Library Lady's Corner
Valentine's Day ~ an eye-opening day of lovers and appreciation! February 14 2018
Chocolates, flower, cards and candies fill the fourteenth of February every year. It’s a tradition that dates back to 270 A.D. and the life of Valentine. History from this long ago is hard to come by, and is veiled in legend and lore as well as enlightened with clear facts. Given it’s original date, it’s easy to understand that it is a combination of Roman and Christian traditions.A Path Worth Treading - Encountering Nature and the Nature of Things February 13 2018
A Guest Blog from The Nature InstituteHere at the Nature Institute, we have conceived of a new year-long foundation course in Goethean science. For participants who attend the program and want to continue the work with further guidance, we plan to offer a second year with more individualized work which could be followed by a research fellowship.
Why a Class Play in Waldorf Schools? February 08 2018
For almost every grade in most Waldorf schools, there is a class play. This is an exciting event and means a great deal to everyone: the teachers, the students, the parents, the extended families of students. Interestingly enough, Rudolf Steiner never indicated that every year should have a class play! This is a tradition built in the ensuing decades of the last 100 years of Waldorf education. Doing plays is a happy tradition, but not a necessity in the curriculum!Cross-Quarter Days and the 2nd of February February 02 2018
Long before Punxsutawney Phil became a celebrity groundhog, astronomers the world round knew this day as an important cross-quarter day in the cycle of the year. Cross-quarter days are those that fall precisely halfway between the solstices and the equinoxes.
There is an oxymoronic quality to the day: if it is bright, sunny, it bodes ill for a short winter, if it is a cloudy, lowery day, it means winter will end soon. This is a characteristic of cross-quarter days.
Happy Groundhog Day or is it Candlemas? February 01 2018
In the mighty Celtic calendar, the year is marked by the two solstices and the two equinoxes. At the Winter Solstice, the days are the shortest of the year; at the Summer Solstice, the days are the longest of the year. At the Autumn Equinox and the Spring Equinox the days are exactly as long as the nights.
The days that mark the halfway mark between these four celestial events are traditionally named “cross-quarter days” as they are the between the quarters markers.
Saint Brigid's Day February 01 2018
Just before Groundhog Day (Candlemas in Christianity), on February 1, is Saint Brigid’s Day (also known as Bridie, Brigit, Brigitte, Biddy, Birdie). This Irish saint was known for the feeding of the poor, tending to the sick and dying, and instilling hope in the hearts of the desperate. She was beautiful by all accounts; a radiant, high, Irish beauty, who chose to give her life to God.Season's Greetings from Waldorf Publications and the Research Institute for Waldorf Education December 22 2017
Hanukah is now complete, the Winter Solstice is upon us, and Christmas follows soon! All about the Light that balances the darkness and warms the world with Love.
All of us at the Research Institute for Waldorf Education (RIWE) and Waldorf Publications (WP) are filled with the lights of your work around the continent to bring Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to the young! We are grateful for your friendship and following. We look forward to a New Year of promise and transformation with you, our Friends! Thank you for your work, for your dedication to Waldorf Education, and to RIWE and WP!
Waldorf Publications — big Changes afoot! December 18 2017
Waldorf Publications is moving its operations to 351 FAIRVIEW AVENUE, unit 265, HUDSON, NEW YORK!! Our phone number will be: 518-828-9999 This move will consolidate our three-site approach to date and we will, at last, all be in one location. Plus, our new neighbor will be the Rudolf Steiner Library, who moved into the former Walmart building two years ago. We are part of a “rejuvenate abandoned box stores” effort on the part of two native Hudson sons who wanted to put life into the big space. We look forward to being a part of this!
