Tag Archives: waldorf-homeschooling

Epiphany

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Epiphany is tomorrow and it’s one of my favorite seasons of the year!  Many families make a cake for Twelfth Night, with a bean or pea tucked inside it for a little Queen or King to find! In England, Twelfth Night is a festive time for merriment and good cheer! (Wassail is a beverage associated with this night as well). In Germany, children dress up as the Three Kings and go from house to house to collect money for a charity (and usually get a sweet or two for themselves and their fine singing!)  In Scandinavian countries, there may be a procession of singers led by “Star Singers” that move from house to house.  Russian children wait for Mama Babouschka to fill their shoes with gifts, as children in Spain wait for gifts from the Three Magi.  Italian children wait for Old Befana to bring gifts as well.  French families typically share a Kings’ Cake.

The day after Twelfth Night is Epiphany.  Epiphany is actually one of the very oldest Christian festivals. If you are wondering what Epiphany/Three Kings Day/Theophany is all about, Christians in the Western Church  celebrate that the 12th night after the birth of Jesus that the Three Kings/Three Wise Men were led by a star to find Him in Bethlehem.  They brought gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh. We know there may not have been three Magi, we know they most likely were not kings, but this is all traditional!  It is also traditionally the time to take down the Christmas tree and all decorations (although some traditions do leave the Christmas greenery up until Candlemas on February second). If you have had the Three Kings traveling around your room to reach the now upright Jesus and St. Mary, that scene can also stay up until Candlemas (February 2).

Besides the Three Kings, also celebrated is  the Baptism of  Jesus and The  Divine Manifestation of the Holy Trinity and the Revelation of Jesus to Man.  There were some great pictures of people celebrating The Feast of Theophany (as the Orthodox church calls it), where waters are blessed and some people around the world plunge into cold waters in remembrance of this special day.  See here for the pictures for this special blessing of the waters:    http://sttheophanacademy.blogspot.com/2010/01/theophany.html

In some parts of Europe, it is customary to incense your house and cleanse it for this time.  One then writes above the front door in chalk C+M+B flanked by the year (so for this year it would look like this:  20+C+M+B+twenty six).  The C,M,B may stand for the Three Kings themselves:   Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, although some of my German friends say the C,M,B stands for “Christ Bless This Home” or a variant of that.

Some other fun ways to celebrate Twelfth Night and Epiphany:

You could bake a cake – either a Kings’ Cake or make the Epiphany Cake on page 242 of “All Year Round” or the “Galette des Rois” on page 154 of “Festivals Family and Food.”  You could also make wassail or some sort of spiced cider. In the past, some years I have made a cake with a bean or baby Jesus to find, and in some years I have done this with a rice pudding.

You could make Twelfth Night a night of games and merriment in your family, complete with riddles to solve, puzzles, games. That’s tonight!

You could take down your Christmas Tree and all greenery. 

You could remember Three Kings Day in a quiet way and read the Gospel accounts of the Three Kings, perform a play as a family, and sing songs special to the occasion.  You could also tell a story – the Legend of the Baboushka, or “An Epiphany Story of the Tree” on page 157 of “Festivals Family and Food”. Some children will receive gifts the morning of Epiphany!

You could prepare for Plough Monday, the Monday after Epiphany.  This used to be the official start to ploughing in England, and is often seen as a general “clean up” day to officially end the Christmas season.

Heading into later January, I love to switch out our Nature Table to a light blue cloth with crystals, a vase of silver-coated branches, and a King Winter.  Some will have an upright Toddler Jesus and St. Mary in their nature space.  I also like January in order to make rose windows, window stars, and stained glass triptychs.  

I hope you are having a lovely season!

Warmly,

Carrie

The Twelve Holy Nights

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Merry Christmas, and a blessed Christmastide to you! 

In times ago and for some today, Christmas was celebrated as a festival of twelve days and thirteen Holy Nights.  Christmas Eve is actually the first of the Holy Nights, with the first day of Christmastide being Christmas and then the Holy Nights extend until Twelfth Night on the eve of January fifth (anyone remember Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare?)  January 6 is of course Epiphany.

