Kimberton Waldorf Farm Program
Grow. Learn. Discover.
Our Farm Program provides year-round opportunities to engage in immersive nature-based learning experiences on our Applewood Farm and school campus. While fostering a connection to the natural world has long been a core value at KWS, recent research has shown that experiences in nature improve learning and emotional well-being in children and young people. Having genuine, hands-on experiences in nature cultivates a sense of wonder and awe. This is the foundation for all scientific inquiry and provides a valuable perspective on the role of nature in our lives.
On the farm
- Chores on the farm include cooking meals, milking, mucking stalls, and animal care.
- Projects on the farm include basket making, stacking wood, bricklaying, carpentry projects, churning butter, baking, working in the garden, weaving, and carding wool.
- Activities include fort building, swimming in the creek, exploring wildlife corridors, experiencing an “old-time” school day with a morning lesson in our old one-room schoolhouse, woodland walks, songs, stories, and crafts.
- All our meals and snacks are organic and locally sourced. We maintain a 2-acre teaching garden on campus. We also use produce grown by the Kimberton CSA on land leased from the school. Yogurt from the Seven Stars Farm is delicious, and our laying hens provide us with nutritious eggs.
- Our 425-acre campus provides a living lab for Ecological Literacy. Immersion in various components of the natural world like the creek, the farm, the forest, the garden, and the wetlands foster a profound understanding of the natural world grounded in direct experience.
- Our curriculum includes aspects of botany, nutrition, forestry, gardening, animal husbandry, environmental studies, life sciences, systems thinking, food equity, arts, conservation and sustainability.
For us in Waldorf education, the sense of the Earth as an organism permeates our education.
At KWS, we don’t view this important experience as something extra, but as an integral part of our education. Our founders understood this and originally opened our school as Kimberton Farms School over 78 years ago.
Our Farm Program carries through that heritage by offering homeschoolers, groups, schools and our current students and families opportunities to immerse themselves in our farm, in our garden and in our forest and fields. Through outdoor projects, farm chores, woodland walks, songs, stories, crafts, exploration and discovery, children come to an understanding of self, community, and natural world as inextricably linked. The resulting deep empathy is life affirming, and results in young people who develop the life skills to act responsibly in support of both the present and the future.
Children will experience the grounding rhythms of nature through the work of a permanent farm. Through experiential hands-on learning, children experience real feelings for the natural word, and can then develop a deep sense of the responsible relationships that exist between human beings and nature. Many people refer to this type of place-based learning as ecological literacy—meaning the cultivation of emotional and social intelligences that happens when we connect children with the rhythms of the natural world. This connection results in the ability to understand how nature sustains life by creating and nurturing interconnected communities.
To learn more or find out how you can register for one of our programs contact us at 610.933.3635, or email us here. Our Farm Program is available to school groups, part-time students, transfer students, as a study program, or as part of a home school program. This program continues to add to our already rich, nature-based curriculum.
If you’d like more information on our Farm Program, give us a call or complete the below form:
