Madrona School Alphabet (I)

In our alphabet-based exploration on what makes a Madrona School education unique, 'I' is for imagination -- Our students develop and nurture flourishing imaginations, making them wonderful readers, good problem solvers, flexible thinkers and in possession of a rich, creative inner life to take into adulthood. 

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Preschool play

A Waldorf school curriculum highlights the importance of imagination with lots of time and room for play in early childhood, both indoors and out. Isn't it magical to see the development of a young child's play, and the richness that happens when the planning and storytelling almost become the play? A well-developed imagination lays the groundwork for academic work, as well as enhances self-discipline. 

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Drawing of a fair from a 6th grade student's medieval history work.

Throughout grade school, the curriculum continues to value imagination as a part of a healthy childhood. In first grade, for example, letters and numbers are brought through story, further developing that full inner pictorial life for each student. And storytelling enhances main lessons in every grade, adding depth to the academic work. A well developed imagination blossoms again and again throughout our children's lives.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." –Albert Einstein

Bread Day in our Early Childhood Classrooms

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It’s baking day in the preschool. Arriving at school, the children spy the familiar cloth-covered bowl on the table. Silky, elastic dough fills the bowl and a sweet, yeasty scent hangs in the air. As each child settles in, they see their teacher reach in for pieces of dough from the bowl. They delight in taking a place at the table and receiving their piece of dough, the only invitation they need to begin kneading and shaping their bun. 

Meanwhile, the teacher sings:
Five hot buns in the bakery shop,
Big and round with honey on the top.
[Maggie] came along with a penny one day,
She bought a hot bun and she ate it right away!

The children love to hear their name in the song, and some sing out. They also join in enthusiastically when the teacher begins to chant “Pat a cake, pat a cake,...”, bringing a steady pounding rhythm to kneading dough.

When each child has kneaded and shaped their dough, and before they run off to play, they place the bun carefully on a baking sheet to finish rising. When all the children finish, the teacher slides the sheet into the warmed oven, and soon a delicious smell fills the room. Anticipation is a wonderful part of this bread day ritual, and the smell of baking bread signals the approach of the clean up song and snack time.

Finally, snack time arrives, the children waiting more patiently some days than others! On a chilly winter’s morning, the class gathers at their table indoors and lights a candle. On a a warm spring day they may walk to the park and sit together around a picnic table. In any case, the class gathers to eat their buns still warm from the oven -- made even sweeter with soft butter and jam or honey -- enjoying conversation and practicing table manners. As snack time ends, everyone washes dishes and play resumes. 

Some children routinely tuck a bit of their bun in a napkin to take home, knowing a brother or sister, or a parent, would love a little taste of bread day.

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Our teachers and students engage in the preparation of a warm, organic snack each day in all of the Madrona School early childhood classrooms -- parent-child, preschool and the kindergartens. This snack fills a hungry tummy after a period of play and interaction, but it also engages many senses, such as touch, smell, sight and taste, and practice integrating multiple sensations within one experience.

Bread day illustrates our aim to engage each child's whole self at school. We surround our students with a calm, home-like environment, time outdoors rain or shine, security through daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms, opportunity for developmentally-appropriate exploration, suggestions for dress and nutrition to nourish both body and soul with warmth; opportunities for purposeful work; and an appreciation for the beauty in the every day.

Want to add 'Bread Day' to your rhythms at home? Here is the recipe our classes begin with -- feel free to make it your own!

Madrona School Alphabet (H)

In our alphabet-based exploration on what makes a Madrona School education unique, 'H' is for handwriting -- and for the concrete beauty it adds to our work.  The Waldorf curriculum emphasizes handwriting as an integral part of the grade school curriculum. In the 1st grade, students practice writing letters as a precursor to reading. In the 3rd grade, form drawing exercises give way to formal cursive writing practice. In every year, each student collects their work into their unique and beautiful main lesson books, the previously blank pages filling with examples of their paragraphs, poetry, essays, observations and drawing. Recent research reveals how handwriting helps children learn, by improving cognitive development and hand-eye coordination, and strengthening reading through better letter recognition. It lays a foundation for effective note-taking and communication for life. At Madrona School, we write before we type.       

Community Eurythmy

We are happy to welcome Audun Smit back to Madrona School for the month of March!  In addition to teaching kindergarten - 8th grade classes, he will be offering community Eurythmy on Fridays at 9:00 - 10:00am in the Eagle Harbor Congregational Church Fellowship Hall at 105 Winslow Way W on Bainbridge Island.  