These beautiful and inward Holy Nights is one of my most personally fulfilling times of the whole year.  It is a very inward time, a time to dream and a time to plan.  I am using Raising Little Shoots’ wonderful Midwinter Resource for adults, and it is fantastic! You can find it here: https://raisinglittleshoots.com/the-year-of-light-a-gentle-winter-journey-with-god-from-midwinter-to-candlemas/

In general, I do a lot of reflecting and thinking about what I want to see in my family life during the next year and what I want to see in myself.   I try very hard to schedule nothing during this time, and so even though I have to work a few days during Christmastide, I like to have as much time as possible to just be.   With all of our children being ages sixteen to twenty four, this year has been a time of puzzles, reading, and being on the farm. The flu has hit my poor husband, but the rest of us are healthy and for that I am grateful. It’s a good time to rest!

Many Waldorf families mark this time by setting up a path of stars for the Three Kings to travel on to reach the infant Jesus.  Some families make an Advent-type calendar to mark these days.  Some families make a Weather Tree, and have fun guessing what the weather will be like each month of the new year based on the weather of each of the Twelve Days.

This is a great time to play card and board games with your family, to catch up with your family and friends, to grow more intimate with your spouse or partner as you plan and dream together. I love the ideas of couples planning their year ahead together with a big calendar!

One thing I love is to take stock of the past year and look ahead to the New Year.  Like most people, I am not very good at keeping resolutions.  So I normally choose a word of the year to help keep me focused and centered on my priority. I first heard of this practice from Sheila over at Sure As The World, many years ago. So many treasures over there!

This year, my word is ROOTED.  Each year I have done artistic representations of my word with sort of corresponding focus areas represented. One year I did concentric circles with the word of the year in the middle.  I have done trees with the word as the root and some of the focal areas as branches and I have done vision boards. Last year I did a vision board and transferred a line drawing of myself onto the vision board with all the different areas I wanted to think about around that.

This year, I am thinking particularly about my work outside of the home, and where I am headed. I am hopefully going to be able to get into teaching at the college level and streamline some of my clinical work, nd I am looking at PhD programs. I am not young anymore, but I don’t feel particularly daunted by it either. The second thing I am thinking about is my health, because as many of you know I faced a life -threatening challenge in 2023, so keeping physically healthy is a top priority! Lastly, my main goal is to keep making fun memories with the family. The older the kids have become, the more obsessed my husband and I are with them because they are so much fun and such cool people to hang out with! I will be dreaming and drawing and painting throughout Christmastide to see what comes to me in these areas.

For those of you just starting out thinking about Christmastide and the Holy Nights, maybe you would enjoy this introspective approach of using biography to understand yourself as you move into the New Year.  Here are areas of focus for each of the twelve days:

December 25th:  Think about your own birth:  the circumstances, your family, your own physical body as an infant and as a child.  Write down your impressions.  Pick three words that describe your physical body as an infant and child.  Were you frequently sick or robust?  Did you have any physical challenges?

December 26th:  Think about the Early Years, ages 0-7.  Did you feel loved and accepted and as if you belonged?  When you think back, what were you like then?  What composed your whole world?  Do you have an early impressions of nature and how that affected you?

December 27th:  Think about the years 7-14.  What were your habits, the things you did on a daily basis from what you did when you got up, what you did in the afternoons after school, what you did before you went to bed.  What did you do every week on certain days of the week?  How did that shape you?  Does it continue to impact you now?

December 28th:  Think about the years 14-21.  What were the things you loved, what was most important to you?  What did you dislike?  Are the things that were important then still important now or has that totally changed?

December 29th:  Think about the years 21-28 of your life.  What things do you see happening that were the complete hand of God, your destiny?  Relationships, people, births and deaths, things that changed your life and who you were forever?

December 30th:  Think about the years 28-35.   Can you draw yourself at this age and the things in your life at this point?  Did you have a significant experience at the age of 33 or so?

December 31st:  Think about the years  35 – 42 if you are there!  What was most important from this period to you? What do you imagine this to be like?

January 1st:  Think about the years 42-49 if you are there.  What do you have to bring outward into the world during this phase?  What is it you are passionate about?  What will you do with your passions this year?

January 2nd: Pick one of the seven year time periods that really speaks to you from your life.  Draw it.  Get together with a friend and draw those time periods together.  Explain your life during that time period to your friend.

January 3rd:  Think about yourself as a physical entity.  What do you need to do to nurture your physical body this year?  What would be helpful?  How could you make this happen?