Book Review: Entry Points: A Guide to Rudolf Steiner's 'Study of Man' December 08 2017
Entry Points: A Study Guide to Rudolf Steiner’s Study of Man
In 2003-2004, when eBooks were launched, before any test marketing or forethought, and eBook readers were “the new best thing” with Nooks and Kindles competing for the “best Christmas present of the year,” the word was that books were a thing of the past. Books were so “yesterday.” But books are holding steady. Maybe it is because reading a book holds an 85% comprehension and retention rate while reading eBooks (any screens, really), comprehension drops to 34% on average.
November 28, 2017 November 28 2017
Keep the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, RIWE, in your good thoughts on Giving Tuesday!
Give a gift if you can but most importantly give us your good thoughts. Thoughts are as valuable as financial contributions!
Here at RIWE, the parent organization of Waldorf Publications, the work is quiet and steady to ensure that the world finds the highest caliber information about Waldorf education and its efficacy. The effort started in 1996 with an eye to North America, but since its inception, the world comes looking here when it needs to know what Waldorf schools do for the young and their families, and what Waldorf teachers need to do it.
Buy Nothing Day 2017! November 24 2017
Join us for our 5th annual BUY NOTHING DAY! Instead of Black Friday, make this relax at home Friday. Stay home with your family, be offline and create homemade potpourri, colorful yarn and twig decorations, or learn a song, (all instructions, lyrics, and ideas included here). Or snuggle in and read a story!
Balance the universe with quiet, loving, relationships at home with the people you cherish most on this (traditionally frantic) Friday.
Book Review: Towards the Deepening of Waldorf Education October 19 2017
In the 1980s and early 1990s, The Pedagogical Section Council of North America worked closely with the Pedagogical Section in Dornach, Switzerland, to develop a publication that gathered the esoteric material Rudolf Steiner gave to the Waldorf teachers in the first Waldorf school in his first training lectures and along the way at teachers’ meetings. The book was beautiful and lovingly compiled. It had a linen hard cover with gold leafing for the title.How Do Children Learn to Write and to Read? October 13 2017
Literacy has been made an urgent issue in the last decade. As parents and teachers, we worry, often deeply. Back in the 1900s, we didn’t worry so desperately. Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, and T.V.’s “Sesame Street” were ever present to reassure us that ways were there for children to learn to read. Maybe these extrinsic tools for children to learn to read and copy writing laid the foundations for the worry — if these tools did not do the trick, perhaps there was something wrong with the child.Book Review: Willibrord - A Wandering Saint in Dialog with His Friends October 02 2017
This new book by Frans Lutters, experienced Waldorf teacher from Holland, Willibrord, A Wandering Saint in Dialog with his Friends, holds great potential for teachers and parents looking for the right mood for story telling with seven and eight year olds.Teachers and parents of second graders face the delicious challenge of filling eager young souls with rich ideas filled with ideals in a right way. In Waldorf schools, the teacher’s efforts of forming a class in grade one settles over the summer months and second graders arrive ready for good stories and new knowledge.
Book Review: The Dynamic Heart and Circulation September 13 2017
Edited by Craig Holdrege
Reviewed by Ronald Koetzsch
Most of us learned in high school biology that the human heart is a four-chambered mechanical pump. The size of a fist, it sends blood to the lungs to be oxygenated and then sends the returning oxygen-rich blood throughout the body in the roughly 60,000 miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries. Even considered only as a mechanical pump, the heart is amazing. The heart beats, without ceasing, about 72 times a minute, over 4,000 times in an hour, about 100,000 times in the course of a day, 365,000,000 times in a year, and about 24 billion times in the course of an average lifetime!
Book Review: The Moon Prince and the Sea August 21 2017
Waldorf graduates like Daniela Rose Anderson often carry a global consciousness. They often volunteer for service in unlikely places with the greatest needs. Daniela did such volunteering and came to know a boy named Sumit and a girl named Marina Both were very young and both had terminal leukemia. The heart of Daniela linked the two hearts of the children who shared the same illness from faraway places.Book Review: Award Winning "Helping Children on Their Way" August 16 2017
Waldorf Publications is proud to be recognized by Mom’s Choice Awards with Helping Children on Their WayElizabeth Auer has assembled a remarkable group of educators to write about many aspects of supporting children in their different and varied “stuck places” along the road to a balanced development for life.
