Our family is preparing to say goodbye to one of the most invaluable influences in our childrens’ lives and our own as young parents.

I remember first starting out at Grow With Me. How my oldest son sprung from my arms headstrong into the action on the playground. How the parents who approached me were so kind but their faces blurred together and I couldn’t remember anybody’s name for weeks as I bounced my toddler around in an Ergo. How Ms. Katy welcomed all of the children with loving enthusiasm and held my youngest with warmth and familiarity while I executed volunteer duties.

I remember how the classroom began to feel like a refuge, with its soft colors and wooden toys, how pleased I was when my son wrapped a silk around a babydoll and nurtured it. This was before he found his tribe of rambunctious young boys who tromped around with sticks playing rough-and-tumble games despite most parents’ efforts to refrain from encouraging gender-specific play.

My son made a best friend. He gleaned his first innocent kiss. He ran and played and explored and splashed in puddles and planted seeds and dug in the dirt and constructed lean-to shelters and watched tadpoles grow. Every time I dropped him off, it felt like I was giving him a precious gift of a childhood from another simpler era. He is now thriving in school, and I feel like Ms. Katy and the classroom community played a huge part in this.

As a mother, I relished the guidance that our conscious discipline training provided us. I began to understand where my child’s big emotions were coming from and how to react to them in a way that was helpful. I gained language skills, ways to connect with my son in a way I never had before.

We all gained a loving community.

When my oldest graduated from the program and my youngest started attending, he felt right at home in a seamless transition. He’d been going to Grow With Me for as long as he could remember, after all. His enthusiasm for creative play and close friendship was stoked, he was gently reminded to be inclusive and kind, and he was encouraged to be assertive.

When he was sick in the hospital, Ms. Katy came and stroked his hand and told him a story while he was sitting through tedious testing. His classmates made him a bundle of cards that he still keeps by his bedside as a reminder of their love. He also made a best friend and gleaned a first innocent kiss. (Though this experience seems to be very specific to our family; please don’t be scared off by this intimation. I don’t know what it is about my two boys; I like to think they are simply affectionate. Ms. Katy holds strong boundaries in the classroom and encourages consent when it comes to ANY type of contact- a hug, a handshake, etc)

My youngest son will graduate in May. I don’t know exactly what it will feel like to not be a part of such a beautiful, thriving community of families, but I do know I don’t have to worry- we have made lifelong friends here. I do know that joining Grow With Me was the most unexpectedly rich and nurturing experience, and that I and my boys will reap the benefits of it for many years to come.

Daisies nod to daffodils, little children run up hills…

Along with the latent energy of spring bursting forth in the natural world, so, too, does the energy in our preschoolers. We note a restlessness building as the daffodils and tulips emerge and as the thermometer rises, Grow With Me friends spill out of the inside classroom into the upstairs playground as part of an extension of our morning free play, in addition to the regular outside time spent on the lower level exploring our ravine. It is a beautiful and bustling time of our year.

Speaking of the lower playground, during a recent community workday, parents came together to construct a new mud kitchen connected to a rejuvenated sandbox area, which has witnessed an explosion of newly inspired creative play. As the day of work drew to a close, our families partook in a potluck and enjoyed the festive tunes of our resident parent musicians.

Families also recently gathered for a whimsical family celebration around the May Pole. The day was sun-drenched and warm and began with the children threading flowers through braided bands, which adorned their sweet heads as they marched in procession to the pole where they manned their long ribbons, and the community sang as children encircled the pole with vibrant spring colors. Then ensued face-painting, popsicles, and a spring-themed puppet show put on by Ms. Katy and Ms. Jenny in the Waldorf tradition.

This particular spring took awhile to fully get off the ground, as Old Man Winter proved to be a stubborn guest overstaying his welcome. He retreated reluctantly back to the north, with only bits of sunshine and warmth punctuating his dreary presence. The children coaxed him with reminders of spring’s wonder, cultivating sprouting seeds on the classroom windowsills, pretending to be germinating seeds themselves during circle time, and chatting about the signs of spring they had discovered in the outdoors.

Springtime forest days are especially fun, as we witness nature awakening firsthand on the fecund forest floor. Creek stomping gives way to rhododendron leaf races, crawdad and salamander buddies, and muddy children.

