the place, but I would allow my son to the dishes because that’s how he learned,’ ” she says.

The moms see it as an investment, Mejia-Arauz says: Encourage the messy, incompetent toddler who really wants to do the dishes now, and over time, he’ll turn into the competent 7-year-old who still wants to help.

Research supports this hypothesis, says the University of New Hampshire’s Andrew Coppens. “Early opportunities to collaborate with parents likely sets off a developmental trajectory that leads to children voluntarily helping and pitching in at home,” he says.

Or another way to look at it is: If you tell a child enough times, “No, you’re not involved in this chore,” eventually they will believe you.

If you give young children a chance to help around the house, psychologists say, you might be surprised by what they can learn. At home in a small village near Valladolid, Mexico, Alondra, 3, peels a mango. Her sister Susy is by her side.

What about middle-class, American kids?

Cultures are complex packages. Parenting models in one culture likely won’t work well in another. It’s a bit like fusion cuisine. You can’t simply take a few ingredients from a Oaxacan beef stew, add them to a New England chowder and expect it to taste good.

That said, American parents can extract useful ideas from Mexican parenting style when it comes to raising helpful kids, says Utah State University’s David Lancy.

“Absolutely,” he says. “In fact, I think we are doing a disservice to toddlers and older children when we deny them the opportunity to pitch in and be helpful.

"But replicating the approach isn’t easy in our society. It’s not a slam-dunk,” he adds. “We have to slow down what we’re doing. We have to make allowances.”

And we have to start early. As soon as you can:

1. Expose kids to chores as much as possible

Let them watch you cook, do the laundry or walk the dog. Let them help change a light bulb, plant herbs in the garden or help make a bed.

Basically, anything you want them to help with later on in life, be sure they’re around while the activity is occurring.

“Especially during the early years, give children the opportunity to wander over and watch what’s going on with the adults,” Coppens says. You’ll be surprised by how much toddlers and young children learn by simply observing what you do — no lecturing or explaining necessary.

This exposure also helps young children to see that chores are a social activity, Coppens says. They’re opportunities to work together and be with family members — which young kids crave. Then kids associate chores with a fun, positive activity.

“This psychological integration into the family seems to be really powerful developmentally for kids learning to work together,” Coppens says.

2. Think small tasks, big contributions

Offer opportunities for the child to help with the chore you’re doing. Give them a task that is appropriate with their skill level. Maybe it’s holding a measuring a cup while baking, moving a chair while sweeping or drying off a dish or two.

The task can be tiny, but the key part, Coppens says, is that it has to make a real contribution to the chore. It can’t be a “fake” project or an action that has nothing to do with the real chore. Then everyone isn’t working together for a common goal.

“In one of our studies, the middle-class, European families reported giving toddlers what we called 'mock work,’ ” Coppens says. For example, a mom would sweep the kitchen and afterward, she would give the broom to her young child to “resweep” the kitchen.

“The parents knew that the child wasn’t contributing to chore, and pretty quickly, the kid will pick up on the same idea,” Coppens says. And the kid loses out on the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes from making a real contribution.

3. Always aim to work together

A big motivating force for young children is being around their family, working on a common goal.

This motivation is lost if we divide up chores so everyone is working solo (or give kids mock work).

So for example, if you’re doing laundry, be sure everyone is folding everyone’s clothes. If you have the children just fold their own clothes while you fold your own, the tasks becomes more about working independently.

4. Don’t force it

“Sometimes people think that to get children to do chores, like Maya kids do, the parents must be doing a really good job of controlling the kids,” says Barbara Rogoff of UC Santa Cruz. But actually, the opposite is true.

“The aim is not to control the kids, but rather to develop the child’s own initiative,” she adds.

To do that, indigenous parents don’t force kids to help. They encourage the child and offer opportunities to participate when the child is interested.

Forcing the child actually has the opposite effect, Rogoff says. It can generate resistance.

“Just like adults, kids don’t like being bossed around,” she says. “Asking a little kid, 'Could you help me with this?’ often gets them on board more often than simply, saying 'You must do this.’ ”

When in doubt, talk collaboratively: “Saying to a child: 'let’s do this together’ sounds so much more interesting and rewarding than saying, 'I want you to do this,’ ” she adds.

5. Change your mindset about young children:

In the U.S., we often think toddlers and young children simply want to play, Coppens says. But the indigenous moms see a toddler coming over to them as an indication that they want to help.

The shift in mindset changes how the parent responds to the toddler’s request to participate in chore, Coppens says.

“All parents are interested in supporting their kids,” he says. “So if you assume that your child wants to play, then you are likely to find a better way for them to play that’s somewhere out of your way while you finish the chore.”

The result is a child separated from the adult activity and not around to learn about the chore — or about how to work together collaboratively.

“But if you make the assumption the toddler wants to help you, but he just doesn’t have a good understanding of how to do that — then you’ll try to find a way for him to help,” Coppens adds. “You will help him help.”

Over time, the “help” will grow in complexity. And the 2-year-old who stirs the pancake mix today could turn into the 6-year-old who makes the whole family breakfast — and feels darn good about it.

2018-19 AWS Enrollment is open!

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:25:26 GMT

For more information contact us at info@acornwaldorfschool.org

or click here: http://acornwaldorfschool.org/apply.html

At Acorn Waldorf School, we cultivate a space for intelligent play, allowing the children to engage with the physical world and each other. This is the true work of childhood, the essential basis for critical thinking, problem solving, and social interaction. In our warm, home-like atmosphere, the children are guarded from sensory overload (so ubiquitous in our culture) that can disrupt and even arrest this fundamental activity from finding expression. Journeying through the year we honor the seasons and celebrate festivals. The daily rhythm balances time spent indoors and out, restful times with active, and individual with group activities. This provides a nurturing and sustaining creative space, fostering self-confidence, physical health, and social intuition.

Experiential tasks, great and small, build the foundation for cognitive learning. With song and story, literacy and linguistic capacity are strengthened, along with a sense of the beauty and expressiveness of language. Counting games and rhyme provide a solid basis for memory and mathematical skills. Concentration, small-muscle development, and hand-eye coordination are all skills significantly promoted through tasks such as baking, braiding, finger crocheting, sewing, modeling with beeswax, and watercolor painting. All these elements work together, creating not only a superior foundation for elementary school learning, but also a basis in areas such as artistic ability, ethical values, social awareness, resilience, and health.

Summer Camp… still time to sign up! Enroll your child here!

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:20:20 GMT

Every week, along with Acorn School teachers, we play in meadows, climb trees, build and dig in the sandbox, make beautiful crafts, take nature walks, run thru the sprinkler and spend time with good friends and simply enjoy summertime laziness.

NEW this year… Oak Camp for 7-12 year olds. Join John Evans, beloved and long-time Mountain Laurel Waldorf School teacher, for 2 weeks of fun, games and shady days in the forest. Contact camp@acornschoolhouse.com for more info. Hope to see you there!

Far up in the deep blue sky,

Great white clouds are floating by;

All the world is dressed in green;

Many happy birds are seen,

Roses bright and sunshine clear

Show that lovely June is here!

~ F.G. Sanders

“the young child does not possess the self-awareness to feel inadequate…” how fortunate

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:18:10 GMT

Inadequacy as a Doorway to Learning

By TERRY ELLIS and CHIP ROMER

Imagine a young child learning to stand for the first time. He has seen his older sister do it countless times, and he is determined that he, too, will stand and then walk towards the things that interest him. He crawls to the coffee table and pulls himself into an upright position, then his legs wobble and he promptly falls back onto his bottom. He pulls himself up again, and falls again. Again, and again. The wise parent watches without intervention, ensuring safety but not interrupting the learning that is going on. The child may become distracted at times, but he will keep trying until he is eventually standing solidly and walking confidently towards his interests.

At no time in this learning process did the child feel inadequate about his initial inability to stand and walk. He simply intended to stand and kept trying until he was successful. While he may have become frustrated, the young child does not possess the self-awareness to feel inadequate. He simply directs his will towards that which he wants to achieve, and, through trial and error, eventually gains mastery. As parents watching this effort, we might be struck by the vulnerability of our child or by his heroic perseverance, yet he isn’t feeling vulnerable or proud of his determination. He simply wants to stand and walk.

For the young child, inadequacy is a way of life. Fueled by curiosity and desire, he is continually learning how to manipulate his body and how to interact with his environment. Inevitably, in our culture there comes a time when a child becomes self-aware in relation to the rest of the culture and its norms. The child becomes aware of his inadequacy. Shame is born, and with it a sense of vulnerability. Metaphorically, this can be seen as “the fall” from the paradise of early childhood.

In Waldorf education, there is a conscious intention to delay this onset of self-judgment, a desire to “keep children young” so that unself-conscious desire for learning can endure. This is one reason that Waldorf educators hope to protect children from media exposure, where commercial content creates premature desires and judgments within children. This is a reason why Waldorf educators discourage the photographing and videotaping of children in their schoolwork and play—seeing themselves in pictures or on the screen awakens self-judgment; rather than remembering the joy of playing the lion in a second-grade play, the child watching a video of that play is likely to measure the quality of her performance against that of her classmates. This invites self-judgment; and feelings of inadequacy, vulnerability and shame enter into the young child’s life.

In our heroic culture, our common defense against the shame of inadequacy is to establish expertise. A ten year old who has yet to master riding a bike decides he “doesn’t like bikes” and becomes an expert skateboarder instead. He diverts attention away from the shame of his inadequacy and toward his expertise. As adults in this culture, we continually fix ourselves into areas of competence or expertise in order to protect against shame—and this stunts learning, which by its nature is dynamic, experimental and includes failure.

By focusing on what we know already—by becoming experts—we learn not to learn. As experts, we live only in the well known. We do not explore the frontiers of our comfort zone, where learning—exploring something new and unfamiliar—necessarily occurs; instead, we remain in our defended expertise. Rather than learning, we end up static, repeating that which we already know.

Turning away from shame has become an entrenched neural pathway—biologically for individuals in our culture, and metaphorically for our culture itself. We default to our comfortable expertise without even thinking about it. Our aversion to the shame of inadequacy is so habitual that it creates a kind of trance state. This trance obscures the need to grow and learn. The trance blocks natural—childlike—excitement for the discovery of the unknown. It is as if the young child has decided he is content to be an expert crawler and denies any interest in learning to walk. We habitually settle for the static safety of familiarity instead of expanding through our inadequacy towards the unknowns where expansive learning lives.

In groups (schools, businesses, charter school development teams), expertise resides at the fixed center, and learning—with its requisite inexpertise, uncertainty and inadequacy—lives on the periphery. A group tends to rely on the competence and confidence of its central experts. Group learning, however, is a dynamic process and is best served by the most sensitive member, often the most marginal or peripheral member, speaking about her sensitivity. This act names the shame that lies at the center of the trance of expertise; once that shame is named the trance is broken, inadequacy can be explored and learning can occur for the whole group. The sensitive “inexpert,” much like a child, lives on the periphery of the culture—the frontier of inadequacy; when her process of discovering the unknown—learning—is shared with the center, the whole group culture learns.

In our culture of expertise, the very process of learning has been scapegoated because it requires the dismantling of expertise, which brings with it exposure to the shame of inadequacy. Innovative charter schools are seen as experimental laboratories, whereas mainstream schools tend to be fixed in their established expertise. Charters live on the periphery of public education, pushing the boundaries through experimentation—and commonly experiencing inadequacy—in order to grow and support new learning. They are often scapegoated by the mainstream because they threaten the cultural trance of defended expertise. Charter schools inspired by Waldorf education are currently on the periphery of the traditional Waldorf culture, and their willingness to experiment on the edge can sometimes be seen as threatening.