January 4th: Think about yourself and the habits and rhythms you create for yourself. If you keep journals, look back through the past years.  What months are you tired?  What months do you feel most energized?  Are you an early or late riser?  What days of the week do you like best and feel most productive?  Are there any rhythms that you should be setting in place for you or your family members so that everyone is happier?  Is life simple or busy?  Do your rhythms support you, or deplete you?  What could you change to make this a simpler and more peaceful year?

January 5th:  Think about what you love.  Name those things.  Name passions you have in books, music, subjects, knowledge.  Are you nurturing those passions?  Are your interests changing?  Name one thing you would like to deepen your knowledge of this year.

January 6th:  How can you nurture your spiritual or your religious side? Do you have a religious community? Do you have any kind of community outside of the four walls of your home?  We were made to be in community with one another.  How will you nurture community this year?

Many blessings,
Carrie

Beauty of April

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I am looking forward to Easter and a lovely Eastertide. It seems to me as if the land is awakening from slumber and the signs of life are so encouraging – the apple tree blossoms, the greening of the pastures, the spring frolicking of the horses. It’s a beautiful place to be.

This month has things worth celebrating! This feeling, along with gratitude, is something to really hold on to in these tight economic times. I think our grown children feel pretty uncertain about the future with the way the economy is. It’s hard to make ends meet, even as one young adult has a good job, and our other child working in a niche industry. Our fifteen year old isn’t quite there yet with having to think about all of that, and I am happy for him to be in high school land for a little longer. The advantages we have as present parents to be able to talk about finances and how to make life flow with our children cannot be overstated. I am so happy all of you are helping to guide your children so well. It’s really invaluable!

Our main festival dates in our family this month include:

13- Palm Sunday

Holy Week

20- Easter Sunday and the start of Eastertide

23- St. George

25- St. Mark

29- St. Catherine of Siena

and I am looking ahead to Ascension Day (Thursday, May 29th) and the Rogation Days that precede Ascension Day ( the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prior to Ascension Day).  There is also a Novena of 9 days that begins on Ascension Day and ends on the Eve of Pentecost.  Pentecost is June 8th! Seems like far away, doesn’t it? Do you have summer plans already?

The other thing to look forward to is Screen Free Week the first week of May! Do you celebrate this? https://screenfree.org/how-to-celebrate/

These are a few of my favorite things this month for my family:

  • Since we will be in Easter and Eastertide here,the  dyeing of eggs, thinking of the Paschal candle and light in our home, indoor dish Easter gardens, Easter carols (yes, they are real!) and attending church are in my heart, This is growing my own garden in my heart.
  • Gardens outside as well – especially leading up to Rogation Days which is a wonderful time to have seeds, gardening tools and homesteads blessed.
  • Spring cleaning, decluttering, and moving ahead with some simple decorating I have wanted to do in our home. We recently built an additional bathroom upstairs, but the amount of projects left at the farm is a bit mind-boggling.

These are a few of my favorite things for small children:

These are a few of my favorite things for grades-age children:

  • Spring handwork – wet felting, making beautiful spring crafts
  • Movement outside and exploring nature
  • Adjusting our rhythm to the seasons, but sticking to strong awake, rest and bedtimes, along with regular nourishing whole foods mealtimes.

These are a few of my favorite things for teens:

**Exploring new interests and possibilities for summer. There are many wonderful camps for the summer. Sometimes by age thirteen or fourteen, the appeal of going to camp dissipates and sometimes it doesn’t, so you can carefully observe your child. It can be hard to know how hard to push.

** Sleep! A lot of teens really need sleep over the summer as they tend to grow over the summer a lot!

These are a few of my favorite things for my own inner work:

In our family:

  • I love to get the vast bulk of my planning done over the summer. Our youngest is in a classical hybrid high school and will be a sophomore in the fall. The singular focus is to get him ready for university and for possible military service, which is his goal right now. So legally we are homeschooling, but I feel as if my planning is done as the off days are following the plans laid out by the hybrid school. Bittersweet!
  • We do have a little work to do in writing over the summer as our high schooler needs to be a bit better in that area.
  • Our oldest two children are adults and we are glad to see them frequently.

Happiest of Spring to you and your family,

Carrie

Read Along With Me – “How the Future Can Save Us”

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We are on page 20 of this wonderful book by Stephen Sagarin, who is a faculty chair, cofounder and teacher at the Berkshire Waldorf High School in western Massachusetts. It is so fun to read his musings on Waldorf Education, and I hope you are enjoying reading along!