We hope that you will be able to join us for this rare opportunity to do Eurythmy with an inspiring young teacher.   RSVPs to the school office, 206-855-8041, would be nice, but are not required.  We have Eurythmy shoes or bring your own.

No previous experience is necessary.   Bring a friend! 

Move your body - touch your soul.

Teaching Handwork at Madrona School

To create something with one’s own hands, if only once in one’s life, is surely a healthy antidote to becoming a passive consumer. –Michael Howard

Handwork is one of the unique specialty classes offered in a Waldorf grade school. At their most basic, the classes teach respect for simple tools: needle & thread, sticks and string, the spindle, wool, a knife, and of course, our hands. Handwork classes bring joy, teach practical skills around real work, and offer every student the opportunity to create beauty, along with the intrinsic satisfaction of completing an often long-term project.  

Developed to work in tandem with the curriculum as a whole, handwork strengthens fine motor skills and helps with hand-eye coordination, which in turn help students with writing, reading and math. Knitting, crochet, clay, woodcarving, embroidery etc., all contribute to the formative artistic foundations found within a Waldorf education, fostering creativity, flexibility and independence. 

Michael Howard, a Waldorf educator, and author of Educating the Will, writes extensively about what handwork classes offer our students, and he takes it further with spoon carving as his example, saying, “We must seek every opportunity to develop the feeling will [or an artistic sense or feeling] because the capacity to feel the clumsiness of our spoon and to intuitively feel, step by step, how to make it harmonious is not limited to spoon making. As our feeling will awakens through activities such as the arts and crafts, it will become active in other domains such as social life. …Our feeling will awakens our creative will to be social sculptors who transform dead and chaotic social forms into more living and harmonious ones.” Handwork classes speak directly to a main educational goal at Madrona School, the nurturing and teaching of whole human beings, capable of shaping their own lives beyond the classroom.

What are the handwork curriculum basics here at Madrona School? Our kindergarteners often do a bit of whittling and hand-sewing to create little pocket gnomes (see above), or dolls, but the program begins in earnest in 1st grade with knitting. In second grade, they add to their knitting skills and begin crochet. In third grade, they expand their crochet abilities, and experiment with taking a fleece through washing, spinning and weaving. In fourth grade, they learn basic embroidery, as well as designing and stitching a cross-stitch piece. In fifth grade, it’s back to knitting, this time in the round, making socks. In sixth grade they play with taking two-dimensions into three-dimensions, designing a stuffed animal, first on paper, and then hand-sewing their creation. In seventh and eighth grade, we often expand into working with different materials, including woodworking, carving soapstone, metal work and expanded embroidery techniques. The eighth grade also spends some time with machine sewing, making quilts and clothing. In addition to all of these skills, our students experience other crafts within their main lesson blocks – making drums or cedar baskets in4th grade Native American and local history studies, or stained glass in a 6th grade Middle Ages block.  The breadth of these opportunities adds further dimension to our arts-integrated academic curriculum.

Finally, handwork classes offer students a way to see form made visible. If you’ve had a first grader in our program, you’ve seen the loosely-knit first projects transform through further practice into a second project – often a flute case they can use for years – where the stitches even out and mistakes are seen and fixed. These lessons in learning to see their work echo observational skills grown throughout school, in experiment-driven science classes, in social relationships, and in an awakening self-awareness. Handwork classes ultimately contribute to a healthy confidence our graduates take with them into the world. 

--edited from our weekly school newsletter, February 14, 2017

Open House Images

It was fun to have so many families at our Open House this past Saturday! And, even though we do this every year, walking through the grades with all that beautiful work on display never gets old. Here are some images from the morning....

1st grade math processes illustrated, and presented in story form, with problems written out too (notice the mistake turned into a flower) ; the 2nd grade room with both math and language arts books, flute cases and poetry on the board.

3rd grade showed multiplication table review, liquid measurement studies and the start of their 'Shelters Around the World' block.

4th grade was full of neighborhood maps and animals and fractions.

One more 4th grade image -- a form drawing precursor the geometry to come in 5th grade. And, the 5th grade room with their Ancient Civilization and Botany books out, as well as a wall of recent watercolor paintings.

6th grade was full of geometry, geology and the Middle Ages.

7th and 8th grades showed off their books together, including drawing, Renaissance and revolutions studies, and human physiology.

Teaching Reading at Madrona School

Excitement over winning the Reading Champions trophy through the public library this summer!

Learning to read can be a real joy and is an important academic milestone in a young student's life. In Waldorf education, we help a child's capacity for reading develop naturally, and offer lots of opportunity to fall in love with words and story.