Attuning our sensitivity to our own inadequacies awakens us to learning opportunities. When we feel ourselves pressing against our inadequacies, we are on the edge of something we do not know but are ready to learn. Rudolf Steiner, in founding the first Waldorf school in 1919, placed teachers outside of their field of expertise: the mathematician taught language arts; the artist taught science. Steiner believed that teachers striving beyond their expertise—or living dynamically with their inadequacies—would serve children as the best examples of learning how to learn. Whether we are educators, charter school developers, parents or mentors, we too can model how to learn by summoning the courage to live in the dynamic tension of our inadequacy. Expansion—individual and cultural—will be our reward.

Terri Ellis and Chip Romer were lead developers of Credo High School in Sonoma County, California, where Chips is currently Executive Director and Terri is a board member. For more information, visitwww.credohigh.org.

The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:15:34 GMT

March 15, 2013

The Stories That Bind Us

By BRUCE FEILER

I hit the breaking point as a parent a few years ago. It was the week of my extended family’s annual gathering in August, and we were struggling with assorted crises. My parents were aging; my wife and I were straining under the chaos of young children; my sister was bracing to prepare her preteens for bullying, sex and cyberstalking.

Sure enough, one night all the tensions boiled over. At dinner, I noticed my nephew texting under the table. I knew I shouldn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help myself and asked him to stop.

Ka-boom! My sister snapped at me to not discipline her child. My dad pointed out that my girls were the ones balancing spoons on their noses. My mom said none of the grandchildren had manners. Within minutes, everyone had fled to separate corners.

Later, my dad called me to his bedside. There was a palpable sense of fear I couldn’t remember hearing before.

“Our family’s falling apart,” he said.

“No it’s not,” I said instinctively. “It’s stronger than ever.”

But lying in bed afterward, I began to wonder: Was he right? What is the secret sauce that holds a family together? What are the ingredients that make some families effective, resilient, happy?

It turns out to be an astonishingly good time to ask that question. The last few years have seen stunning breakthroughs in knowledge about how to make families, along with other groups, work more effectively.

Myth-shattering research has reshaped our understanding of dinnertime, discipline and difficult conversations. Trendsetting programs from Silicon Valley and the military have introduced techniques for making teams function better.

The only problem: most of that knowledge remains ghettoized in these subcultures, hidden from the parents who need it most. I spent the last few years trying to uncover that information, meeting families, scholars and experts ranging from peace negotiators to online game designers to Warren Buffett’s bankers.

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

I first heard this idea from Marshall Duke, a colorful psychologist at Emory University. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Duke was asked to help explore myth and ritual in American families.

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

“We were blown away,” Dr. Duke said.

And then something unexpected happened. Two months later was Sept. 11. As citizens, Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush were horrified like everyone else, but as psychologists, they knew they had been given a rare opportunity: though the families they studied had not been directly affected by the events, all the children had experienced the same national trauma at the same time. The researchers went back and reassessed the children.

“Once again,” Dr. Duke said, “the ones who knew more about their families proved to be more resilient, meaning they could moderate the effects of stress.”

Why does knowing where your grandmother went to school help a child overcome something as minor as a skinned knee or as major as a terrorist attack?

“The answers have to do with a child’s sense of being part of a larger family,” Dr. Duke said.

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. …”

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

Dr. Duke said that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.

Leaders in other fields have found similar results. Many groups use what sociologists call sense-making, the building of a narrative that explains what the group is about.

Jim Collins, a management expert and author of “Good to Great,” told me that successful human enterprises of any kind, from companies to countries, go out of their way to capture their core identity. In Mr. Collins’s terms, they “preserve core, while stimulating progress.” The same applies to families, he said.

Mr. Collins recommended that families create a mission statement similar to the ones companies and other organizations use to identify their core values.

The military has also found that teaching recruits about the history of their service increases their camaraderie and ability to bond more closely with their unit.

Cmdr. David G. Smith is the chairman of the department of leadership, ethics and law at the Naval Academy and an expert in unit cohesion, the Pentagon’s term for group morale. Until recently, the military taught unit cohesion by “dehumanizing” individuals, Commander Smith said. Think of the bullying drill sergeants in “Full Metal Jacket” or “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

But these days the military spends more time building up identity through communal activities. At the Naval Academy, Commander Smith advises graduating seniors to take incoming freshmen (or plebes) on history-building exercises, like going to the cemetery to pay tribute to the first naval aviator or visiting the original B-1 aircraft on display on campus.

Dr. Duke recommended that parents pursue similar activities with their children. Any number of occasions work to convey this sense of history: holidays, vacations, big family get-togethers, even a ride to the mall. The hokier the family’s tradition, he said, the more likely it is to be passed down. He mentioned his family’s custom of hiding frozen turkeys and canned pumpkin in the bushes during Thanksgiving so grandchildren would have to “hunt for their supper,” like the Pilgrims.

“These traditions become part of your family,” Dr. Duke said.

Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn’t mean simply “talking through problems,” as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves. When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

“This Life” appears monthly in Sunday Styles. This article is adapted from Bruce Feiler’s recently published book, “The Secrets of Happy Families: How to Improve Your Morning, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smart, Go Out and Play, and Much More.”

Celebrating the young child’s birthday…

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:13:19 GMT

by Lisa Marshall

I have such fond memories of my childhood birthday parties: my mom knew how to make our birthdays really special. Now I love to throw parties for my own three children. I’d love to share some of the tips I’ve learned for a successful party. The key is to really evaluate what is appropriate for your child’s age and temperament. One wants to make the party special but not to go overboard (or at least not too far).

When my children were very little, I realized that the party was more for us than for them. I would invite several other families, good friends of ours and we would have a champagne brunch (winter birthday) or a cookout (summer birthday). The adults would enjoy these gatherings and the children would interact as they would at any other gathering of friends. There was not a big to-do made over the child except for singing Happy Birthday and of course some sort of cake.

As my girls got older, say from 4-7, we had lovely small gatherings (a nice rule of thumb is that the number of children should be the child’s age plus one). I did most of the planning for these parties with very little input from the child although I did my best to do something I thought they would enjoy. Whenever possible, I had parties outdoors or at least partly outdoors which made them feel less stressful. The parties would last no more than 2 and a half hours and there was a rhythm to them something like this:

30 minutes free play

Snack served (little sandwiches, carrot sticks, juice box)

Circle time

Craft

Light the birthday ring, sing happy birthday and serve cake

Story

Goodbye

You’ll notice I didn’t include opening presents. For young children, both the birthday child and the other children, this can be very stressful. For many years I didn’t do present opening during the parties. Until age 7 I had at least some of the other mothers stay for the party.

I love to do circle time at parties. For toddlers, I would do a very simple circle, a few hand rhymes and Ring-Around-the-Rosy. For older children I would lead them in old fashioned play-party games and then dance the Hokey-Pokey. I always tried to include something for the season.

Where I presently live, I am lucky to have a mother who is a story-teller. When she is around, I ask her to prepare a story or two for the party. The children always love hearing her stories and this is a great way to calm everyone down towards the end of the party. She is so good at choosing the right story for the age of the children.

My children each have a sort of signature for their party. My oldest is born very close to Christmas so her special thing is gingerbread men. Depending on the age and number of children, they may roll out the dough, cut the cookies and I bake them and later they decorate. When they were smaller, I made the cookies in advance and they decorated them at the party. Usually this also served as their gift to take home. Sometimes they also get an ornament or a candy cane. One year we made little aprons with gingerbread people on them for each child but that year I had my mother and step-mother both helping me. My oldest is somewhat melancholic and finds large parties unpleasant. One year we invited some other girls and their mothers to a Christmas concert and then had dinner at our house afterwards. She loved this “party”.

My middle one is a May birthday so we usually have warm weather. We get out the old hand-crank ice cream churn and all the children help us make the ice cream for her party. In place of the traditional goody bags, one year I gave out sand buckets and shovels, bubbles and sidewalk chalk, another year it was beach towels, and one year I made bean bag frogs for all the children in her class (I definitely over did it that year. I was up at 3 a.m. sewing eyes on frogs!). One year we had a tea party with 2 other families’ girls and decorated straw hats with tulle, ribbons and silk flowers.

My son has had very low key parties, usually just the family – until recently he was shy around other people. Last year, when he turned 5, his birthday was on Thanksgiving. We had a very small party for him at the park with two other families and their children. It was a beautiful warm day (we live in Florida) and so we made felted balls in fall colors in a big vat of warm soapy water. I told his birthday story for the first time. It was lovely and very simple. The kids were of mixed ages so there was someone for everyone to play with and the park and playground provided plenty of entertainment so I didn’t have to do much. We also had our new puppy along for added fun (and chaos).

Whatever you do, consider carefully the age and temperament of your child. Also be true to yourself, if you don’t like it, don’t do it! Don’t hesitate to ask for help from friends and family. And remember that often, less really is more.

The Kids Are Not Alright. Stop Measuring Them All the Time.

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:11:11 GMT

As a psychologist, Madeline Levine has seen firsthand how children today are unraveling under pressure. In order to “succeed,” children take stimulants to study or cheat regularly to maintain their grades. They also resort to unhealthy ways of coping with anxiety such as substance abuse or self-mutilation. What the heck are we doing to our kids?

What’s the Big Idea?

We’re hyper-parenting them. At every level of their educational development we are subjecting them to strict measurements.

“We need to embrace a healthier and radically different way of thinking about success,” Levine argues in her book, Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. We celebrate what is obvious and measurable over everything else. This is debilitating to children in precisely the same way that it is debilitating to parents. It is debilitating to everyone.

Levine argues for a different approach which she calls “courageous parenting.” If your child hasn’t learned to read in kindergarten, don’t freak out. Development is a process, and it is doesn’t happen at the same pace for everyone. Have the courage to let your child experiment and play. We overload our children with homework, even though we know that about one hour is really the right amount.

What’s the Significance?

Teach Your Children Well offers savvy advice for courageous parenting at different stages of a child’s education. Therefore, the lessons span from “remembering to play” to “building independence” to “becoming an adult thinker.”

You can apply Levine’s underlying concept to your own adult life. Courageous parenting is related to the idea of permanent beta, that is, being a lifelong learner. You need to embrace the process of learning and developing skills, not just the outcome. And it is absolutely alright (in fact you should be encouraged) to go at your own pace.

Some thoughts from Janet Lansbury…

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:09:37 GMT

Our Children Choose Us

Many of us have the sense that the children in our care chose us. We feel it especially when a child’s needs tap into our weaknesses, we are forced to adjust, and that adjustment makes us change for the better. It is as if their souls zeroed in on us and decided, “That woman and that man, those future brothers and sisters need lessons I can provide. I’ll help them grow. I’ll be their teacher.”

I was reminded of this theory in my parenting classes yesterday. Two moms in separate classes were dealing with different parenting challenges. Both of them were stretching to interact with their children in a way that did not come easily.

One of these moms, Jenny, admits that it is hard for her to project the authority that her son Dylan needs. She struggles to give him firm boundaries and speak to him with a definitive tone in her voice. It would be simpler, of course, if toddlers said to parents, “Please tell me “No!” or “Stop me!” or “Let me know you’re in charge!” Instead, they ask for limits by testing us or acting out, and then cry when limits are set. They need to know that even though they cry, parents will hold the line and not cave. A parent who is not inclined to be assertive, or worries about being too strict, has obstacles to overcome.