We are in Section 7 of the “Method” section and the author talks about how so often we begin Waldorf Main Lesson with this idea of dancing, singing, eurythmy and bean bags. Rudolf Steiner himself said in Soul Economy (by the way, one of my most favorite set of educational lectures compiled and often overlooked by people) that “while a person is engaged in limb activities that simulate the metabolism, thoughts that were artificially planted in the head during the previous years are no longer there. When children jump and run around and are active in the limbs and the metabolism, all thoughts previously planted in the head simply fly away.”

Many homeschoolers have complained for years that they would take the family for a walk prior to school, and then by the time they come back, everyone uses the bathroom and has a snack, half of the morning is gone! Sometimes we have limited time and we really just need to get to work in the grades.

Section 8 discusses taking notes. Those in my generation often wrote down nearly word for word what our teachers were saying, especially in high school and college. We were fast writers! LOL. Sagarin says perhaps this isn’t the best tactic, and he often teaches without having the students take notes and then the next day he comes in and writes a very concise summary on the board that students can copy without having to listen. Think about how you want to approach this in your homeschooling, especially as you move up in the grades. Section 9 is about the value of doodling.

What do you think of this book so far? Here in the States, the school year is fast approaching, and I hope this book gives you some thoughts for your new homeschooling year.

Blessings,
Carrie

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What Curriculum Should I Use?

This question comes up this time of year as folks are looking towards getting things settled for the next school, which here in the States begins in either August or September, depending upon what state you live in.

When I began homeschooling forever ago, it was the time of Yahoo Groups and there really weren’t many options as far as Waldorf homeschooling curriculum. This was also an era where we were warned by Waldorf teachers that we could not bring a true Waldorf education into the home as the class is a social organism.

So is the family. So is the community in which we live. It is not the same as a classroom in a school, but it can be a successful way to educate human beings. With care, children can thrive in and outside of a classroom.

We only had a two paper curricula to choose from, and if we ordered books from Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore, it was usually sight unseen.

Typically, the way I planned was to figure out what Rudolf Steiner said about that age/grade (remember his general indications were much broader than a single grade), look at the blocks for that grade, learn about that subject myself from books from the library (actually read the fairy tales, the fables, read about that period in history, learn about math skills or chemistry or whatever!), think about the three day rhythm for grades aged children – present/practice other academic skills, sleep, review and deepen academic skills, sleep, create something new and a synthesis out of what had been presented. Practice! Put this into a school calendar surrounding the seasons and festival of the year and viola! Another homeschool year is born!

In this day and age, where people are busier than ever and families are often having to work two and three jobs just to stay afloat financially, there is this push for curricula that is open and go, that someone else other than the parent could possibly implement, for a curricula that distills things down. I really do understand that times are different than what they were, that is it hard starting out, and you feel like you don’t know enough about Waldorf education to really authentically bring it. I have been there, and it’s what prompted me to gather people into a homeschooling group and to earn a certificate in The Arts and Anthroposophy.

I think it is STILL always better to create something for your own child that reflects your family, where you live, what speaks to your child than any prepackaged curricula. Most true Waldorf curricula are not open and go, but they do give you a space and a place to jump off the pages and create something. I think the best curricula would probably just be a presentation of options. If it’s a really tough year, maybe a really solid choice would be something like Oak Meadow or another gentle but closer to mainstream curriculum. It is different than Waldorf Education and that is okay as some years in our families are just plain difficult and require different choices. These curriculums are not second choice, they are just different.

Waldorf Education is spiritual; it is the gift of allowing the spiritual journey of the human being open onto earth. It requires us to be touch with the slower, more intuitive and artistic parts of ourselves, which takes and requires time. It might require us tapping into our artistic selves – you don’t have to be an award winning artist or musician or handworking talent, but you have to be willing to try. It might require us hunting and searching and creating what to bring. At its heart, it is also about your development as a person, as a caretaker and parent, and as a teacher.

Putting together a Waldorf curriculum for your child takes time. Most good things in parenting, and in life, do.

If you are looking for more on this topic, try these back posts. Many blessings – Carrie

Which Waldorf Curriculum Do I Buy?
Making A Waldorf Curriculum Work For You!
‘Tis the Season for Choosing Waldorf Homeschooling Curriculum