Grow With Me ventured out for two outings this spring: one in education and one in service, but both a lot of fun! Our friends explored the WNC Nature Center and assisted with food sorting at Manna Food Bank, two wonderful organizations in our area.

For Mother’s Day, the classroom mothers received a gift that will dwell in our gardens and hearts for years to come as Ms. Katy facilitated a particularly special craft with our children, and we all took home concrete garden stones imprinted with our child’s hand.

As we wish each other well and send our graduates off into the bright unknown, we look forward to park play dates during the summer months that nurture Grow With Me’s strong sense of community that makes it such a magical place to be young (and old).

Here at Grow With Me, we are most strongly influenced by tenants of Waldorf early education: rhythm, reverence, and repetition. Founded by Rudolph Steiner in 1919 in Germany, the focus of Waldorf philosophy is on developing the whole child as a well-rounded being with a strong, thoughtful foundation.

While our school does bring in many elements of Waldorf, we try to do so while remaining open-minded and not strictly tied to any educational approach, and we are not an officially registered Waldorf school. So what does it look like as we incorporate Waldorf philosophy in our classroom?

*Daily Rhythm and Reverance

Our children have a consistent daily rhythm that unfolds predictably each day and is marked by external cues such as the church bells, the clean-up bell, and songs that signal the next activity. We hold a goodbye circle with parents in the morning and sing a familiar song to ease the transition from home to the classroom, we sing a blessing and light a candle each time we gather around the table to eat snack and lunch, and we sing a song to close the day each afternoon.

*Natural Materials

The environment of our classroom is pieced together with intention. Our walls are decorated minimally, the lighting is soft and provided by lamps and twinkle lights, we pay close attention to cleanliness and organization, and the toys and supplies provided are mostly composed of natural materials (and many made by American artisans and craftsmen). Wooden dollhouses, handmade dolls filled with stroked wool, naturally dyed play silks, and blocks created from slices of branches are just a few of the items our children come into contact with on a daily basis.

*Handwork

You will find our students beading, weaving, stringing leaves, and molding beeswax. Handwork takes precedence over handwriting in Waldorf early education, though at Grow With Me we do encourage children to foray into writing their own names if they so desire. The thought is that we encourage little ones to develop fine motor and dexterity prior to asking children to form letters, so that when the time comes for them to write, they will be fully equipped.

*Painting and Artwork

A Waldorf approach to art focuses on engaging young creative imaginations rather than prescribed projects with lines and specific directions, though guidelines are sometimes provided. Our class painting day is Thursday and the students often paint on thick watercolor paper with rich, primary watercolors from glass ramekins. Ms. Katy refrains from guessing what children are creating, but instead poses the open-ended question… “tell me about your painting!”

*Storytelling

Here we break away from strict Waldorf philosophy a bit; Ms. Katy is an artful storyteller and engages the class with felted props, story stones, and by involving the students in acting roles, however, we do also love our books at Grow With Me. Waldorf dictates a rich storytelling tradition, which Ms. Katy embodies beautifully, but discourages books with printed pictures. As flexible Waldorfers, we find that most of our families are readers, and our children are big fans of books that supplement our curriculum.

*Caring for the Classroom

Our daily rhythm includes chores. Waldorf education emphasizes a home-like environment where all members are responsible for upholding its condition. Students contribute to the meal preparation by chopping and measuring and the cleanliness of the classroom through daily chores. Children are assigned a job each week with this beautiful chore chart, as well as daily chores, such as sweeping, spraying and wiping the table, and dusting. They also participate in serving snack, and are responsible for washing their own dishes afterward.

*Seasonal Nature-focused Curriculum 

At Grow With Me, though sometimes we will dabble in early phonetics and counting though casual conversation with the children, we refrain from focusing on these skills in our classroom teachings. Lessons instead emphasize themes like identifying changing seasons in the nature, storytelling, shapes, the five senses, and character traits like kindness and helpfulness. We flow with the changing of the seasons; when the weather is warm in the spring, the children’s energy is so big that we open the outside as part of the playroom and incorporate water play and bubbles. Our snack menu is also seasonal; winters see root vegetables and soups while warmer weather ushers in smoothies and fruit popsicles.

*Unstructured Play

The daily rhythm leaves ample time for unstructured play, and the adults do their best to refrain from interfering and guiding the group dynamic. We aim to intervene to assist with conflict resolution, guide a group whose play has become dangerous or hurtful, or offer a fun activity such as garden chores or a craft.  We believe in their big imaginations and in giving them space to expand without adult influence.