Dylan is Jenny’s lovable obstacle incarnate. He is a jolly boy with a mischievous sense of humor, kind to other children when he is not distracted by his voracious need to test. Jenny understands that being a loving mom means also being an authority figure, but because she is not the assertive type, putting that into action is intensely challenging. I know from experience that overcoming this hurdle will bring Jenny personal satisfaction and a boost in self-confidence. At the end of class Jenny and I reflected on the irony of this mother/ son match, and the positive changes Dylan is forcing her to make.

Rebecca is a smart, together mom who adores her 15 month old son Nicholas. Nicholas is having a difficult time adjusting to my class. Although he is amazingly focused and detail oriented when he plays — loves to spin large plastic beads and other objects as if they were tops — he cries every time he enters the classroom and then periodically throughout the 90 minutes. Rebecca was nervous when she first came to the class and now believes her son reacted to her tension. Nicholas is a sensitive boy, and even though Rebecca is working on relaxing in class, she still has trepidation, and he picks up on it. If mom’s nervous, there is something to worry about.

I talked to Rebecca about letting go of all expectations. Rather than prepping Nicholas for class, trying to make it work, I encouraged her to slow down, relax, and tell herself that if he cried in her arms throughout the entire class, it would be okay with her. Rebecca admitted with a smile that she is a ‘doer’ and a ‘fixer’, and ‘letting go’ did not come easily. And, once again, the subject of ‘being given the child we need’ was discussed.

I am more a Jenny than a Rebecca. I had to dig deep to provide the authority my first daughter needed. It was a struggle not to give in to her tears and her assertive, persuasive, commanding presence. And this is at 20 months old! At seventeen, she still has a way of making me feel I’ve let her down when she asks for the moon so convincingly and I only have stars. But I have never for one moment been ungrateful for her decision to be my baby. She is my pride and joy. She made me grow so much.

When my daughter was 3, my husband and I talked about having another child. “You want another baby? But that was so hard for you!” he said. After a pause I answered, “I know. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it again.” I was open to another hard lesson, if I was lucky enough to be chosen.

Celebrating Birthdays in the Acorn Nursery

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:07:32 GMT

by Mia Reed, Acorn Nursery Teacher

As I sit here sewing gold trim onto a beautiful hand dyed blue silk, I ponder the gifts that the recipient of this particular birthday cape has brought with him. I think of the child in question, remembering moments we have shared at school, consoling tears, comforting after a fall in the grass, looking at birds in the sky, laughing together over silly words, watching proudly as they master a task. I think of the family. I think of the love they have for their child to bring him or her to us. I think of conversations we’ve had, chit chatting at festivals and potlucks.

Birthdays are favorite moments in the Acorn Nursery for me. There is so much love in the room as we gather in our circle to tell the birthday child’s story. Leading the child by the hand to their parents, singing our special song, “in Heaven shines a golden star, an Angel led her from afar, from Heaven high below to Earth… and led her to her House of Birth”. Some children get shy and hide behind my legs, others run ahead with joy. The teacher tells the story of the Little Angel and the Big Angel up in the Heavens, doing good work together, work that results in gifts that the Little Angel tucks into their back pack for when they will travel down to Earth. There’s a part in the story that I find so beautiful, that tells of the Little Angel handing their wings to the Big Angel for safe keeping upon their return…

As the birthday celebration goes on, I watch as the candles get lit, I watch the child open their gift, I watch as each child hands over their chosen treasure, and my heart is filled with love and joy.

And then to top it all off, there’s whipped cream : )

Winter, winter, winter…. these acorns make it fun!

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:07:32 GMT

Winter!

A beautiful reflection of a child’s days at Acorn School by an alumni parent.

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:02:01 GMT

written by Linda Park for the Hearts Speak blog. Thank you!

Week in and week out, the rhythms at my daughter’s pre-school and kindergarten program stayed essentially the same. It was always porridge on Mondays, rice on Tuesdays, bread on Wednesdays, and soup on Thursdays (no school on Fridays). Painting was always on Rice Day. And, Outdoor Adventure was always after lunch. This was our rhythm for over three years. Some friends have understandably asked me, “But isn’t your child getting bored?”

It had crossed my mind. Other than the morning circle time, I knew that the majority of my daughter’s day was engaged in free play and not a lot more. Another popular kindergarten in the area offered Spanish and French classes, yoga for children, gymnastics, jazz and tap dance, painting, pottery, and singing, just to name a few of the electives. On a tour of the center, I marveled at the program’s extensive selection of lessons and asked if this meant that they had a large number of adjunct teachers. It was then explained to me that all those additional classes were provided through videos – and that the school did not give the children any media except for these “educational videos” which were described as a great way to expose the children to a wide range of learning.

At home, I tried to carefully observe my daughter for any signs in a loss of interest or the need for something more, like maybe violin or badminton lessons? I wasn’t sure what I was looking for outwardly, but I thought whatever signs that might manifest, it would probably stand out in some way. So, I observed as carefully as I could and observed for over three years.

What I saw was a child who was deeply engaged in her world. Every afternoon, the older children including my daughter would go on an outdoor adventure with the teacher. My daughter loved these outings and, arguably, she looked forward to it more than her all-time favorite snack of freshly-baked-bread-slathered-with-butter-AND-apple-butter-on-Bread-Day.

During Outdoor Adventure, the children discovered all kinds of treasures in the creek-bed. They learned some herbal first aid when my daughter got stung by a bee and the teacher plucked wild plantain to address the sting. They took pleasure in tasting tiny drops of nectar from honeysuckle flowers and finding onion grass to add to their soup. Inspiring acts of bravery and quick-thinking became an oft-repeated story, such as the time Jack, literally, went out on a limb to rescue a friend’s hat that blew into the rushing stream. There were times of tears when Lucy got scared while crossing the big log and all the children quietly gave her their encouragement, and so on. Daily surprises and adventures presented themselves in the context of the same walk, same creek, and the same teacher.

What I was observing was more than just the learning associated with knowing things. Every day, through the familiar, my daughter was deepening her feeling of her experiences. She was learning through her head and her heart, and growing a sense of love for the world around her. Cultivating this love was the teacher-gardener.

In my daughter’s third and final year at the school, the teacher asked me to consider a picture of “ripeness” in terms of our children. I kept thinking of the bananas and avocados in the store that are harvested too early and sometimes go from under-ripe to black. Or the tomatoes that we keep in brown paper bags to ripen on the counter. This was in contrast to the taste and goodness of juicy berries right off the bush, peas pulled from the vine or apples picked off the branch. It was a fair question: in this day and age, how do we cultivate ripeness in our children?

A slow and deep transformation was unfolding at this school, in the community, and within my daughter. This change was rooted in the very earth of the teacher’s perennial “garden.” The teacher’s gentle guidance and daily attention was the nourishment for the children’s growth and connection with their physical and social environment. The warmth of the teacher’s own beingresonated and extended to the health and bounty in each of the children. A bountifulness that, I firmly believe, is generative towards our future.

Simple pleasures….

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 17:00:31 GMT

Fall brings memories of grade school and the smell of new school supplies.

There are no traditional school supplies to get yet for Finn, but we did go shopping for some new rain gear, which he enjoyed trying out in the store a day or two before his first day of kindergarten.

“I have to see if I can run in it!” he said, taking off across the store.“And I might lay on the ground so I better test that out,” he said, lying down on the floor and rolling around. Thankfully there were few customers in the store at the time.

On the first day of school, he walked gingerly onto the grounds holding onto my hand, then tightening his grip when he sensed it was time for me to go. I looked around at the other parents, some making the separation easily, others not. Last year we had a few difficult dropoffs.

I wondered if this would be one. Then a couple of his friends came running up, asking Finn to come play. Suddenly I could barely get his attention enough to say goodbye. He gave me a kind of over-the-shoulder glance and off he went.

The next day, Erin took him to get his first professional haircut. I didn’t go, but she sent me pictures. He sat perfectly still and she said he was so serious. The change was dramatic. I’m still kind of mourning the wavy locks. He looks so much older and about an inch taller. “Who is this little man?” I thought.

While he was at school, l had begun working on a new painting. A few months ago, I sketched a peony on a canvas and it was just sitting on the easel. I guess the creative feeling in the fall air inspired me to add some color to it—and when Finn got home, he noticed it immediately.

“Hey Daddoo, you haven’t painted in a long time,” he said. “How come you haven’t painted?”

“I’ve been busy with other things,” I replied.

“I like it,” he said, pausing to looking at it. “Yeah. I like it… But where are the thorns?” he asked.

“It’s a peony,” I said

“Are you sure?! I think it’s a rose,” he said. Then he proceeded to show me where the thorns should go.

He’s only a few weeks away from turning five, so I’ve noticed an increase in his confidence and dexterity lately. I guess I can add “opinion” to that list as well.

Anyway, he’s right. Whatever. I have artistic license. It’s a rose peony.

I’m happy to see Finn take changes in stride. Tonight he asked if he could go to school “a hundred times a week.” That’s a desire that I’m pretty sure will change as he gets older. But the tinge of excitement and possibility mixed with the cooling temperatures will likely stick around for the duration, if he’s lucky. And I think he is. Even if he is a little opinionated.

David Dewitt is an artist, blogger, and painter who lives with his family in the Rondout Valley. For more, visit daviddewitt.com.

What’s the Alternative? Acorn School for one…

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 16:59:01 GMT

If Academics-Focused Preschool Is “Crushing Our Kids,”

What’s the Alternative?

The education world exploded this weekend with the Atlantic’s publication of Erika Christakis’ “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids,” adapted from the early-childhood expert’s soon-to-be published book The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups. Christakis’ article describes a recently (and radically) altered society where, instead of staying home with mom, “[n]early three-quarters of American 4-year-olds are now in some kind of nonfamily care.” And instead of discussing the sound of crunching leaves and exploring the texture of sand, these young kids are bombarded by what Christakis describes in the opening paragraph as:

a print-rich environment, every surface festooned with alphabet charts, bar graphs, word walls, instructional posters, classroom rules, calendars, schedules, and motivational platitudes—few of which a 4-year-old can “decode,” the contemporary word for what used to be known as reading.

Christakis then goes into distressing detail about the pitfalls of this “new scientific focus on the cognitive potential of the early years”: “[N]ow that kindergarten serves as a gatekeeper, not a welcome mat, to elementary school, concerns about school preparedness kick in earlier and earlier,” she writes. This obsession with “school readiness” leads to an intense pressure for kids to be reading by the end of kindergarten; those who can’t do so increasingly “flunk” kindergarten—an unheard-of notion in my youth.

But the crux of Christakis’ article compellingly streamlines an argument that many of us have seen more and more evidence of in recent years, which is that inculcating kids with hardcore academics at too young an age may ultimately do more harm than good. Like that Tennessee preschool study that got so much attention earlier this fall, which concluded that many preschool attendees had lost whatever gains they’d made in early childhood by first grade, more and more studies are suggesting that kids subject to the “academic takeover” of early learning tend to lose their enthusiasm for school earlier than their peers.

I took great interest in this article because, among other reasons, I am the parent of small children in Washington, D.C., which comes as close to offering universal pre-K—available in many neighborhoods not just at age 4 but 3—as any municipality in the country. And I mostly feel very, very lucky to be here at this time in my kids’ lives. Certainly from a pocketbook perspective, preschool access is life-alteringly great—asI’ve written elsewhere, the availability of high-quality preschool at age 3 played a not-insubstantial role in our financial calculus to go for child No. 2.

