Kimberton Waldorf School

Education That Matters

Bringing Waldorf Home

Play is crucial to a child’s development and well being.

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“Play is essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children. Despite the benefits derived from play for both children and parents, time for free play has been markedly reduced.”

Jeffrey Goldstein, Ph.D., author and research associate at Utrecht University also says, “Play seems to have some immediate benefits, such as aerobic conditioning and fine-tuning motor skills, as well as long-term benefits that include preparing the young for the unexpected, and giving them a sense of morality. How? Learning to play successfully with others requires ‘emotional intelligence,’ the ability to understand another’s emotions and intentions.”

Children and Chores

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The Benefits of Chores

When it comes to assigning housework to children, there’s some debate. Many parents want to preserve childhood for as long as possible, letting the “kids be kids” and enjoy plenty of playtime while they’re still young. Others may see children as less capable, preferring to finish the housework as quickly and efficiently as possible. These arguments make sense, but they also overlook the many positive benefits of giving kids chores.

Our daily lives are full of moments where we can connect, empower and teach our children. All the chores that may feel like drudgery to us as adults are often a delight to the young child. A dish tub full of bubbles, a basket full of laundry, a floor needing sweeping or a window sill asking for a dusting. All of these tasks offer endless opportunities for our families as a whole.

Meaningful Work

For the young child the gift of being entrusted with meaningful work builds their self-esteem, develops lifelong capabilities and life skills and bonds the family by distributing the work of the household. Young children naturally want to take part in the world around them. Research indicates that those children who do have a set of chores have higher self-esteem, are more responsible, and are better able to deal with frustration and delay gratification, all of which contribute to greater success in school.

Understanding Process

If we as adults can be present and open to their help then we will give the gift of purposeful work to the children in our care. It requires our presence because often in this busy world mundane tasks are overlooked or at best rushed thru to completion. Think of all the daily conveniences that are used almost daily in our homes: the dishwasher, the washer/dryer, the vacuum, etc. These serve a purpose but also deprive our children from seeing the cyclical process of things.

When we wash dishes by hand we can see the full process. The plate going in dirty, the need for us to scrub it clean, to rinse it, to dry it. These cycles are important for young children to witness and take part-in. It’s important to consciously choose to perform these tasks in our homes offering the gift of participating in the full process to our children.

Working Mindfully

When we are conscious and present we are able to engage with both our child and the work at hand. The demands of the modern world surely can distract: the ping of an email, the buzz of our phone, our laptops open for work, the TV on in the background; these all call us out of the moment. Minimizing our distractions in our home helps to create a sanctuary and allows us to remain focused. Our children will observe when we choose to complete these tasks mindfully and with joy. It is much like a meditation practice where we become conscious of our thoughts and choose to remain present as we work. This allows us to fully engage with what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with.

Being Present

This presence is a natural state of being for the young child. When we show up and work with joy our children learn to do the same. Viewing our household chores as a meditative practice makes our work a spiritual endeavor and bonds us with our children in the only moment they know: The Present!

By Molly Brett
Kimberton Waldorf Preschool Teacher
Parent Child Program Teacher

Resources:

Happy Children Do Chores – NY Times
Benefits of Chores – Center for Parenting Education
Mindful Simplicity:  Decluttering and Cleaning
5 Ways To Be More Present With Your Child – Huffington Post
Why Kids Should Have Chores

Want to get your kids into college? Let them play

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Every day where we work, we see our young students struggling with the transition from home to school. They’re all wonderful kids, but some can’t share easily or listen in a group.

Some have impulse control problems and have trouble keeping their hands to themselves; others don’t always see that actions have consequences; a few suffer terribly from separation anxiety.

We’re not talking about preschool children. These are Harvard undergraduate students whom we teach and advise. They all know how to work, but some of them haven’t learned how to play.

Parents, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and politicians generally fall into one of two camps when it comes to preparing very young children for school: play-based or skills-based.

These two kinds of curricula are often pitted against one another as a zero-sum game: If you want to protect your daughter’s childhood, so the argument goes, choose a play-based program; but if you want her to get into Harvard, you’d better make sure you’re brushing up on the ABC flashcards every night before bed.

We think it is quite the reverse. Or, in any case, if you want your child to succeed in college, the play-based curriculum is the way to go.

In fact, we wonder why play is not encouraged in educational periods later in the developmental life of young people — giving kids more practice as they get closer to the ages of our students.

Why do this? One of the best predictors of school success is the ability to control impulses. Children who can control their impulse to be the center of the universe, and — relatedly — who can assume the perspective of another person, are better equipped to learn.

