Third Grade Farm Trip

Contributor: Diana Carlson, Class Teacher of Grade 3 of 2015-16

I have just returned from spending a week with my third graders at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, New York.  We had a great time!  The students baked bread, made butter, and cooked supper for their classmates and teachers.  They planted seeds as the spring leaves popped around them in the April sunshine.  They woke in the chill dawn to feed and water the cows, chickens, pigs, and horses.  They also rode those horses, and cleaned those cows’ barn, and looked for eggs in the hen-house.  They skipped stones and waded in the river and ran and climbed trees, with old friends and new.  In the evenings they sang together, and practiced being quiet together so that everyone could settle down to sleep.Farm Trip 2016

Farm Trip 2016

The farm trip meets the developing nine-year old in many important ways.  For most of my students, this was their first extended time away from their family.  The nine-year old is developing an individual interior world; for the first time they realize that they can have thoughts and experiences that are theirs alone.  The experience of the farm trip, although shared with familiar classmates and teachers, is an individual, personal life experience outside of the family round.  Many of the students expressed surprise at how little they missed their families; they almost felt a little guilty at first, as if their self-sufficiency denied their affection for their families.  When the families arrived to pick up their dirty, happy children on Friday morning, the students were thrilled to reconnect and share their experiences with their parents and siblings.  They experienced that a separation is not a severing, and that they are able to have individual experiences and still remain connected, even over distance and time, to their loved ones.  This foundational experience gives the child the confidence to move out into the world in ever widening arcs as they mature.

We had the opportunity to share our farm experience with students from the Primrose Hill School in Reinbeck, New York.  The children enjoyed getting to know one another and see how another Waldorf third grade can be similar and yet different.  We knew many of the same songs and poems, we were following the same curriculum as outlined by Rudolf Steiner, we were the same ages.  And yet we had different class cultures, different personalities.  By the end of the week however, the farm teachers commented that the groups had integrated so harmoniously that they couldn’t tell which students were from Meadowbrook and which were from Primrose Hill.

The farm experience deeply connects the child to the third grade science and geography curriculum.  Now these students really “know” cows – their size, their smell, their slick noses and rough tongues, their beautiful eyes and placid natures.  To know a cow in this way is to have a deeper connection to all that comes from the cow – butter, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, leather, hamburgers.  The students also gain an understanding of the amount of work that creates their daily meals.  One student commented on how difficult it was to clean out the barn – how strenuous, how smelly, how relieved he was to never have to do that again.  And one of the farm teachers remarked, “Yes, and think – somebody has to do that every day or you would never be able to have ice cream!”  The realization that all we enjoy is derived from the work of others cultivates gratitude and a true understanding of the interconnectedness of our world.

Farm Trip 2016 IIThe experience of being at the farm planted seeds of understanding in the hearts and minds of my students.  I look forward to watching these seeds sprout and blossom in the years ahead.  I am grateful to Meadowbrook and to the parents of the third grade class for making this trip possible.

Finding Quiet

Contributed by Sarah Wiberg, Parent-Child Class Teacher

Parent-Chid Class Table Quiet Crafting
Tea and crafting is part of the rhythm in the Parent-Child classroom. This time offers parents a creative activity and time to connect while the children play.

I am currently enrolled in the Birth to Three Training at Sophia’s Hearth, in Keene, NH. As I was reflecting on my week of training last month,  I began to see that this training is meeting me professionally and personally in such a deep way. I  have been called to grow in ways I did not expect.

Practicing Quietness

One of those opportunities for growth came in the form of practicing and embracing quietness. One of my teachers put into question my own practice of quiet. I had been so proud of all the things that I could juggle in my mind and still appear calm on the outside. I started to realize that I do not allow enough quiet moments to come into my day – moments that could really fill and restore me instead of constantly feeling frazzled.

“A quiet mind and calm environment is fertile ground for creative play and safe social experiences and interactions.”

During class, I am often able to find a place of quiet. The strong rhythm of the morning offers opportunities to follow what is known so well and I enjoy a calm, quiet mind.  The children can often find that peace in the day when they are surrounded by what is predictable. A quiet mind and calm environment is fertile ground for creative play and safe social experiences and interactions.

Modeling Quiet for our Children

Our children find this peace when we are able to find it for ourselves. Through our modeling, they learn to feel calm in their environment.  This might be the hardest to achieve for parents.  I will be the first to admit that there are many times that it is easier to be the teacher in a class than a parent at home.  At home it is easy to become distracted by the demands of life; dishes, laundry, ironing, making lunches for school, cleaning the living room, vacuuming the floor…(care to add a few more?)  And I did not even mention the work expectations, evening meetings, or different family commitments.  How is one ever able to find a quiet moment at home with the ever-running list of responsibilities and commitments?

During the season that seems to pull us in so many directions, I challenge you as I have challenged myself, to find a quiet moment each day.  This moment could be to meditate, reflect on something in nature, read a book, or just observe our children as they play.  In this moment we may also make time for finding gratitude for what we have in our lives.  This practice helps us to find the positive in each day when it is so easy to feel overwhelmed.  Our children will feel this shift and begin to reflect it in their own lives.

Here is one of my favorite verses.

Felted Art Quiet Winter NightQuiet I bear within me
I bear within myself
Forces to make me strong
Now will I be imbued
With their glowing warmth
Now will I fill myself
With my own will’s resolve
And I will feel the quiet
Pouring through all my being,
When by my steadfast striving
I become strong
To find myself within myself
The source of strength,
The strength of inner quiet.
 -Rudolf Steiner

Many blessings during this Holiday Season.

Faire Thai Soup

Thia soup I (475x541)Serving this soup has become tradition on the Friday night before Holiday Faire. A throng of volunteers arrive to transform the school into a festive wonderland and by 8pm they are starving. So the table is set up and out comes the spicy Thai curry soup. The recipe has been requested so many times that I have finally tried to write it down to share but really, this is more a set of guidelines than a recipe. Follow your taste buds, find the balance that suits you between spicy, salty, sweet and sour.

Click here: Thai Soup

What your own biography wants to teach you

How have I come to be who I am? Does my life, and the relationships I form within it have lasting meaning? Each of us is born into a specific life situation, a set of seemingly random circumstances encompassing gender, inherited genetic and ethnic traits, a social grouping that may – or may not, help us to thrive. While the nature-nurture debate rages on we all know of instances, perhaps within our own families where similar life situations produce very different individuals leading very different lives. In her new book, Why on Earth: Biography and the Practice of Human Becoming, Signe Elkund Schaefer explores the idea that each of our lives expresses a uniqueness of spiritual intention within the unfolding of universal rhythms and possibilities. What mysteries are at work in the development of human consciousness, in the unfolding of history, in the evolution of the universe? Continue reading →