And the program my oldest child attended was wonderful in most respects, with lots of sensory time and outdoor play and socialization and art—and in an integrated setting hard to find later in life. But if, when my son was in PK3, I felt proud that his teacher pulled him and two other kids from nap to practice reading (what a young genius I’d incubated!), I disliked, in PK4, that my iPad-deprived child would ignore the boxes of blocks and Legos all over the classroom and beeline to one of its four computers to play “math literacy” games for the first hour of the day.

And I got downright spooked when I attended a “kindergarten preview” where the teachers told us that we could kiss the Reggio Emilia–inspired fun and games of preschool goodbye. Kindergarten was serious business: We could expect at least 30 minutes of homework every night, in math and English. Around that same time, on a snowy day while his sister was napping, I asked my son what he wanted to do and he shrugged: “Maybe you could print out some phonics worksheets for me?” When, a few months later, we lotteried into a school with a play-based kindergarten, we took the spot.

Now, at 6½, my son, at a bilingual school that seemed (but might not turn out to be) less assessment-driven than the achievement gap-obsessed school we left, is what his teachers call a “strong reader” in both English and Spanish. But does he like reading? The jury’s still out on that one. Maybe it’s just that he’s equal parts defiant and hyperactive, but I don’t remember my mother asking me to read at his age; I remember doing it because I identified so deeply with Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

“You’re supposed to read this book your teacher sent home,” I’ll say.

“But it’s booooring!” he’ll cry.

“Fine,” I’ll give in, “let’s do handwriting instead.”

Christakis offers a compelling prescription of the problem: We are drilling kids with too much academic information at too young an age. The solution, she says, is higher-quality programs where “adults are building relationships with the children and paying close attention to their thought processes and, by extension, their communication,” where the focus is “not just on vocabulary and reading, but on talking and listening.”

Rather than direct children in predetermined tasks, preschool teachers should use “sophisticated vocabulary” to enable open-ended, child-directed explorations. The relationship between teacher and child is far more important than whatever flavor-of-the-month curriculum the district is currently promoting. Christakis writes:

Conversation is gold. It’s the most efficient early-learning system we have. And it’s far more valuable than most of the reading-skills curricula we have been implementing: One meta-analysis of 13 early-childhood literacy programs “failed to find any evidence of effects on language or print-based outcomes.” Take a moment to digest that devastating conclusion.

But, in a world where so many mothers work outside the home, is academic preschool really worse than the alternative? Leaving kids home with grandma and a TV blaring all day, or sending them to day care centers where the teachers are almost always less credentialed and less educated than public-school teachers. Given that a shocking 2 out of 5 U.S. kids live in poverty, I still can’t help but feel that the wrong kind of preschool is superior to none at all.

As for my own kids, I’m pleased to learn that the private preschool that my 3-year-old currently attends three mornings a week meets Christakis’ description of an ideal early-learning environment. She writes:

They provide ample opportunities for young children to use and hear complex, interactive language; their curriculum supports a wide range of school-readiness goals that include social and emotional skills and active learning; they encourage meaningful family involvement; and they have knowledgeable and well-qualified teachers.

But the school also costs money, and it requires either a backup child-care system for the other hours of the day, or a parent who doesn’t work. It requires, too, extensive teacher vetting and training that isn’t feasible for many publicly funded programs. So how, in our heterogeneous, high-poverty country, can we get our kids to be more like the “joyful, illiterate kindergartners of Finland”? I’ll be reading Christakis’ book for more concrete answers.

Laura Moser writes about education for Slate‘s Schooled blog. Follow her on Twitter.

Our new classroom arrives!

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 16:47:51 GMT

Deep gratitude to the 5 helpers who worked tirelessly and cheerfully in 98 degree weather today… what a group! Thomas, Heath, Marc, Karsten & Eddie, thank you for helping to dismantle and move Acorn School‘s new classroom… in 98 degree heat and managed to get all packed before the rain! The best. Period. This second yurt will house our new Forest Kindergarten. So excited!

Happy Spring days at Acorn School…

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 16:45:34 GMT

Spring!

….or…. you can just come to Acorn School!

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:54:27 GMT

It’s not about imparting specific bits of knowledge, but about nurturing people – helping them develop their natural talents and abilities.It’s something that applies from cradle-to-grave – anyone in Denmark working with young children, or the mentally ill, or the elderly, requires a university degree in pedagogy.Along with the rigorous formal training, pedagogues enjoy a status that our own childcare and aged care workers don’t seem to enjoy.But what does this mean in practice? In Johan’s case it means fostering his children’s powers of observation, their physical strength, balance and coordination, their compassion and their ability to cooperate – all with the lightest of touches.Kids Gone Wild No one would ever let Johan Laigaard run a kindergarten in Australia.

At the one he runs in Denmark, two boys swing large sticks over their heads as they whack a rotten log; another shimmies up a tall tree that bends in the breeze blowing off the nearby fjord; and others run wild in the woods.

There are no fences, and when I look around for someone to intervene, I don’t see any adults either.

There aren’t many kindergartens where this kind of behaviour would be encouraged.

If you’re the kind of parent who keeps a close eye on your kids in the playground, Denmark’s forest kindergarten will come as a rude shock – they do things differently here, as you’ll see in my story on Dateline.

Johan says he’s watching from a distance. So what happens if he thinks the children are doing something dangerous?

“I sometimes close my eyes, because I know I have to stop something, but I can also stand and watch it a little bit first because I think it’s exciting. And I can understand why they do it,” he says.

The children are taught to see knives as a tool, not a weapon.

And what do the parents think if they see their kids swaying precariously ten metres off the ground?

“They think, ‘Oh no.’ But we have taught them – the most dangerous thing you can do is shout at [the children].”

Johan’s approach to child safety sounds dangerously devil-may-care, but it’s not what it seems. Children here learn to take small risks when they’re very young and as they grow in confidence, they take bigger risks.

Johan trusts them – and their parents trust him. And given the fact that in 17 years no one’s ever been seriously injured through careless play, the trust doesn’t seem misplaced.

The children are taught when it’s safe to play by the water, but also when it’s not.

Whether he’s throwing rocks into the fjord with a bunch of enthusiastic three year-olds, or abseiling down a muddy slope with some determined five year-olds, Johan clearly gets a vicarious buzz from their juvenile thrill-seeking.

“It’s not dangerous in my opinion. And if you don’t get a little bit of danger, what’s life worth living? Everybody needs a little bit of kick sometimes.”

I suspect Johan also gets a buzz from shocking overseas visitors. When I translate the footage I shot over three days in his kindergarten in Skive, I realise that he’s actually got a very clear idea of what’s dangerous, and when he needs to lay down boundaries.

Johan warns the children about the potential dangers of uprooted trees before allowing them to play.

On one hike through the woods, Johan talks to the kids about a large tree uprooted in a recent storm, and warns them about its root ball.

“You’re never allowed to crawl under such a big pile of soil under a tree. Because all of a sudden, the tree can break,” he tells them. “And then the soil falls back. And soil is so heavy you’ll never get out of it again. So never go under a gap like this. Don’t go under it because you can be injured.”

Are forest kindergartens a good idea?Dateline’s story on Denmark’s forest kindergartens has had a huge response, but is being able to run free in the forests a good way for children to learn? Or should there be greater concern for their safety?

The following day, out foraging for Christmas decorations, Johan notices a boy waving around a long branch and gently intervenes.

“David, take care of the stick, you’ll hit our faces. You’re welcome to have it but you must look after it. Hold it up in the air so you don’t hit us. Point to the trees with it. Do you want me to break it so you only have a smaller stick and it will be easier to look after?”

“Yes,” replies David.

“I’ll help you break it. I’ll just make a stick so you can walk with it. Are you ready? That’s better. Isn’t it easier to walk with this one?”

“Sometimes they get a little accident, but that’s the way to learn,” Johan says. (Photo: Marianne Borowiec)

Johan makes it look easy, but there’s a great deal of skill involved in interactions like this – and it’s that skill, far more than the seemingly reckless play, that still impresses me several weeks later.At the heart of what makes Danish kindergartens so special is one word – pedagogy. To my ears it’s an ugly word and one I hoped my interviewees would avoid. It sounded like a very academic way of talking about the process of teaching.

But in Denmark, and in many other parts of Europe, ‘pedagogy’ is an everyday word for something that’s much more holistic than ‘teaching’.

It’s not about imparting specific bits of knowledge, but about nurturing people – helping them develop their natural talents and abilities.

It’s something that applies from cradle-to-grave – anyone in Denmark working with young children, or the mentally ill, or the elderly, requires a university degree in pedagogy.

Along with the rigorous formal training, pedagogues enjoy a status that our own childcare and aged care workers don’t seem to enjoy.

But what does this mean in practice? In Johan’s case it means fostering his children’s powers of observation, their physical strength, balance and coordination, their compassion and their ability to cooperate – all with the lightest of touches.

Jane Williams-Siegfredsen (right) with Bitten Pedersen, who runs a forest kindergarten outside of Viborg in Denmark. (Photo: Marianne Borowiec)

As Jane Williams-Siegfredsen, the author of a book on Danish forest kindergartens, puts it: “There’s this thing where the pedagogue needs to stand back sometimes and not always jump in and help the child. They need to let the child overcome problems themselves. We learn so much more from doing that.”

Comment: ‘It’s important for children to learn to be cold, wet, and survive that’Teacher Jane Williams-Siegfredsen was at first shocked and fascinated by Denmark’s forest kindergartens. Now she’s striving to give more children that freedom.

Observing Johan, he often manages to teach children a lot without ever setting out to teach them anything at all.

One boy’s spontaneous question about worms leads to a discussion about habitat, predators and prey, and eventually ends with the boy observing that mice enjoy eating pancakes. Curiosity satisfied, he’s off to jump in a puddle.

The children at the forest kindergarten have no worries about getting wet and muddy! (Photo: Marianne Borowiec)

Most impressive of all, Johan manages their behaviour without criticism or judgement and without ever raising his voice. And he does it in the forest, having fun.

“When I started to take the education as a pedagogue I didn’t really know there were such places,” he tells Amos. “But when I tried it, it was like I was a child – I could use my childhood in the work.

“And I think that is important, that you like what you are doing. The children can see if you don’t like it. Then it’s not fun for them either. So if I have fun, they have fun, so we enjoy it together.”

What a pity no one would let Johan Laigaard run a kindergarten in Australia.

Lessons that resonate into adult life and even old age….

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:37:44 GMT

In this short film Waldorf teacher Susan Stevenson discusses how Waldorf Education prepares students to enter the world with confidence and awareness, lessons that resonate into adult life and even old age.Thank you to the

Waldorf School of Philadelphia for this thoughtful post.

Science and Math Curriculum in Waldorf Education

There is a movement afoot to change STEM to STEAM.The relation between art, music, science and mathematics is clear; music and math are inseparable, as Pythagoras first told us, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” The ultimate representation of art, as both science and math, is

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

In fact, the STEM behind art can be seen in any geometric representation or any attempt to create

a three dimensional world on a two dimensional canvas

Art brings a much needed depth and beauty to the world of STEM.

Which is why Waldorf Education presents its students with STEAM — not to soften or bring “fun” to an unfun topic — but to bring realism and soul to our growing world of bits, dynamic loads and relativity. Artistic and Scientific creativity are not very different. If one were to describe an upcoming class topic by mentioning the words — space, time, dimension, perspective and consciousness — it is unclear if the context of class will be physics or art. This reality is what shapes the Waldorf Math and Science curriculum.

In Waldorf Education, everyday life and beauty are brought into science, engineering, and math.

Science: The methodology for science instruction in Waldorf Education is based on observation and Socratic Inquiry. Students of all ages are immersed in observation and manipulatives, experienced during regular nature walks, gardening, cooking, form drawing and experimentation, to name only a few. Waldorf teachers begin not by lecturing on rules and formulas, but by showing those rules in action through experiments, the natural world, art and music. These real world examples and applications are used to then guide students to use socratic inquiry and observation to connect logical parts to the whole, which helps them deeply understand the science within our world.

Technology: While some believe Waldorf schools are anti-technology, that is actually not the case. We simply believe Technology Can Wait until High School, at which point it can be used as a tool — for research, creation and construction. We also follow the science on the topic. While initial results for tech in the classroom were hopeful, full implementation and scientific study of these efforts are not positive or downright dismal. However, science does indicate that movement, art, music, and note taking by hand, are proven to better support thinking.

Engineering: Waldorf students build and create, every day, using engineering concepts. Our third grade class, for example, spends main lesson time on the drawing and configuration, measuring and implementing a structural creation for the school. Labeled the “building project,” it is just one example of how engineering is placed into the curriculum. Older students also design and build their own chairs, by hand, in woodworking. Younger children sew and knit forms which require many engineering and geometrical concepts. And, of course, geometric and other forms of drawing and art all support the logic needed to make engineering concepts reality.

Art: As you can see, the “A” exists everywhere within the STEM narrative at Waldorf schools. It can be taught separately and achieve positive results, but its incorporation within each of these other STEM disciplines helps tie meaning, beauty and practicality into all the other subjects. Music brings soul to math, art brings life to geometry, woodwork brings purpose to engineering, and cooking what you grow in the garden brings applicable relevance to science.

Math: When the students are young, math curriculum is introduced through story, movement, recitation, and rhythm. Manipulatives make concepts like division (dividing gems among classmate) and fractions (slicing pizza for all) concrete realities — forever silencing the “when will I use this?” mantra of the bored student. All age students, from very young to adolescence, experience daily musical training, which studies show aids the learning of abstract mathematical concepts. Older students, move from storytelling in math to story problems, using practical applications in mathematics for things like cooking, music, geometric drawing, and mathematics in art.

Does this methodology work?

A California State University Study asks this very question and takes an honest look at all facets of Waldorf and Public School science curriculum. The results?

“Waldorf students scientific reasoning and problem solving skills appear to be at or slightly above those of their counterparts in mainstream educational settings.”

How do our students fare internationally on assessments? During the TIMSS assessment, “Waldorf 8th grade students outperformed U.S. students and international students in the category of correct answers (98% vs. 90% and 92%) and in providing a correct description and interpretation of the solution (98% vs. 81% and 88%).”

Follow the science, follow the soul, and one will quickly conclude the STEM needs to be STEAM in order to effectively reach our students and inspire them to create and problem solve in our modern world.

Letters and Numbers

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:29:56 GMT

“Naming letters and numbers is superficial and almost irrelevant in relation to the capacities we want to help children develop”

“The most important competencies in young children can’t be tested—we all know this…”

How ‘twisted’ early childhood education has become — from a child development expert

By Valerie Strauss

Nancy Carlsson-Paige is an early childhood development expert who has been at the forefront of the debate on how best to educate — and not educate — the youngest students. She is a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Ma., where she taught teachers for more than 30 years and was a founder of the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools. She is also a founding member of a nonprofit called Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early childhood education and advocates for sane policies for young children.

Carlsson-Paige is author of “Taking Back Childhood.” The mother of two artist sons, Matt and Kyle Damon, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Legacy Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps for work over several decades on behalf of children and families. She was just given the Deborah Meier award by the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

In her speech accepting the award (named after the renowned educator Deborah Meier), Carlsson-Paige describes what has happened in the world of early childhood education in the current era of high-stakes testing, saying, “Never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today.” Here’s the speech, which I am publishing with permission:

Thank you FairTest for this Deborah Meier Hero in Education Award. FairTest does such great advocacy and education around fair and just testing practices. This award carries the name of one of my heroes in education, Deborah Meier—she’s a force for justice and democracy in education. I hope that every time this award is given, it will allow us to once again pay tribute to Deb. Also, I feel privileged to be accepting this honor alongside Lani Guinier.

When I was invited to be here tonight, I thought about the many people who work for justice and equity in education who could also be standing here. So I am thinking of all of them now and I accept this award on their behalf — all the educators dedicated to children and what’s fair and best for them.

It’s wonderful to see all of you here — so many family and friends, comrades in this struggle to reclaim excellent public education for all – not just some – of our children.

I have loved my life’s work – teaching teachers about how young children think, how they learn, how they develop socially, emotionally, morally. I’ve been fascinated with the theories and science of my field and seeing it expressed in the actions and the play of children.

So never in my wildest dreams could I have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today.

Where education policies that do not reflect what we know about how young children learn could be mandated and followed. We have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively — they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. But in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-K at the age of 4 are expected to learn through “rigorous instruction.”

And never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that we would have to defend children’s right to play.

Play is the primary engine of human growth; it’s universal – as much as walking and talking. Play is the way children build ideas and how they make sense of their experience and feel safe. Just look at all the math concepts at work in the intricate buildings of kindergartners. Or watch a 4-year-old put on a cape and pretend to be a superhero after witnessing some scary event.

But play is disappearing from classrooms. Even though we know play is learning for young kids, we are seeing it shoved aside to make room for academic instruction and “rigor.”

I could not have foreseen in my wildest dreams that we would have to fight for classrooms for young kids that are developmentally appropriate. Instead of active, hands-on learning, children now sit in chairs for far too much time getting drilled on letters and numbers. Stress levels are up among young kids. Parents and teachers tell me: children worry that they don’t know the right answers; they have nightmares, they pull out their eyelashes, they cry because they don’t want to go to school. Some people call this child abuse and I can’t disagree.

I could not have foreseen in my wildest dreams that we would be up against pressure to test and assess young kids throughout the year often in great excess — often administering multiple tests to children in kindergarten and even pre-K. Now, when young children start school, they often spend their first days not getting to know their classroom and making friends. They spend their first days getting tested. Here are words from one mother as this school year began:

“My daughter’s first day of kindergarten — her very first introduction to elementary school — consisted almost entirely of assessment. She was due at school at 9:30, and I picked her up at 11:45. In between, she was assessed by five different teachers, each a stranger, asking her to perform some task.

“By the time I picked her up, she did not want to talk about what she had done in school, but she did say that she did not want to go back. She did not know the teachers’ names. She did not make any friends. Later that afternoon, as she played with her animals in her room, I overheard her drilling them on their numbers and letters.”

The most important competencies in young children can’t be tested—we all know this. Naming letters and numbers is superficial and almost irrelevant in relation to the capacities we want to help children develop: self-regulation, problem solving ability, social and emotional competence, imagination, initiative, curiosity, original thinking — these capacities make or break success in school and life and they can’t be reduced to numbers.

Yet these days, all the money and resources, the time dedicated to professional development, they go to tooling teachers up to use the required assessments. Somehow the data gleaned from these tests is supposed to be more valid than a teacher’s own ability to observe children and understand their skills in the context of their whole development in the classroom.

The first time I saw for myself what was becoming of many of the nation’s early childhood classrooms was when I visited a program in a low-income community in north Miami. Most of the children were on free- and reduced-price lunch.

There were 10 classrooms – kindergarten and pre-K. The program’s funding depended on test scores, so — no surprise — teachers taught to the test. Kids who got low scores, I was told, got extra drills in reading and math and didn’t get to go to art. They used a computer program to teach 4- and 5-year-olds how to “bubble.” One teacher complained to me that some children go outside the lines.

In one of the kindergartens I visited, the walls were barren and so was the whole room. The teacher was testing one little boy at a computer at the side of the room. There was no classroom aide. The other children were sitting at tables copying words from the chalk board. The words were: “No talking. Sit in your seat. Hands to Yourself.”

The teacher kept shouting at them from her testing corner: Be quiet! No talking!

Most of the children looked scared or disengaged, and one little boy was sitting alone. He was quietly crying. I will never forget how these children looked or how it felt to watch them, I would say, suffering in this context that was such a profound mismatch with their needs.

It’s in low-income, under-resourced communities like this one where children are most subjected to heavy doses of teacher-led drills and tests. Not like in wealthier suburbs where kids have the opportunity to go to early childhood programs that have play, the arts, and project-based learning. It’s poverty — the elephant in the room — that is the root cause of this disparity.

A few months ago, I was alarmed to read a report from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights showing that more than 8,000 children from public preschools across the country were suspended at least once in a school year, many more than once. First of all, who suspends a preschooler? Why and for what? The very concept is bizarre and awful. But 8,000? And then to keep reading the report to see that a disproportionate number of those suspended preschoolers were low income, black boys.

There is a connection, I know, between these suspensions and ed reform policies: Children in low-income communities are enduring play deficient classrooms where they get heavy doses of direct teaching and testing. They have to sit still, be quiet in their seats and comply. Many young children can’t do this and none should have to.

I came home from that visit to the classrooms in North Miami in despair. But fortunately, the despair turned quickly to organizing. With other educators we started our nonprofit Defending the Early Years. We have terrific early childhood leaders with us (some are here tonight: Deb Meier, Geralyn McLaughlin, Diane Levin and Ayla Gavins). We speak in a unified voice for young children.

We publish reports, write op eds, make videos and send them out on YouTube, we speak and do interviews every chance we get.

We’ve done it all on a shoestring. It’s almost comical: The Gates Foundation has spent more than $200 million just to promote the Common Core. Our budget at Defending the Early Years is .006 percent of that.

We collaborate with other organizations. FairTest has been so helpful to us. And we also collaborate with –Network for Public Education, United Opt Out, many parent groups, Citizens for Public Schools, Badass Teachers, Busted Pencils Radio, Save Our Schools, Alliance for Childhood and ECE PolicyWorks —There’s a powerful network out there – of educators, parents and students — and we see the difference we are making.

We all share a common vision: Education is a human right and every child deserves one. An excellent, free education where learning is meaningful – with arts, play, engaging projects, and the chance to learn citizenship skills so that children can one day participate — actively and consciously – in this increasingly fragile democracy.

– Valerie Strauss covers education and runs The Answer Sheet blog.

Acorn Potato & Chestnut Harvest Festival!

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:24:06 GMT

Starting School and Saying Goodbye…

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:22:00 GMT

Note: Thanks to Faith Collins of Joyful Toddlers for permission to repost this article. The original article can be viewed here. Faith Collins is a LifeWaysgrad the founder of Joyful Toddlers, offering workshops, Tele-Class and advice on increasing your enjoyment of the young children in your life. She was the director of Rainbow Bridge, a Representative LifeWays center, until she moved to London, England with her husband.

Dear Miss Faith,

My little guy is starting daycare and while I’m sure that it will be a wonderful, loving place for him, I am dreading dropping him off and saying goodbye. We have had a hard time with babysitters lately. Do you have any advice for helping it go smoothly?

Dear Mama,

Yes! I have helped many families adjust to saying goodbye for the first time, and what I’ve seen is this: the thing that makes the most difference for a child is the parent’s attitude. When a parent feels bad that a child is crying, and lingers as a result, children often continue crying for a long time, even after the parent has managed to drag herself away. I think that when a parent does this, the message she is sending is, “I don’t want to leave you here, but I have to.” The way the child interprets this is, “Mom doesn’t want to leave me here; I AM NOT SAFE HERE.” The biggest gift you can give your child is to say, with every ounce of your being, “I am leaving you in the best of hands.” You don’t have to say this out loud; transmit it through your actions, through your attitude. This doesn’t mean that you don’t acknowledge his feelings: it’s hard to watch you leave! You can be compassionate without feeling guilty for causing the grief. “I know that saying goodbye is hard, AND I know that you’ll have a good time while I’m gone. I love you so much, and I am leaving you in the best of hands.”