Psychologists calls this the “theory of mind”: the ability to recognize that our own ideas, beliefs, and desires are distinct from those of the people around us. When a four-year-old destroys someone’s carefully constructed block castle or a 20-year-old belligerently monopolizes the class discussion on a routine basis, we might conclude that they are unaware of the feelings of the people around them.

The beauty of a play-based curriculum is that very young children can routinely observe and learn from others’ emotions and experiences. Skills-based curricula, on the other hand, are sometimes derisively known as “drill and kill” programs because most teachers understand that young children can’t learn meaningfully in the social isolation required for such an approach.

How do these approaches look different in a classroom? Preschoolers in both kinds of programs might learn about hibernating squirrels, for example, but in the skills-based program, the child could be asked to fill out a worksheet, counting (or guessing) the number of nuts in a basket and coloring the squirrel’s fur.

In a play-based curriculum, by contrast, a child might hear stories about squirrels and be asked why a squirrel accumulates nuts or has fur. The child might then collaborate with peers in the construction of a squirrel habitat, learning not only about number sense, measurement, and other principles needed for engineering, but also about how to listen to, and express, ideas.

The child filling out the worksheet is engaged in a more one-dimensional task, but the child in the play-based program interacts meaningfully with peers, materials, and ideas.

Programs centered around constructive, teacher-moderated play are very effective. For instance, one randomized, controlled trial had 4- and 5-year-olds engage in make-believe play with adults and found substantial and durable gains in the ability of children to show self-control and to delay gratification. Countless other studies support the association between dramatic play and self-regulation.

Through play, children learn to take turns, delay gratification, negotiate conflicts, solve problems, share goals, acquire flexibility, and live with disappointment. By allowing children to imagine walking in another person’s shoes, imaginative play also seeds the development of empathy, a key ingredient for intellectual and social-emotional success.

The real “readiness” skills that make for an academically successful kindergartener or college student have as much to do with emotional intelligence as they do with academic preparation. Kindergartners need to know not just sight words and lower case letters, but how to search for meaning. The same is true of 18-year-olds.

As admissions officers at selective colleges like to say, an entire freshman class could be filled with students with perfect grades and test scores. But academic achievement in college requires readiness skills that transcend mere book learning. It requires the ability to engage actively with people and ideas. In short, it requires a deep connection with the world.

For a five year-old, this connection begins and ends with the creating, questioning, imitating, dreaming, and sharing that characterize play. When we deny young children play, we are denying them the right to understand the world. By the time they get to college, we will have denied them the opportunity to fix the world too.

Article by Erika Christakis and Nicholas Christakis – Originally published at CNN.com

Erika Christakis, MEd, MPH, is an early childhood teacher and former preschool director. Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard University. Together, they serve as Masters of Pforzheimer House, one of the undergraduate residential houses at Harvard College. CNN article

Huffington Post: The Obamas’ Low-Tech Parenting

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Although First Lady Michelle and President Barack Obama certainly could provide their daughters, Malia and Sasha, the latest in digital devices, the Obama parents have chosen to raise their kids in a low-tech home environment. A recent New York Times article looking at Mrs. Obama’s parenting style reveals that her girls don’t use the computer for entertainment or watch TV on school nights. And on ABC’s The View, President Obama declared that his daughters have grown up with strong limits on their phones. Why do Mr. and Mrs. Obama set such tech rules, especially amid a culture that is ever quicker to hand kids gadgets? The First Lady says that the TV and computer (unless school-related) are “a privilege that we don’t value deeply.” Also, the Obama parents’ high education level (e.g., both attended Harvard Law) likely plays a role, as the children of college graduates tend to spend less entertainment time on screens than kids whose parents aren’t college grads.

Click here to read more.

Technology Too Soon Doesn’t Aid Learning

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The pandemic of children’s attention deficit spectrum and emotional disorders appears linked to precocious challenges in childhood development.

Regarding Naomi Schaefer Riley’s “Teach Your Children Well: Unhook Them From Technology” (Cross Country, Jan. 2): Having attended the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City from kindergarten through 12th grade, and now a family-practice physician for over 30 years, I’ve witnessed the effect of Waldorf education on thousands of students.

It might seem counterintuitive to eschew the temptation to give children an educational advantage by ever earlier exposure to infant screen time, reading instruction and virtual-world indoctrination, and instead allow the delicate developing neurological system to gently grow into appreciation of real-world colors, forces and textures, thus recapitulating our natural human evolution before gradually integrating the fast-paced media world of modern electronics and flashing screens. The growing pandemic of children’s attention-deficit spectrum and anxiety-disorder syndromes appears suspiciously linked to precocious challenges in childhood development. My observations indicate that, in general, Waldorf-schooled individuals are protected from adverse influences while being adjunctively enabled to navigate the challenge of maturing into able adults. My college-bound 18-year-old son is a national champion model-airplane builder and radio-controlled aerobatic pilot.

