February Craft: Sweet Dreams Pillow

This could be a Valentine’s Day craft with a sweet note tucked in the pocket, a pocket for dreams and wishes any time of the year, or a pillow for the tooth fairy. Kits and wooden heart beads will be in the Waldorf Academy store while they last.

What you need:

• felt squares in coordinating colours:
  - 2 squares each 8 cm x 8 cm
  - 1 square 5 cm x 5 cm
• 1 bead for decoration (e.g., a wooden heart bead for Valentine’s)
• embroidery floss
• uncooked rice, fleece, or other stuffing
• embroidery needle
• scissors
• funnel

Steps:

1. Thread the needle with 3 strands of embroidery floss.
2. Sew the bead firmly on the small square.
3. Centre the small square on one of the large squares.
4. With a running stitch, sew the small square as a pocket on to the larger square. In other words, sew down one side, across the bottom, and up the other side in order to leave the top open.
5. Use a blanket stitch to sew the 2 large squares together as a pillow. But note: on the final edge, leave an opening of about 3 cm.
6. Insert the funnel and nearly fill the pillow (fill to about 75%, so that it is neither flat nor bulging).
7. Finish sewing the last edge with the blanket stitch.  

Therapeutic Eurythmy Workshop

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

January 31^st, 7-9pm

Join Michael Chapatis and Janet Hendershot for an informative and hands on evening exploring and understanding therapeutic eurythmy and how it can benefit children.

What is Therapeutic Eurythmy?

Eurythmy Therapy is a form of movement therapy, which seeks positive outcomes in physiological, emotional and academic areas.

What are the benefits of Therapeutic Eurythmy?

• Improving posture, mobility, spatial orientation, coordination, breathing, circulation and focus can be addressed.
• A sense of well-being and confidence can be strengthened.
• It can be beneficial in the treatment of many different areas, including but not limited to allergies, anxiety, ADHD, developmental disabilities, and learning difficulties.

Michael Chapitis

Eurythmy Diploma/Performing Arts; Pedagogical Eurythmy Certificate; Eurythmy Therapy Diploma/Medical Section, Goetheanum, Switzerland

Michael Chapitis currently works with Kindergarten to Grade Eight students as a part-time Therapeutic Eurythmy specialist at the Halton and Trillium Waldorf Schools and Waldorf Academy in Ontario.  Of note, it takes 7 years to complete the Therapeutic Eurythmy Program.  Michael received much of his mentoring and further training, from renowned educator, Marjorie Spock, who witnessed the creation of Eurythmy under Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s and who founded Waldorf Schools in North America. Michael offers annual courses in Switzerland to eurythmists and physicians. Michael has been working with Waldorf Academy students since 1999.

Janet Hendershot

B.F.A. (York University), O.C.T., Reading Specialist (University of Toronto), Remedial Specialist (Rudolf Steiner College of Sacramento), Special Education (York University)

Janet has been with the school since 1999 after receiving a diploma in The Extra Lesson and remediation from the Ruldolf Steiner College, Sacramento.  She is a member of the Ontario College of Teachers, qualified to teach Kindergarten through Grade Ten and has taught in public schools.

This evening is supported by ATHENA; the Association for Therapeutic Eurythmy in North America

website: www.therapeuticeurythmy.org

Thank you to the Cheese Boutique for bringing to us our Holiday Fundraiser. We hope you love your CHEESE! We sure did- it raised the school almost $1,500!

Waldorf Academy Cheese Habits
#1Manchengo (Spain)
#2 Lancashire English Cheddar(England)
#3 Ermit(Quebec)
#4  Asiago(Ontario)

MABEL’S LABELS- FUNDRAISER FOR WALDORF ACADEMY BEGINS
GREAT FOR SCHOOL, CAMPS, SPORTS
This new fundraiser is even easier and goes until the end of the school year.
As a way to target the problem of lost belongings and a large lost and found chest, Waldorf Academy is fundraising with Mabel’s Labels, a company with all types of labels that are colourful, indestructible, easy-to-use and fun!
Iron-Ons, Stickies, Bag Tags, Allergy Alert labels & more! Personalize your labels with names, nicknames, initials – whatever you choose. Cool icons help even little ones identify their own belongings. Dishwasher, microwave, laundry & kid tested! Dispatched within 24 hours! Great choices for teens too!
Visit www.waldorf.mabel.ca to place your order while helping our fundraiser!”

Grade 3 a journey not a race to academic excellence

While most schools are focused on delivering a standardized curriculum that prepares the child for the EQAO test, our Grade 3 teacher is preparing a dynamic and experiential year tailored to suit the children in the class because she/he knows a 9 year old child learns best when the approach is artistic and imaginative. By the end of the year the Grade 3 students will have participated in a farming and equestrian block, built and presented a model of a shelter, built a real shelter, learned cursive, knitted a hat, grown a garden, performed in a play for all the students and the community, continued with French, Mandarin and music and go on a two night farm trip.