But what if I AM feeling guilty? It is heart-wrenching to walk away when my little one is crying his heart out and reaching out to me.

It seems like one more hug could only help, right? But no. Remember, you know that this is going to be a wonderful, loving place for him. You told me that in your letter. That’s why you chose this place. So, if that is true, then being there won’t be a hardship for him; it’s only the process of watching you leave that is hard. In that case, the longer you draw out the process of leaving, the longer you’re drawing out his feelings of unhappiness. Be loving, and firm in your knowledge that this is the best choice for your family, and say goodbye. If you go out to your car and cry, that’s OK. This is a big transition for both of you. But don’t let those guilty feelings make your son’s separation even harder than it needs to be. (One thing that can help is to ask your caretaker to call you if he hasn’t stopped crying after a certain amount of time.)

I tried doing what you said, but he runs after me and latches onto my legs, so the caretaker has to pull him off of me. That feels terrible!

I bet that feels terrible for everyone! It sounds like your little guy may feel safer with a ‘hand-off.’ Hold him while you’re coming in, and when it’s time to go, put him into the arms of his caretaker. Then blow a kiss and wave goodbye. It’s important that you’re handing him over to the caretaker, so that she doesn’t have to be in the position of pulling him away from you. Remember, you want to be giving your son the message that you are making a good decision and he will be safe here.

On the first day, drop-off was OK, but it seems like it’s getting worse and worse.

My experience is that the first day is often deceptively easy, because your child doesn’t know what’s in store. Then days two, three and four get worse and worse, as he starts to realize that this is a regular thing! But by day five he has started to bond with his caretaker, so it’s a little better, and day six is a little better still. Once that bond is established there may still be some crying, but he should be easily comforted by his caretaker after you leave. If your child is only going two days a week, this process might be a little bit slower, as it will take him more time to bond with someone he is not seeing as frequently.

So, know that learning to say goodbye is a process, and don’t lose faith! Continue letting him know that you are leaving him in the best of hands, and don’t draw out the process of saying goodbye. If your child is still really having a hard time after this period, make some time (not at drop-off!) to talk to your caretaker. How long does he cry after you leave? Is he bonding with her and with any of the other children? If he’s not bonding well, it may be that being in a big group is overwhelming for him still, and he’d do better with a sitter or a nanny at home. Many children are not ready to be in a group setting without mom until they are at least three years old. If it seems that he IS bonding with her, ask if there’s anything you could be doing differently, that would help his transition. She may well have some ideas.

Summer Camp begins with lots of mud, two bunnies and new friends

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:20:11 GMT

When children are playing alone on the green,

In comes the playmate that never was seen.

When children are happy and lonely and good,

The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.

Nobody heard him, and nobody saw,

His is a picture you never could draw,

But he’s sure to be present, abroad or at home,

When children are happy and playing alone.

He lies in the laurels, he runs on the grass,

He sings when you tinkle the musical glass;

Whene’er you are happy and cannot tell why,

The Friend of the Children is sure to be by!

He loves to be little, he hates to be big,

‘Tis he that inhabits the caves that you dig;

‘Tis he when you play with your soldiers of tin

That sides with the Frenchmen and never can win.

‘Tis he, when at night you go off to your bed,

Bids you go to sleep and not trouble your head;

For wherever they’re lying, in cupboard or shelf,

‘Tis he will take care of your playthings himself!

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Kids Learn Best Through Play, Play, Play!

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:18:32 GMT

Thank you NYTimes!

Sunday Review | OPINION

Let the Kids Learn Through Play

By DAVID KOHN MAY 16, 2015

TWENTY years ago, kids in preschool, kindergarten and even first and second grade spent much of their time playing: building with blocks, drawing or creating imaginary worlds, in their own heads or with classmates. But increasingly, these activities are being abandoned for the teacher-led, didactic instruction typically used in higher grades. In many schools, formal education now starts at age 4 or 5. Without this early start, the thinking goes, kids risk falling behind in crucial subjects such as reading and math, and may never catch up.

The idea seems obvious: Starting sooner means learning more; the early bird catches the worm.

But a growing group of scientists, education researchers and educators say there is little evidence that this approach improves long-term achievement; in fact, it may have the opposite effect, potentially slowing emotional and cognitive development, causing unnecessary stress and perhaps even souring kids’ desire to learn.

One expert I talked to recently, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., describes this trend as a “profound misunderstanding of how children learn.” She regularly tours schools, and sees younger students floundering to comprehend instruction: “I’ve seen it many, many times in many, many classrooms — kids being told to sit at a table and just copy letters. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s heartbreaking.”

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

In the United States, more academic early education has spread rapidly in the past decade. Programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have contributed to more testing and more teacher-directed instruction.

Another reason: the Common Core State Standards, a detailed set of educational guidelines meant to ensure that students reach certain benchmarks between kindergarten and 12th grade. Currently, 43 states and the District of Columbia have adopted both the math and language standards.

The shift toward didactic approaches is an attempt to solve two pressing problems.

By many measures, American educational achievement lags behind that of other countries; at the same time, millions of American students, many of them poor and from minority backgrounds, remain far below national norms. Advocates say that starting formal education earlier will help close these dual gaps.

But these moves, while well intentioned, are misguided. Several countries, including Finland and Estonia, don’t start compulsory education until the age of 7. In the most recent comparison of national educational levels, the Program for International Student Assessment, both countries ranked significantly higher than the United States on math, science and reading.

Of course, these countries are smaller, less unequal and less diverse than the United States. In such circumstances, education poses fewer challenges. It’s unlikely that starting school at 7 would work here: too many young kids, disadvantaged or otherwise, would probably end up watching hours of TV a day, not an activity that promotes future educational achievement. But the complexities of the task in this country don’t erase a fundamental fact that overly structured classrooms do not benefit many young children.

Some research indicates that early instruction in reading and other areas may help some students, but these boosts appear to be temporary. A 2009 study by Sebastian P. Suggate, an education researcher at Alanus University in Germany, looked at about 400,000 15-year-olds in more than 50 countries and found that early school entry provided no advantage. Another study by Dr. Suggate, published in 2012, looked at a group of 83 students over several years and found that those who started at age 5 had lower reading comprehension than those who began learning later.

Other research has found that early didactic instruction might actually worsen academic performance. Rebecca A. Marcon, a psychology professor at the University of North Florida, studied 343 children who had attended a preschool class that was “academically oriented,” one that encouraged “child initiated” learning, or one in between. She looked at the students’ performance several years later, in third and fourth grade, and found that by the end of the fourth grade those who had received more didactic instruction earned significantly lower grades than those who had been allowed more opportunities to learn through play. Children’s progress “may have been slowed by overly academic preschool experiences that introduced formalized learning experiences too early for most children’s developmental status,” Dr. Marcon wrote.

Nevertheless, many educators want to curtail play during school. “Play is often perceived as immature behavior that doesn’t achieve anything,” says David Whitebread, a psychologist at Cambridge University who has studied the topic for decades. “But it’s essential to their development. They need to learn to persevere, to control attention, to control emotions. Kids learn these things through playing.”

Over the past 20 years, scientists have come to understand much more about how children learn. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has spent his career studying how the human brain develops from birth through adolescence; he says most kids younger than 7 or 8 are better suited for active exploration than didactic explanation. “The trouble with over-structuring is that it discourages exploration,” he says.

Reading, in particular, can’t be rushed. It has been around for only about 6,000 years, so the ability to transform marks on paper into complex meaning is not pre-wired into the brain. It doesn’t develop “naturally,” as do other complex skills such as walking; it can be fostered, but not forced. Too often that’s what schools are trying to do now. This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t increase access to preschool, and improve early education for disadvantaged children. But the early education that kids get — whatever their socioeconomic background — should truly help their development. We must hope that those who make education policy will start paying attention to this science.

Winter joy at Acorn School.

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:13:55 GMT

Let it snow!

Come visit us at Acorn School.

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:04:57 GMT

Acorn School offers an exceptional mixed age nursery/kindergarten program designed for two to six-year olds led by Waldorf trained early childhood educator, Motria Shuhan.

In our warm, home-like atmosphere we cultivate a space for intelligent play, allowing the children to engage with the physical world and each other developing the essential basis for critical thinking, problem solving, and social interaction.

Journeying through the year we honor the seasons and celebrate festivals. The daily rhythm balances time spent indoors and out, restful times with active, and individual with group activities. This provides a nurturing and sustaining creative space, fostering self-confidence, physical health, and social intuition.

With song and story, literacy and linguistic capacity are strengthened, along with a sense of the beauty and expressiveness of language. Counting games and rhyme provide a solid basis for memory and mathematical skills. Concentration, small-muscle development, and hand-eye coordination are all skills significantly promoted through tasks such as baking, braiding, finger crocheting, sewing, modeling with beeswax, and watercolor painting. All these elements work together, creating not only a superior foundation for elementary school learning, but also a basis in areas such as artistic ability, ethical values, social awareness, resilience, and health.

Make an appointment to visit the school by contacting

Happy happy new year to all.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:21:22 GMT

May your year be filled with joy, peace, good health and excellent friends!

Shooting stars, climbing & playing and sharing a meal in our outdoor classroom

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:19:26 GMT

Preparing and flying Michaelmas stars with goldenrod & marigolds.

Acorn summer camp’s final week. a deep bow of gratitude…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:17:36 GMT

Thank you to all the families who brought their children to join us at Acorn School for summer camp this year! We had a wonderful time, made new friends and have made many timeless memories together.

A bow of gratitude to 3 very special friends, Mia Reed, Melanie Indelicato and Minka Wasylyk-Hrechniw for being most excellent and loving helpers throughout the 5 weeks. Thank you!

These are the things of summer…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:13:50 GMT

Wet felting treasure pouches, eating watermelon, hammering boats & sewing sails, eating snow peas out of our garden, rigging a pulley to the treehouse… these are the things that make up a week at Acorn Summer Camp. Thank you to Miss Minka Wasylyk for taking these beautiful photographs!

A Quiet Maker’s Revolution…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:12:28 GMT

In eighth grade, I almost failed wood shop class. In a full semester, the only project I completed was a lopsided, uneven cutting board that my mother faithfully used for years. Bless her.

“Come on, Papa,”the four-year-old says as she takes me by the hand. “Let’s go make some star sticks and May crowns.”She leads me to the front porch and carefully shows me how to make a star stick. “You make two of these while I gather flowers for the May crowns,”she says. “You let me know if you need me for anything, okay?”

A little stunned by her calm presence and command, I simply whisper “Okay”and continue weaving yarn around two sticks. As the star stick takes shape, I feel inexplicably happy.

By the time I reached teendom, it was clear I was not much of a maker, in the Bill Coperthwaite sense (http://circlein.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/a-day-with-bill-coperthwaite/). I can make poems. I can make books. I can make ideas fly. I can make believe quite well, thank you. But I lack the wits and skills to date to make a book shelf or chair or even a decent set of stone steps. Among the bushy Waldorfian fathers who tote tool belts instead of laptop cases, I can feel a wee small.

I grew up prejudiced against making things with hands, honestly, against vocational education. I don’t think I’m unique in that sense or what our educational system or economy or culture-at-large seems biased against.