John Takacs, D.O.

Portland, Ore.

Audubon Pennsylvania’s Bird Town Flyer

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This is an article about Kimberton Waldorf School’s bird sanctuary published in Audubon Pennsylvania’s Bird Town Flyer:

By Tim Walsh and Celia Martin

Kimberton Waldorf School consists of a breathtaking 430-acre campus with rolling hills, farm, bubbling creek, and forest. We also have the magical French Creek Conservation Trail on campus, which is used daily by the students for both educational and recreational purposes.

The garden actively maintains about twenty bluebird houses in which Eastern bluebirds, tree swallows, wrens, and an occasional chickadee nest. We encourage these birds in the garden because they eat bugs so they are a natural insect control since we garden organically. We also have gourd houses for purple martins and a feeder for the hummingbirds that visit in the summer. On our campus, the birds enjoy the fruits of serviceberry, dogwood, mulberry, wild cherry, crab apple, and yes, poison ivy! Birds have also been known to take bites out of our apples and tomatoes and they usually eat all of the blueberries before we can get to them but we are willing to share. There are many birds that nest on our school campus and in the surrounding property in the woods. These include those already mentioned plus woodpeckers (including the magnificent pileated woodpecker), titmice, robins, mockingbirds, killdeer, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, many kinds of sparrows, and much more. Our fields are an active hunting ground for great blue herons, red-tailed hawks, kestrels, turkey, black vultures, and other birds of prey including an occasional bald eagle. We once had a sandhill crane walking through the fields which I think became lost during its migration. The

French Creek, which borders our property, is home to many geese and ducks including mergansers and wood ducks, and the rattling call of kingfishers can be heard frequently. At night we have heard the calls of both screech owls in the summer and great horned owls in the winter. We definitely have many kinds of birds living here, feeding here, and nesting here. Tours available!

“Last Child in the Woods” is a must-read for all parents and educators

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One of the best books I’ve read is “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” by Richard Louv. Published in 2008, it’s as relevant as ever in our society where there’s a growing divide between children and the outdoors.

Louv believes that kids nowadays suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” – a term of his own invention that describes “the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.”

The effects of this disorder are widespread and long lasting. Individuals, families, and entire communities relate to each other differently when they have limited access to nature or spend little time outdoors. Louv cites long-standing studies that show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies.

To learn more, click here. 

Why Access to Screens Is Lowering Kids’ Social Skills

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Kids read emotions better after being deprived of electronic media

People have long suspected that there’s a cost to all this digital data all the time, right at our fingertips. Now there’s a study out of UCLA that might prove those digital skeptics right. In the study, kids who were deprived of screens for five days got much better at reading people’s emotions than kids who continued their normal screen-filled lives.

Why Access to Screens Is Lowering Kids’ Social Skills

You Can’t Bounce Off the Walls If There Are No Walls: Outdoor Schools Make Kids Happier—and Smarter

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The original kindergarten—the children’s garden—conceived by German educator Friedrich Froebel in the 19th century, was a place where children learned through play, often in nature.

That idea is fast eroding. Children aren’t playing in the garden anymore; instead they’re filling in bubbles on worksheets.

Kindergarten is the new first grade. Its teachers are required to focus on a narrowing range of literacy and math skills; studies show that “some kindergarteners spend up to six times as much time on those topics and on testing and test prep than they do in free play or ‘choice time,’” writes journalist David McKay Wilson in the Harvard Education Letter. Instruction is teacher-proofed as teachers are required to use scripted curricula that give them little opportunity to create lessons in response to students’ interests. Many schools have eliminated recess or physical education, depriving children of the important developmental need to move and exercise. The efforts to force reading lessons and high-stakes testing on ever younger children could actually hamper them later in life by depriving them of a chance to learn through play.

To learn more, click here. 

Children That Play Outside In All Weather Grow Up Resilient

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It seems like an obvious statement, so why don’t kids play outside in challenging weather nearly as much as they used to? Why are schools keeping kids inside at recess when the temperature gets too cold? What kind of adult will this type of childhood experience create?

As Winter ebbs and flows, with temperatures ranging from minus 25 to plus 10 in the past few weeks, we’ve experienced a wonderful range of opportunities with the programs we run. Challenges and opportunities. From freezing weather with blustery winds, to rain and floods in the parks where we work, to massive snowstorms full of amazing forts and fun!

Imagine children that have grown up playing outside in all manner of challenging conditions, in all seasons of the year. Imagine how they’d be different than kids taught to come inside when it’s raining, or cold. Imagine how they’d be different from kids that find entertainment from the TV, computer or video games.

