By Sarah Addae
As I am teaching a block, I often notice all of the different things a particular subject connects to. It is actually amazing sometimes how many different connections exist – not only between subjects, but between different years and grades. I’ve been able to pull in a memory from several grades earlier with the children and point to where we are going in a particular subject.
Math lends a grounding to the social sciences like history. If you’re studying geography, for instance, and you discuss distances, temperatures, topography, and population, in the upper grades, you’re looking at how to use navigational instruments and how to use the stars to navigate. That experience of not knowing where you are but trying to orient yourself from the sky is one that can arise time and again through camping trips and wilderness experiences, too.
Now that the golden leaves are fading and the days grow shorter and colder, we have the opportunity to cultivate our inner summer, to nourish our inner light. Autumn and winter give us time to pause and turn inward to reassess our actions, to think about the direction of our lives, to reach out to others with warmth of heart, to count our blessings. We celebrate this inner light in a variety of ways in Waldorf education. Just as Michaelmas was the harbinger of Autumn, we have several heralds of Winter, each one created to meet specific ages at our school.
I wanted to thank the school and staff for bringing Diana Graber to speak to Sandpoint about Cyber Civics. As a parent of four children, ages 15, 13, 9, and 3, I was very interested in her topic!
One of my favorite aspects of Ms. Graber’s approach was how respectful it was to our teens and pre-teens. The world is filled with technology, and whether you restrict your children from it or not, they will encounter it. Just like other challenging subjects that tend to come up as our children rise toward adulthood (like sex), it’s best to be honest with them and give them the right amount of accurate information for their age. By entrusting them with the truth, respecting them enough to be honest, and being vulnerable about our concerns (and yes, fears!) in their best interest, we put them in a wonderful position to make healthy, confident choices.
Autumn is the season to harvest the bounty and give thanks for the abundance. The season has us storing up for the winter and counting our blessings for all that has come into fruition over the planting and growing season. This autumn, as I begin my last year in this journey with the SWS graduating class of 2020, it occurs to me that there is the spirit of autumn in the eighth-grade year. The planting and growing has been occurring over the course of the last seven years, the harvest time is now, and there is a lot to be thankful for. My feelings of gratitude find themselves neatly dividing into three distinct categories: for my colleagues at the Sandpoint Waldorf School, for the parents of my students and all of the Sandpoint Waldorf School community, and for my students and all of the students here at the Sandpoint Waldorf School.