So when a trusted friend several years ago told me that Waldorf schools don’t teach children how to read until they are nine or ten, I balked. When he convinced me I didn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Waldorfian who praises bee’s wax and shuns all printed matter, I leaned back in.

And I had remembered a few years earlier seeing another friend’s two boys who attended a Waldorf school in Woodstock. While I spoke with my friend in her kitchen, her 6-year-old and 9-year-old came waltzing through the kitchen sword fighting like Jedi masters. Not six minutes later, they sat quietly at a small table, holding balls of yarn.

“What are they doing?”I said.

“Knitting their socks,”my friend said.

I was enchanted.

But when any of us think about our children’s future, we make decisions on more than being enchanted with seemingly quaint practices.

Still, here’s what you and I know. Moving and using our hands helps us think. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago has a lab with her name devoted to cognition, linguistics, and education. Her TEDx Talk “What Our Hands Can Tell Us About Our Minds”is a brilliant primer. My favorite lines: “Our hands indicate who is ready to learn”and “Our gestures can change our minds.”

A group of scholars at the University of Westchester and the Edge Centre for Real-World Learning argue in “Bodies of Knowledge” that “Practical and vocational learning is no less intelligent than academic learning and every bit as worthy of our full admiration.”

You know this. You don’t need the references to confirm it. But what about your parents or in-laws? Or your friends who question your choices for your child’s education?

My 4-year-old’s grandmother, case in point. On one hand, she is an exquisite knitter and weaver. She spends two or more whole days with her granddaughter. They adore each other. The influence is evident. The other evening, the four-year-old and I tossed leaves in the water. When I suggested we make boats somehow, she ran to get her ball of yarn, tied the yarn strings to leaves, and floated them in the stream and pond like boat-kites she could reel back in. Again, I stood a little astonished as I watched her confidently tie knots and figure it all out on her own. She exhibited more resourcefulness and practical creative problem-solving than many of my 40-something clients.

Still, the grandmother frets about the four-year-old “getting behind”if she doesn’t enter a school where she learns math and reading sooner than later.

“Get behind what?”I asked.

“You know, the other kids.”

“So they can get into freshman comp?”I said. “I’ve taught freshman comp. She’s not getting behind.”I wanted to say so much more, about how she’s miles ahead already. I had become a “convert,”I thought.

The truth is now I admire if not envy carpenters, wood workers, weavers, knitters, and sculptors of all stripes, and I was hearing what philosopher-author Alain de Botton had said recently in an interview about his kids: “I hope they don’t become writers. I hope they don’t turn to books too soon. We turn to books as kids because we’re anxious. I hope they’re not anxious like I was as a boy.”

On the evening the four-year-old taught me to make star sticks, we walked around the yard to gather flowers and branches for the May crowns. She designated my work space on a large stone and her own space. We knelt and got to work. In the household, her mama and I set the tone. In this space, she relished setting it.

“You see, Papa,”she said, “we can make things, and it’s fun to work together.”

“I love working together with you, Boo.”

“I love working together with you, too.”

How we use our hands and how we relate to our physical resources and how we relate to each other does change how we make. It changes how we make families. How we make communities and neighborhoods. How we make the future.

In the land of hand-held devices, we can either program our lives or be programmed.

A teacher’s highest calling is not to prepare a child for the SAT but to preserve the sanctity of and to allow to unfold of its natural accord a child’s original genius that she feels empowered to make things, make a life, make a difference.

In this sense, we are all makers, and this I believe: In a Wiki-Google age of digital consuming, the makers shall inherit the earth.

– Jeffrey Davis is one of the original Acorn School parents & father of Dahlia, an original little oak at Acorn School and an inspired maker.

JEFFREY DAVIS

Author, Speaker, Creativity Consultant

TRACKING WONDER

e: jeffrey@trackingwonder.com

p: 845-679-9441

Psychology Today Online Column: Tracking Wonder

May Day Celebration… a community weaving

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:08:48 GMT

We’re dancing, we’re dancing, around the Maypole high with colors of the rainbow, our ribbons do fly.Dear children take a ribbon please, today May flowers all are we.Around, around, around… a garland we do weave.

A sensory springtime feast for the young child.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:08:47 GMT

Building balancing bridges, muddy sandbox digging, rainy swings, puddle jumping, pulling heavy wagons and windy ribbons flying high… all in a week at Acorn School!

See Acorn School in the Spring Issue of Visit Vortex Magazine! Let’s Make Wet Felted Eggs with the Acorn School

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 23:05:04 GMT

Let’s Make Wet Felted Eggs with the Acorn School

At Acorn School, nursery- and kindergarten-aged children spend their time both indoors and out, balancing restful times with active fun and individual play with group activities. Throughout the year at this school, children journey through the seasons and spend time honoring special traditions. One way we celebrate spring is by making felted eggs, which you can easily do at home.

MATERIALS | For this project, you will need the following:

Two large plastic eggs, 100% wool roving (White Barn Sheep and Wool is an excellent source), ribbon, dish soap, hot water, embroidery floss, wheatgrass, alfalfa and mung bean seeds, forsythia branches, and small scissors.

#1 : About two weeks before you are ready to start felting, fill the bottom half of one of the plastic eggs with starter soil, and sow seeds. Wheatgrass will be the tallest, and the other two kinds will be curly and short. You can experiment with different seeds for different looks. These can be purchased at a health food store like the High Falls Food Coop. Place in a sunny spot and keep watered, being careful not to let the sprouts get too wet, for they will get moldy.

#2 : Cover the other egg with a six- to eight-inch square of wool roving, making sure that the wool is pulled apart into a “cloud” texture. Pull the wool firmly around to completely cover the egg. Take a second piece of wool, and put it in the opposite direction around the egg, layering in a cross hatch. I chose different colors for the inside and outside. The different pieces of wool can be the same color, of course, but it’s fun to use two different colors.

#3 : Cup the egg in your hand, and gently immerse it into hot, soapy water. Children especially love this part! It takes a while to fully wet the wool, at least as long as it takes to do a slow count to ten. Still cupping the egg, carefully take it out of the water.

#4 : While carefully holding the wet egg, squirt a thin stream of dish soap all around the egg. Then, holding the egg in one hand, start firmly PATTING the wool into the egg with your lubricated hand. At first, the wool will seemingly expand; have faith and keep patting until you begin to feel it shrinking—this will take about ten minutes of good patting. Once the wool begins to get well-felted, you can smooth the egg, making sure you have enough soap (but not too much!) on your hands to keep your hand from moving the wool around on the egg.

#5 : Once the wool feels snug and smooth around the egg and well-felted, finish with a hot rinse. Roll the egg in towels to remove excess water. When the egg is dry, use fine scissors to cut a zigzag most of the way around the egg, leaving approximately two inches across the back attached for a strong hinge.

#6 : Carefully remove the plastic egg. Take your twig and bend around the top, forming a handle. You will be tacking it at each side. Using strong embroidery floss, stitch the twig onto the felted egg.

#7 : Place the egg cup where your sprouts are growing into the felted egg.

#8 : Tie a ribbon at the corner.

The humble human hand.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:59:27 GMT

This wonderful video and the text below was posted on one of my favorite blogs, “

On Being

“. Renate was my Handwork teacher during my teacher training at Sunbridge College . I am so happy to share this with all of you!

“Our destiny is written in the hand.”

—Renate Hiller, co-director of the Fiber Craft Studio at the Threefold Educational Center in Chestnut Ridge, New York

Practicing mindfulness. Paying attention. Listening generously.

For Renate Hiller, the fiber artist whom you see in the film above, these majestic phrases apply in all their richness. Her German lilt of the tongue reaffirms this exquisite eloquence as she connects the importance of using our hands with the way in which we understand and find value in ourselves and in others. There’s something so honest and pure about her thought — that we gain a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our own humanity and our greater world by using our hands.

Using our hands grounds us — in work and in relationship. As we create something, hopefully beautiful, with our hands, we are transforming our moral and social senses. We evolve; we change. We notice things that we passed over the day before: the curve in a sidewalk to make way for a tree in the boulevard, the purl of a scarf, the transition of a capital that greets the ceiling. We observe the mundane and see it anew. The process of creating through the hands becomes a spiritual practice.

Ms. Hiller strings together so many “threads” that help me think about raising children; about living a fuller, more physically experiential work life (yes, even about writing marginalia in a script rather than using the track changes option in Word); about hearing differently the many stories from folks who write in to the program, especially the passionate accounts of people and their gardens.

She also reminds me of something Joanna Macy told Krista in a recent interview (show to be released on September 16th):

“I’m looking at my hand right now as we talk. It’s got a lot of wrinkles ‘cause I’m 81 years old. But it’s linked to hands like this back through the ages. This hand was shaped by when it was a fin in the mother seas, where life was born. This hand is directly linked to hands that learned to reach and grasp and climb and push up on dry land and weave reeds into baskets. It has a fantastic history. Every particle and every atom in this hand goes back to the first — what Thomas Berry calls ‘the primal flaring forth,’ the beginning of space-time. We’re part of that story.”

Valentine’s Day Celebration, love was all around…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:56:23 GMT

I give my heart to you,

You give your heart to me,

Good friends we will always be.

A beautiful beginning to this year…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:56:22 GMT

What a wonderful start to this school year!

Acorn Summer Camp has a lovely finale!

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:52:05 GMT

We had such a lovely last week at Acorn School, even the weather was gentler. Mr. Andrew came by to do some further work on our carpenter’s shed and quickly became the Pied Piper. The children were so inspired by his good work. They followed and helped by carrying and lifting wood into place. Mr. Andrew patiently made a place for them to be truly useful. A two day flurry of hammering nails ensued.

A million thank yous to Mrs. Quick. When she joined us 5 weeks ago, our vegetable garden was a wild meadow. With great determination and love, she pulled weeds and grass, turned over soil, planted seeds and tended to the garden. Children regularly joined in the work as they were inspired by being near her. Acorn School now has a very beautiful and productive garden. We look forward to picking cucumbers for pickling in September!

Mia Reed was at the helm of the beautiful crafts that children had a chance to work on every week. Felted bead necklaces, tissue paper butterflies, wind ribbons, bracelets and yarn dolls all went home throughout the weeks. Mia’s patient, loving smile encouraged children as they lovingly created treasures to bring home.

I am deeply grateful to all the helpers who supported the work and to all the families who have shared their children with us this summer! I must be the luckiest person on earth…

Crowns, frogs, sprinklers and good friends…Second Week at Acorn Summer Camp

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:49:38 GMT

never mind the heat… we had a great and fun week!

Summer birthdays, churning butter, building boats and lazing around…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:47:21 GMT

Climbing, hammering and moving mountains

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:45:56 GMT

This week at Acorn School we had 2 new pieces of playground climbing toys brought in by the clever Mr. Shuhan, who figured out how to load it all onto a pick up truck and bring back to us. In addition Mr. Joe moved a gigantic mountain of mulch in to exactly the right spot for our climbing pleasure. Thirdly, Mr. Andrew continued his hard work on a much anticipated carpenter’s shed. Enjoy the pictures!

