Yesterday was my very favorite festival of the entire year, the Winter Light Faire at our Waldorf school. The whole community gathers and creates the most beautiful festival with crafts, performances, delicious food and treats, storytelling, beeswax candle dipping, wreath making, hot cider, gnomes, faeries, shopping for local handcrafted creations, games, and my very favorite, the Crystal ...
Waldorf Education
Advent Spiral Walk
The days are growing shorter, the mornings are darker when we get up, and in the absence of the sun, it is time to turn inward and create a little light of our own. Our Waldorf school held an Advent Garden spiral walk this week for all the students, and one on Sunday night for adults. We have a wonderfully diverse school community, so our celebration of the Advent Season means a ...
Advent Wreath
This weekend marked the beginning of Advent season. This is a winter festival of light celebrated at our Waldorf school, and the Advent wreath in the center of our table honoring the light found in stones, plants, animals and humankind is a tradition we began last year to brighten up our very dark, rainy Oregon winters. We go out in the woods and fashion a little wreath from spruce, Douglas-fir, ...
Lantern Walk
We arrived at our children's Waldorf school in the evening and walked down the dark hallway to their classroom where a soft glow was spilling out of the door. Inside sat their teacher playing softly on a small harp and singing a lantern walk song. All of the candle lanterns they had made from jars covered in tissue paper and dried leaves were sitting on their desks with cheerful little flames ...
Farm Field Trip
Pumpkin patch field trips are some of the best memories I have from elementary school. I loved going out to farms on the Dungeness River delta and running with my classmates into fields full of bright orange pumpkins in the crisp autumn air, looking for just the right one. Now, I enjoy going along with my children on their class pumpkin patch field trips. This year, our class at the Waldorf ...
Taming Our Dragons: A Waldorf Michaelmas Celebration
"Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave."-Rainer Maria Rilke In Waldorf Communities, the season of Michaelmas is an important time. It is a time for children to return to school in the fall, it is a time of Summer's ending and the Autumn Equinox, and it is a time characterized by dealing with the dragons that confront us ...
A Sukkot Campout…At School!
This week, my children's third grade Waldorf class celebrated the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. To honor of the 40-year period the people of Israel spent wandering through the desert and living in temporary shelters, it is customary to build and dwell in a temporary shelter called a Sukkah. We gathered bamboo at a local farm and then fashioned a Sukkah frame. Then the ...
Back to School We Go!
This week is a big week for a lot of kids in Oregon (and I hear last week was a big week for kids in Washington.) It's back to school time. It's not as though it was my children's first day of school ever, but it was a pretty important day for us with both kids going to the Waldorf school that we have wanted them to go to for such a long time. With their willow lunch baskets packed, a bouquet of ...
A Waldorf Education
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -William Butler Yeats This past week we joyously enrolled our children in the local Waldorf school for the coming school year. It has been an arduous path, wrought with twists and turns, and we are so very happy to have arrived where we set out to be, and at the beginning of a new journey. My discovery of ...