Book Review: Earth Science July 17 2017
By Hans-Ulrich Schmutz, PhD
Reviewed by Ronald Koetzsch
Many Waldorf parents and Waldorf teachers regret that they themselves did not receive a Waldorf education. But parts of the Waldorf curriculum can be studied and experienced at any age. Earth Science, by Hans-Ulrich Schmutz, although meant as a guide for Waldorf high school science teachers, gives any rueful adult the opportunity to work through the rich Waldorf earth science curriculum for grades nine through twelve.
Summertime and the Livin’ is Easy — and the Reading is Fantastic July 08 2017
At this time of year being a teacher looks like a good career. After all, teachers “get the summer off!” Sure, they don’t have to show up at school every day, and sure they can wear shorts and sandals instead of dresses and collared shirts. However, once school ends, once reports are completed and meetings subside, the energetic work of preparation begins.
Through books galore, teachers travel to exotic lands from times gone by — India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece if you are a rising fifth or tenth grade teacher — back in time to the reformation in Europe and the many wars around the world in the last 150 years if you are a rising eighth or ninth grade teacher — ‘round the world for the first conscious time with Magellan (was it worth it when so many died along the way?) if seventh grade will be you destination in the fall — back to the land of stories from before recorded history if you are starting as a first grade teacher — and lost in a miraculous world of new life in embryology if you are a twelfth grade teacher.
To be ready for classes in autumn, the reading is varied and enormous in volume.
Book Review: At Home in Harmony: Bringing Families and Communities Together in Song ~ New Release June 29 2017
Meg Chittenden’s new book, At Home in Harmony, Bringing Families and Communities Together in Song is both artistic and magical. The volume is beautiful, from the clean, bright cover to the charmingly illustrated pages of sheet music, to the quick anecdotes about every song. Her goal is to make it easy to learn songs and to add harmonies that can also be absorbed and then sung again and again as accompaniment to life. Singing is so much more beautiful when it harmonizes in a round or when a simple harmony can make a song that is fresh and simple, blossom like a rose in marvelous harmony.Book Review: The Seven Core Principles of Waldorf Education ~ New Release June 24 2017
The Pedagogical Section Council of North America has produced for us another beautiful book to help in understanding the esoteric basis of Waldorf Education,The Seven Core Principles of Waldorf Education (Waldorf Publications, 2017, 124 pages, $24).
The Pedagogical Section Council developed the seven, essential elements that make a school truly a Waldorf school. Pedagogical Section Council members then took up elaborating on each of these principles, the essays written were published in the Research Bulletin over a couple of years, and then the essays were gathered with a few additional treatises on the principles and made into this fine book explaining what makes a Waldorf school a Waldorf school.
Book Review: The Falconer June 11 2017
by Christopher Sblendorio - reviewed by Ronald Koetzsch
In Waldorf schools, history is taught largely through the medium of biography. The life stories of individual human beings, famous and not so famous, good and not so good, are told by the teacher or read in books. Each life, interesting in itself, illuminates the events and conditions of the time in which the person lived.
Can Morality be Taught? June 08 2017
Math and Arithmetic in a Waldorf School May 24 2017
Children learn arithmetic in school. Most of what we call “math” is arithmetic — the skills of computation and calculation. When we do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, times tables, square roots, calculating area — for examples — we are doing arithmetic. Arithmetic is a division or department of mathematics. Geometry, algebra, and calculus are other branches of mathematics.
Teaching children skills in arithmetic tends to be a cause of anxiety in our culture. Comparative studies accomplished in the latter part of the last century, comparing the attitudes of Japanese parents and American parents about arithmetic skills was revealing. Read More