Kids who play outside in challenging weather are more positive, more creative, and more adaptable. They don’t let challenges stop them. They rise to challenges and find ways to carry on in spite of them. And that’s just their baseline. It’s nothing special to them. It’s normal.

To learn more, click here. 

Into the Woods

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In their new book, The App Generation, education professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis argue that kids today are becoming more risk averse. “Rather than wanting to explore, to try things out by themselves, young people are always pushing to find out exactly what is wanted, when it is wanted, how it will be evaluated, what comes next and where we end up,” they said in a recent Q-and-A.

To learn more, click here.

Is Music the Key to Success?

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CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

Is Music the Key to Success? (New York Times)

Knitting Is More Important Than Homework

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Two years ago on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Business section, an article ran entitled, “A Silicon Valley School That Doesn’t Compute” about the Waldorf School in Silicon Valley. I had already made the decision to enter my oldest son in a Waldorf school before the article came out, but I pathetically admit that this piece in the New York Times validated my intuition regarding a Waldorf education.

Knitting is More Important than Homework (Huffington Post)

How to Limit Your Child’s Screen Time

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National Public Radio’s Here and Now program recently featured our Food for Thought Organic Lunch Program. “School Lunches: Growing Your Own And Tips For Eating Better” addressed the need for healthier food options for school children. Our organic lunch program, which creates delicious organic lunches from fresh vegetables and fruits grown in our school garden, was featured as a model for healthy food in schools. The show highlighted the hands-on learning that is a hallmark of Waldorf Education – children have a direct connection to the food they are eating, and help plant, harvest, and prepare the fruits and vegetables used to make their nutritious school lunches.

To listen to the show, click here.

It’s one thing for a small, private school to incorporate gardening and healthy eating into its curriculum, but what can larger, poorer urban schools do?

Many say that they don’t have the budget to afford healthier choices, and also say that kids just aren’t interested in changing the way they eat.

The debate over how to feed American school kids became heated last month when Michelle Obama lashed out at a group of House Republicans who pushed to grant waivers — or exceptions — to the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, by letting schools opt out if they said they were losing money.

As lawmakers debate the law requiring that schools provide healthier lunches in order to qualify for federal funding, we take a loot at the Kimberton Waldorf School in rural Kimberton, Pennsylvania. Waldorf schools believe in hands on education, and this one has kids grow their own lunch in a program called “Food for Thought.”

Here & Now’s Robin Young also talks to consultant Kate Adamick, co-founder of Cook for America, who says most schools already have enough money to fund healthy eating initiatives — they just need to learn how to do it. Adamick shares her recommendations on how to bring healthy food into American public schools.

Interview Highlights: Kate Adamick

On debunking the argument that kids don’t like healthy foods

That’s the biggest myth in school food, that the kids won’t eat it. The food and beverage industry loves us as adults to think that the kids won’t eat it. There are numerous studies on this that say a child has to be exposed to a certain type of food ten to twenty times before they’ll eat it. That means that we have to keep trying. We really need to remember there are no cases in recorded history of a child starving to death when there’s a plate of healthy food sitting in front of them.

Tips Adamick has given to schools to save money

“[A district was] portioning salad and food and everything in little plastic cups. When you do that, you’re paying for those little plastic cups … If you put it out for kids to take on their tray, that’s faster, that’s much less labor intensive and you save all of that money, both on the labor time and the plastic cups.”

“The federal government funds school food both with cash and with an allotment of food. You can order it either raw — so I can order raw chicken, or I can send that raw chicken to a processor and have them turn it into chicken nuggets, and chicken fingers, and chicken dinosaurs, which are typically laden with salt, fat and sugar … You pay for that. So take the free chicken in and cook the chicken.”

How to Raise a Child

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It would be easy, on first glance, to dismiss Madeline Levine’s “Teach Your Children Well” as yet another new arrival in a long line of books that have urged us, in the past decade or so, to push back and just say no to the pressures of perfectionistic, high-performance parenting. But to give in to first impressions would be a mistake.

For Levine’s latest book is, in fact, a cri de coeur from a clinician on the front lines of the battle between our better natures — parents’ deep and true love and concern for their kids — and our culture’s worst competitive and materialistic influences, all of which she sees played out, day after day, in her private psychology practice in affluent Marin County, Calif. Levine works with teenagers who are depleted, angry and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges, and with parents who can’t steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment and connection. “Our current version of success is a failure,” she writes. It’s a damning, and altogether accurate, clinical diagnosis.

How to Raise a Child: Teach Your Children Well (New York Times)