January has really delivered this year with it’s single-digit temperatures and two good snowfalls to date. Upon returning to Grow with Me after winter break, the children enjoyed a good romp in the leftover snow on the ground, while last week an overnight snow storm canceled school for two days.

Inside the classroom, the children have been busy learning about and exploring their five senses and experimenting with ice using salt and colored water in the playroom.

Outside, they discovered the kale in the garden was still growing even after the frigid temps we experienced as we ushered in 2018 (Ms. Katy’s kale at home did not fare so well!) They became a family of kale-loving bunnies and nibbled the cold-sweetened leaves. Often parents will find kale leaves tucked away in jacket pockets or backpacks.  It is a wonderful thing when a culture of healthy eating choices takes hold of a group of preschoolers and nibbling kale becomes trendy. Grow with Me reinforces choices such as these by involving children in whole-foods snack preparation and tending the vegetable garden.

Lately, the children have also been loving creating vibrant chalk drawings, taking turns scooting down the hill aboard the big toy dump trucks and pretending to be dinosaurs. Luckily most of the extremely cold temperatures haven’t been occurring on school days- but weather certainly doesn’t stop Ms. Katy and her students!

Just before winter draws us inward, Grow With Me friends and families have ample occasion to enjoy the festivities of the season together. Our co-op shares several heartfelt annual holiday traditions.

We kick things off by gathering for a Stone Soup Thanksgiving family potluck. In the weeks leading up the feast, Ms. Katy uses her storytelling magic to impart upon the children a beautiful folk story of a hungry community coming together to contribute one ingredient per family to a large pot of stone soup that they then share among themselves in celebration. We in turn bring in one ingredient per family to contribute to our own communal pot of Thanksgiving soup, which we enjoy together. It is a warm, noisy gathering of families and the children are excited to share the event with their loved ones.

During the month of December, Grow With Me meets at a local nursing home to sing carols for the residents. We parade through the halls with our voices and instruments before convening in a community room to perform the carols the children have practiced in school. It is a magical and emotional experience to see the faces of the elderly, injured and disabled alight with the joy of the children’s infectious holiday spirit. We look forward to it every year.

And the culmination of the season is Grow With Me’s Solstice Spiral, where past and present Grow With Me families gather to carry our candles through the darkness into the spiral as a symbol of the promise of the light’s yearly return.  This year we were graced with the primal rhythms of drums played by a former Grow With Me family, and after the ritual of walking the spiral was complete, a gaggle of kids of all different ages overran the upstairs playground with the laughter and screams of a familiar tribe in play while inside families gathered and partook in holiday treats.

May the joy of the holidays sustain you through the cold winter days while we hold onto the sun’s promise of the Solstice.

 

Rhythm plays a most important role in Waldorf education, and that includes both a daily and seasonal rhythm. The “curriculum” involves bringing the outside world within our four walls- working with materials gleaned from nature and its seasons. So far this fall we’ve been apple picking, pressed apple cider, harvested and roasted sweet potatoes from our own garden, decorated pumpkins, collected leaves and preserved them in a beeswax dip, explored signs of autumn in the forest, talked of the preparations our animal friends are making for winter,  and enjoyed listening to stories and verses rooted in seasonal themes.

Our mid-morning snack also reflects the offerings of the season, and lately has included squash soup, roasted root vegetables, and all things apple. And as part of our daily rhythm, the children help with snack prep by peeling and chopping vegetables and fruits.

Below you’ll find a simple kid-friendly recipe for the roasted root vegetables we so often enjoy for snack during the cooler months:

Sweet potatoes

Yukon gold potatoes

Beets

Coconut or olive oil

Salt

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Scrub veggies and peel beets. The adult can slice the vegetables into 1/4 inch slices and allow the child to chop the slices into bite-size pieces with a chopper like this one. Toss veggie bits with oil until coated and spread onto a baking sheet. Season with salt to taste.

Bake at 450 for 30-40 minutes, removing to stir about halfway through. Allow veggies to cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Bon appetit and happy fall!

One day a month, Grow With Me moves school to the forest.  On Forest Days there is lots of time for exploring, building, playing, and (weather permitting) splashing!  Each Forest Day also includes a nature walk where Ms. Katy teaches us a bit about the amazing plants that call the forest home.