In an ideal world, young children enjoy exposure to the world of language and literature through their parents. Hopefully, books represent beauty, humor and love to a small child -- they soak in illustrations, they giggle at funny words or at the voices an adult uses to read, they cuddle with a loved one to hear a story -- or five. Reading becomes aspirational, as they see a parent enjoy reading, or that stack of books by an older sibling's bedside. Further, in a Waldorf kindergarten classroom, a reverence for language and for story is reinforced through a daily story told by the teacher, by a ready basket of beautiful books for quiet times, and through ample opportunity for imaginative play, play that lays the groundwork for eventual understanding of abstract concepts.

In grade school, reading instruction is a part of language arts as a whole. In 1st grade, Waldorf education introduces reading through stories. Children discover letter forms out of a story their teacher tells, listening and then drawing, molding and moving through letters and their sounds. In other words, we take a multi-sensory approach, engaging a child auditorially, visually, kinetically, and at heartfelt level.They revel in the unique sounds of a letter as they practice writing simple sentences from the stories they are hearing and the pictures they are drawing. They write letters, then sentences and eventually, longer stories, until one day, it may dawn on them that they are reading what they are writing. Do you remember this eureka moment in your own life?

This unfolding and discovery allows for the love of language and of story to grow. The children work at decoding through phonics and sight word recognition too, but the emphasis remains on comprehension. Stories are told throughout a Waldorf education, and the overall literacy of a student grows with each passing year -- including vocabulary, grammar skills, and cultural and historical knowledge. With such a robust and supple beginning to language arts, Waldorf education actively cultivates space for developing capacity, both in interest and skill. Reading comes from the inside out, and while the time to master the mechanics varies, the intrinsic motivation and engagement with language is indicative of the lifelong joy of choosing to read!

For more, ask your child's teacher, or:
Read this blog post by the Waldorf School of Philadelphia, full of links to recent research in reading instruction, originally posted September 21, 2016: Reading in Waldorf Schools

For a parent's perspective, read Myth Busting: How Reading is Taught in a Waldorf School by Sarah Baldwin, Moon Child blog, originally posted June 6, 2011.

And an excellent article describing more of the art and mystery inherent in the act of learning to read: There's More to Reading Than Meets the Eye by Barbara Sokolov, Renewal, A Journal for Waldorf Education, Vol. 9#1, Spring 2000

Sometimes, reading comes along unusually slowly for children because there are underlying issues such as dyslexia.  When it becomes clear that extra help in mastering the fundamentals of reading are needed, we work with the parents to arrange for supplemental help.  Sometimes this means that a child works with a tutor at school once, twice or more times per week.  This extra help in 2nd, 3rd or 4th grade can make a big difference in a child's confidence and image of themselves as a successful reader.

Madrona School Alphabet (G)

We've reached the letter 'G' in our alphabetic journey to celebrate what makes a Madrona School education unique  ... and Graduates!

From a 1st grader's main lesson book, the beginning of a school journey...

From time to time, we have the pleasure of checking in with some of our alumni. They truly are the best representatives of all that makes Waldorf education unique. Our graduates exhibit self-confidence and a sense of purpose in pursuing interests, in both high school and beyond. They prove well prepared for life after Madrona School!

Since 2005, Madrona School has graduated 44 students from 8th grade. The first graduating class has finished college, while other graduates are in college or high school. Initially, our alumni go on to succeed in the variety of local high school programs: Bainbridge High, Eagle Harbor, Seattle Waldorf, West Sound Academy, and Seattle Community College's Running Start program. Most of them attend college, including: Bates, Beloit College, Lewis and Clark, Canadian College of the Performing Arts, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, Smith, Western, UW and Whitman. They are budding scientists with biology and geology majors, musicians, Spanish scholars and theater majors.

Our school home is a beginning...

According to the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, and their interview-based study of 526 former Waldorf students, 94% of Waldorf school graduates attend college. Among other outcomes, their research offers three key findings about graduates, including 1) the ability to think creatively and embrace lifelong learning; 2) placing a high value on human relationships; and 3) bringing a strong sense of ethics into adulthood. We have a pamphlet in the office, entitled "The Results of Waldorf Education" with more on this research. You are welcome to come and pick one up!

Keep your eyes open to opportunities to support our current 8th grade class as they prepare for school beyond Madrona School -- we'll have a 8th grade project presentation in the spring, and graduation in early June is a wonderful evening where we are welcome to celebrate with our new graduates!

--edited from our school newsletter, February 4, 2014