Spend lovely morning with the Roots & Shoots Parent Child Program at Acorn Waldorf School

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:42:37 GMT

Supporting parents by offering a beautiful and welcoming environment in which to meet with other parents and a facilitating teacher. Each week we will gather for quiet observation and lively discussion around the living questions of those in the group. There will be time for singing and finger games, indoor and outdoor play for the older little ones, as well as seasonal handwork projects for parents. Expectant parents are also welcome! Let us know if you are interested in joining Motria Shuhan for a morning designed for children aged birth to 24 months and their parent or caregiver. For more information contact us at motria@acornws.org

May Day Festival…. a lovely day with the children.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:38:47 GMT

This week at Acorn School, soup, sewing and walks with friends

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:36:20 GMT

Bread Day at Acorn School…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:35:04 GMT

Getting to know little oaks…

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:27:14 GMT

What a lovely group of children and parents I have been blessed with at Acorn School this year! We have spent the last two weeks getting to know each other and settling into the rhythm that gives support and freedom to the children. From the youngest who is almost 2 yrs old to the oldest, who is 4 and a half, everyone is relaxing into their day, playing, working and becoming fast friends.

A great big thank you to Mia Reed and Laura Kliminchenko for volunteering their warm and loving presence to our circle and giving me support!

Pictured here is a snack which was greatly enjoyed. Peas, apple slices and almonds. These we blanched and then had a great time slipping the skins off, soaking in salt water and drying in the oven… YUM! This group of children are great eaters

With fall and winter weather just around the corner, Alison Sinatra will be collecting orders for Ruskovilla woolen undershirts, etc. Please check out this link and if you are interested email me or Alison with your order. I will try to get us a discount!

Ruskovilla Woolens

I’m looking forward to the next few weeks… we have two birthdays and perhaps some wool dyeing in marigolds!

Our auction is open! Find a treasure and give back.

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:20:00 GMT

The Acorn Waldorf School Auction is NOW OPEN for bidding! We are so excited about our first-ever online auction to help raise funds for our Tuition Assistance
Fund! We’ve gathered lovely goodies from far and wide.

Potato Harvest

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:16:48 GMT

“One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes – four.

Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes – more!”

“Eight potatoes, nine potatoes, ten potatoes – all!”

Building a fire and roasting chestnuts and potatoes… mmmmm….

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:14:12 GMT

And a surprise visit from the wonderful and gifted, David Levy and his flutes and singing bowl!

Beautiful baby dolls and their makers graduate Acorn School!

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:11:31 GMT

This spring, for several months, 3 rising first graders at Acorn School, spent many hours working diligently and patiently, sewing tiny stitches until their beautiful work was complete. On the last day of school, these 3 friends named their babies with their parents, teachers and classmates as happy and proud witnesses. We wish Juniper, Chloe and Teo much happiness with their new teachers and friends in their new schools! Visit us often… we will miss you!

Kim John Payne

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 22:08:00 GMT

speaking on “Loving Limits in a Digital Age”

Advent Time at Acorn School… a time of quiet anticipation

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:57:03 GMT

On Friday we celebrated the beautiful Advent Spiral with our school community. The children were reverent, the harp playing angelic and all went out into the quiet night slowed, inspired and nourished. A reminder of the true nature of this season.

Every day we light a candle at our table, with each week in December bringing with it a new candle to light. This week we have two! And a lovely verse to accompany the candle lighting…

The first light of Advent is the light of stones, stones that live in crystals, in seashells, and in bones.The second light of Advent is the light of plants, plants that reach up to the sun and in the breezes dance.The third light of Advent is the light of beasts, all await the birth, from the greatest and in least.The fourth light of Advent is the light of humankind, the light of hope that we may learn to love and understand.

Each day at school, the children wait patiently for a visit from the tiny lady who lives in the red cone. After she greets everyone she whispers the names of children to Mrs. Shuhan, these friends then receive a carefully chosen golden walnut inside which lives a teeny tiny gnome on a necklace. We look forward to this tradition every year in our school!

I wish you all a slowed down and meaningful Advent season this year!

May Day Festival

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:53:29 GMT

…. a lovely day with the children.

Come join us for Acorn’s Summer Session and Open House!

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:53:28 GMT

Space is limited…

Over 50 fleece angels!

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:53:26 GMT

Thank you to all of the folks who stopped by Acorn School to help make angels to send to the Sandy Hook School. Each angel was created with love and intention. It was wonderful to see how each one was unique, reflecting the individuals who made them.

We are fortunate to live in such a supportive and loving community!

Although I am mailing this cloud of angels tomorrow, if anyone would like to create more or perhaps paper snowflakes here is information on destination, etc…

“When school resumes for Sandy Hook, it will be in a new building. Parent-volunteers are working to ensure that the students are welcomed back by a winter wonderland with the entire school decorated with as many unique snowflakes as possible. Please make and send snowflakes by January 12, 2013 to the Connecticut PTSA, 60 Connolly Parkway, Building 12 Suite 103 Hamden, CT 06514″

A wonderful day…

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Thank you to everyone that helped to make Acorn School’s Open House a delightful day. Delicious food, beautiful music, magical puppet show, new friends and familiar ones… everything in place to make for a blessed day. Here are some photos for you to enjoy.

Angels for Sandy Hook

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Dear friends, in a small gesture of protection, warmth and soul armor for the children of the Sandy Hook school, who must now bear the inconceivable events of last Friday in their hearts, bodies and minds, join me at Acorn School, this Saturday, December 22nd from 1-6PM to make fleece angels. Once gathered, they will be sent to Newtown, CT.

These simple wool fleece angels are beautiful and will be imbued with the maker’s prayers and good wishes of support. No experience is necessary and all are welcome. Please RSVP via email at motria@acornwaldorfschool.org so I can plan on supplies.

Join us for Acorn School’s Open House – Saturday, November 10th 2012

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Open House May 12, 2012

Sat, 12 May 2012 04:00:00 GMT

We’re excited to announce our first Open House at our beautiful new location. Come meet us and see where the children will be spending their days!

It would be helpful to know how many people to expect, so please RSVP below or if you prefer, by phone.

May 12

From 10:00 am to 1:00 pm

2911 Lucas Turnpike

Accord, NY 12404

845-626-3103

Acorn Waldorf School Blog

Introducing the Neighboring Tree Documentary!

We are excited to share a new documentary about the work the Neighboring Tree Project did with a neighboring Head Start and the creation of an outdoor forest program for the children in their care.

��

Help Us Celebrate Our 10 Year Anniversary!

Let's Celebrate Together!

Neighboring Tree Project

We also hope to learn: we want to get to know our neighbors, the children and families in our region, and learn from whatever is brought to the group together. The forest offers nutrients to all its trees, and one tree shares with another for mutual health of the whole.

Read on to learn about our first two endeavors, Agri-Business Child Development in New Paltz, NY and Meagher Pre-K in Kingston, NY.

"Learning about nature-based play has been an eye-opening experience. In a world where children tend to be surrounded by so much, one realizes that all children need to learn and grow is the freedom and encouragement to safely explore the world around them".

Looking back with deep gratitude...

To our devoted Teachers, who showed up each day, turned on a dime when needed, all the while keeping the children embraced in the warmth of love and rhythm, supported one another through professional & personal trials, and all the while staying cheerful and loving… THANK YOU ��

To our stellar Health Team, who made tough decisions, were available to us all at all hours of the day and night, ready to solve, listen and guide us through stormy weather… THANK YOU ��

To our supportive Parents, who stayed committed to the school, met each week, trusted and supported their teachers, worked on and showed up for the heart driven festivals that warm school life and brought their children to us each day… THANK YOU ��

And finally...

To the little children , who remain delighted, joyful and earnest. THANK YOU ❤️

Begins on Aug 31. 2020! Outdoor Roots & Shoots Parent Child Class

Begins on July 6th! Online Roots & Shoots Parent Child Class - July Session

When In Wilderness

Applying wilderness wisdom to navigating the current pandemic... by Karl Johnson M.A.

Summer Camp update

Acorn WS Summer Camp Update!

How Do I Find and Create Goodness for My Children?

Enrolling now! Acorn Waldorf School Forest Kindergarten & Nursery!

HERE is more information and enrollment application! Space is limited.

"...we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a “wild” way."

“Bye kids, come back when you’re hungry,” our parents said as we walked out the door for our adventures. “Don’t fall off a cliff!” Ah, what unimaginable liberty."

You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing. Just show up!

Do you really "see" your child? Helicopter parenting has become the American norm but it may not be the best way to connect with our kids...

Simplicity Parenting Workshop!

Spend lovely morning with the Roots & Shoots Parent Child Program at Acorn Waldorf School

Lovely to think about summer camp on a spring day

How To Get Your Kids To Do Chores (Without Resenting It)

2018-19 AWS Enrollment is open!

Summer Camp… still time to sign up! Enroll your child here!

“the young child does not possess the self-awareness to feel inadequate…” how fortunate

The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.

Celebrating the young child’s birthday…

The Kids Are Not Alright. Stop Measuring Them All the Time.

Some thoughts from Janet Lansbury…

Celebrating Birthdays in the Acorn Nursery

Winter, winter, winter…. these acorns make it fun!

Winter!

A beautiful reflection of a child’s days at Acorn School by an alumni parent.

Simple pleasures….

What’s the Alternative? Acorn School for one…

Our new classroom arrives!

Happy Spring days at Acorn School…

Spring!

….or…. you can just come to Acorn School!

Lessons that resonate into adult life and even old age….

Letters and Numbers

Acorn Potato & Chestnut Harvest Festival!

Starting School and Saying Goodbye…

Summer Camp begins with lots of mud, two bunnies and new friends

Kids Learn Best Through Play, Play, Play!

Winter joy at Acorn School.

Let it snow!

Come visit us at Acorn School.

Happy happy new year to all.

May your year be filled with joy, peace, good health and excellent friends!

Shooting stars, climbing & playing and sharing a meal in our outdoor classroom

Preparing and flying Michaelmas stars with goldenrod & marigolds.

Acorn summer camp’s final week. a deep bow of gratitude…

These are the things of summer…

Wet felting treasure pouches, eating watermelon, hammering boats & sewing sails, eating snow peas out of our garden, rigging a pulley to the treehouse… these are the things that make up a week at Acorn Summer Camp. Thank you to Miss Minka Wasylyk for taking these beautiful photographs!

A Quiet Maker’s Revolution…

May Day Celebration… a community weaving

We’re dancing, we’re dancing, around the Maypole high with colors of the rainbow, our ribbons do fly.Dear children take a ribbon please, today May flowers all are we.Around, around, around… a garland we do weave.

A sensory springtime feast for the young child.

Building balancing bridges, muddy sandbox digging, rainy swings, puddle jumping, pulling heavy wagons and windy ribbons flying high… all in a week at Acorn School!

See Acorn School in the Spring Issue of Visit Vortex Magazine! Let’s Make Wet Felted Eggs with the Acorn School

Let’s Make Wet Felted Eggs with the Acorn School

The humble human hand.

Valentine’s Day Celebration, love was all around…

I give my heart to you, You give your heart to me, Good friends we will always be.

A beautiful beginning to this year…

What a wonderful start to this school year!

Acorn Summer Camp has a lovely finale!

Crowns, frogs, sprinklers and good friends…Second Week at Acorn Summer Camp

We are excited to share a new documentary about the work
the Neighboring Tree Project did with a neighboring Head Start
and the creation of an outdoor forest program
for the children in their care.

Do you really "see" your child? Helicopter parenting has become the American norm
but it may not be the best way to connect with our kids...

I give my heart to you,

You give your heart to me,

Good friends we will always be.

The Acorn Waldorf School Auction is NOW OPEN for bidding! We are so excited about our first-ever online auction to help raise funds for our Tuition Assistance
Fund! We’ve gathered lovely goodies from far and wide.

“One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes – four.

Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes – more!”

“Eight potatoes, nine potatoes, ten potatoes – all!”