What Are the Needs of Five Year Olds?
Ask Kytka Archives: July 22, 2002

This question comes just at the right time. The lovely Ms. Joan Almon, Waldorf Kindergarten Master Teacher and Chairman of the Waldorf Kindergarten Association has allowed us to reprint this article:

What Are The Needs of Five Year Olds?
by Joan Almon

A Waldorf kindergarten is an extension of the family experience, an intermediate step for the child between the home and formal schooling. The goal is to provide a warm, calm, secure, aesthetic environment in which the imagination and creativity of the child will flourish.

The quality of the environment of a Waldorf kindergarten is integral to its goals for the children. The feeling of warmth and security is created by using only natural materials: woods, cotton, wool in the construction of the decor and toys. The curtains transmit a warm glow into the room. In this warm environment are placed toys which the children can use to imitate and transform the activities that belong to everyday adult life. In one corner stands a wooden scale and baskets for children to pretend they are grocery shopping; a pile of timber stands ready to be constructed into a playhouse, a boat or a train; a rocking horse invites a child to become a rider; homemade dolls lie in wooden cradles surrounded by wooden frames and cloths the children can use to create a pretend family and play house. (more…)

Waldorf Succeeds in Public Schools
by Claudia M. Lenart

The innovative Waldorf methods could provide an enriching education experience for any child, but for most families, a private Waldorf education is unaffordable. Private K-12 Waldorf schools cost an average of $8,000 to $11,000 per year. While some schools offer sliding scale tuition, the education still may be out of reach. Yet “Waldorf methods are so exciting and enlivening for all children that they shouldn’t be reserved just for those who can afford it,” says George Hoffiker, principal of the Yuba River Charter School, a Waldorf method school in Nevada City, California.

Mary Goral, a professor at Mt. Mary College in Milwaukee and director of the early childhood education program, teaches graduate students and teacher enrichment classes on Waldorf-inspired pedagogy for public schools. “I truly believe what is needed in public schools is something much more like Waldorf, something that engages the whole child — body, spirit, and soul,” says Goral.

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Educating the Whole Child
by Claudia M. Lenart

“I like to use the analogy of a Waldorf School as a garden and the teacher as the gardener. Our job is not to turn a cabbage into a rose or a rose into a cabbage, but to weed and mulch so the cabbage is the healthiest and best you’ve ever seen and the rose is the most beautiful and the best you’ve ever seen,” says Susan Stevenson, a teacher at Chicago Waldorf School.

“One of the chief tasks of Waldorf education is to bring life to knowledge,” said Waldorf education founder Rudolf Steiner, in “Deeper Insights into Education.” He believed teaching could never be

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Ask Kytka Archives: March 2, 1999
Do you know any “waldorf” halloween stories?

The Little Hobgoblin: A Halloween Story

Once there was a little hobgoblin who lived deep in the woods, in a little rocky dell. He was a very naughty little hobgoblin, for his favorite pastime was to play tricks on the farmers, and on the farmer’s children, and on the townspeople, and on the townspeople’s children.

When night came and it was dark outside, the little hobgoblin would peer out of his little rocky dell, and if the moon were shining, and the stars were peeping, the little hobgoblin would creep out through the woods. He would sneak right into

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