Living lessons
Reflections. Invitation on a journey of discovery in the curriculum of the Waldorf schools
The curriculum of the Waldorf schools goes back to suggestions from Rudolf Steiner. In the course of the decades it has been considerably extended and adapted to the current requirements. It is a composition which is attuned to the anthropological and developmental psychological needs of children and young people. Like in a musical score we can identify the developmental arcs, reflections, recapitulations and variations. [more]
Living Teachers
Johannes Matthiessen – artist of the earth. An obituary
Johannes Matthiessen was an artist through and through. He studied architecture, taught art in Waldorf schools, was a visual artist, social artist and an artist of the earth – but above all he was a person who lived and worked with incredible intensity. [more]
Living lessons
Report verses. The most proper form of temptation since the existence of self-knowledge
Developing passion and enthusiasm for our own and all those other report verses, experiencing a touch of self-knowledge – how this can work and what the report verses should be like is described by Till von Grotthuss, class teacher at the Gröbenzell Rudolf Steiner School. [more]
Early childhood
What children’s drawings can tell us
If we compare the changes which occur in children’s drawings over a certain period of time, it is as if we were watching the child “landing” on earth. From the initial “body pictures” the drawings move on to a depiction of what is seen and imagined. Ulrike Staudenmaier investigates the question of what comes to expression in these depictions. [more]
Living lessons
Zealously at work. Manual crafts communicate elementary laws of physics
Manual crafts are the source and a practical application of physics, just as tools are created from applying the laws of physics. Pliers are an example which makes use of the lever principle. [more]
Early childhood
The spherical I of the small child
The I of the small child develops wholly out of the surroundings through movement and obtaining upright posture, speaking and thinking, until finally it learns to say “I” to itself. [more]
Early childhood
“I have swallowed the sun and the moon”
A child asks and asks and asks. We think that we have to keep explaining. Why is it that children are not satisfied by this and thus keep on asking? Because they do not want answers but involvement. They want us to be witnesses to what they discover. And only when they experience our real interest in a matter and, above all, affirmation, can they make sense of what they have discovered, incorporate it and let it become part of their life. [more]
Living lessons
Waldi2go – an experiment in real life
The Wahlwies class teacher Sven Saar is convinced that we can actually teach twelve-year-old children anything we want: done in the right way and with confidence in their abilities, they will undertake the tasks they are given conscientiously and responsibly – as here in the case of setting up a company. [more]
Living Teachers
“The method convinced me”
Friederike Bönner and Maximilian Buchka are traditionally trained teachers – and devote themselves wholly in their work to the education system established by Rudolf Steiner: Friederike Bönner is director of a Waldorf kindergarten and is at the point of completing a part-time course in early childhood education at Alanus University. The 71-year-old Maximilian Buchka teaches there as professor of special needs and early years education and offers reading courses for the texts of Rudolf Steiner. [more]
Early childhood
Knots and buds
Children develop in quite different ways: some do so with great personal and social difficulties, as if a knot were being tied and untied, others such that delicate changes over time appear like the organic opening of a bud. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.