The study of measurement in the mathematics and science curriculum allows the children to discover how human beings orient themselves on the earth. The children will learn about the earliest attempts to mark the passage of time by watching the cycles of nature to the later inventions of the water clock and sundial, which they may construct as a class. How distance is related to the measurements in the human body ( e.g., the king’s foot being “a foot”) is a fascinating discovery for how the human being is truly the “measure for all things”.

At the end of the year each child and their parent enters the shelter they built with their teacher to partake in a Native American ceremony that celebrates their ability to communicate-cursive writing, to feed themselves- farming and gardening, to provide themselves with a home- they build a shelter, and to provide clothing- they knit a hat.

Which curriculum do you think will nurture the whole child? The 9 year change represents a significant development in the child. Discover how the Waldorf curriculum meets the child and provides them with a deeper education.

Applications for 2012 Grade 3 are being accepted now. Tuition Assistance is available. We encourage those who feel they need financial assistance to apply.  To learn more about our Grade 3 program and tuition assistance please call Sara Anderson, Enrollment Manager at 416-962-6447 ext 225

January 18th School Tour 9:15-10:15 am Registration Required

February 16, Open House 6:30-8:00 pm

Decorated Wooden Boxes

Here are instructions for decorating wooden boxes with scenes from nature. If you are fond of Esla Beskow books or similar, you can easily use them as inspiration. Just make sure you give yourself enough time for the different stages. Light-coloured wood, simple line drawings, and added colour seem to work best. The wood finish tends to darken the wood. For white, you might need to use an acrylic paint.

What you need:

• paper for rough sketches
• medium lead pencil (HB)
• eraser
• a wooden box (one you have made or one purchased unfinished from a craft store; light-coloured wood ideally)
• a wood sample * (This could be the bottom or the box or a different piece of wood entirely. It is for testing the finish on the paint before using on the box.)
• wood-burning tool or a hard pencil (2H, 3H, or 4H)
• watercolour paints and paint brushes
• white paint (craft or acrylic)
• non-toxic wood finish—e.g., Clapham’s Beeswax Salad Bowl Finish (from Lee Valley Tools)

Steps

1. Sketch your drawings on paper and try different arrangements of designs on the box top and sides. If the box combines woods of different shades or textures, plan to have each illustration within one consistent area of wood OR use the variation as part of your design.
2. When your plans are final, lightly sketch your drawings on the box with the HB pencil. If you must erase, do so lightly. Too much erasing will roughen the wood and change the way the wood absorbs paint. (*At the same stage, draw on a wood sample.)
3. If you are using the wood-burning tool, attach the fine point and heat up the wood-burner. Use the fine point to carefully outline your sketch and then work in any shading you want. If you are using a hard pencil, use the pencil both to score and darken the wood. (*At the same stage, burn or score/darken the wood sample.)
4. Before painting, lightly erase any leftover pencil markings and brush away the erasings.
5. With watercolour paint, a brush, and only a little water, start colouring your decorations. Use the white last. Avoid using too much water: it will saturate the wood and make the colours bleed. (*At the same stage, paint the wood sample.)
6. Before the next stage, let the box (paint and wood) dry completely.
7. Following the instructions on the non-toxic wood finish, try the finish on the wood sample to test the paint for bleeding. If the paint bleeds, stop. Try an alternative product on a sample until you find one that does not make the paint bleed. (Clapham’s Beeswax Salad Bowl Finish worked for me but your results might vary with the polish, the watercolour paints, or the wood.)
8. Gently apply the finish to the box, inside and out.
9. 

We are currently between two festivals – Martinmas, a festival promoting selflessness and alleviating poverty, and Christmas, a celebration of family and giving.

This is an appropriate time to teach our children that giving can be as important as getting, and a food drive is a very tangible way of doing this.

I recently created a team to participate in the Holiday Challenge benefiting Daily Bread Food Bank. The money we raise will go towards helping those who are hungry in our communities. Last year, there were over 794,000 client visits to Daily Bread’s member agencies.

Most needed items:

• Baby formula & food
• Beans & lentils
• Canned fruits & vegetables
• Canned fish & meat
• Cans of soup or hearty stew
• Dried pasta & tomato sauce
• Macaroni & cheese
• Peanut butter
• Rice
• Canned, powdered or Tetra Pak cartons of milk
• MONEY!!

Please give generously online and help our kids help others.  Online donations via http://dbfb.convio.net/goto/waldorf

Patricia Meindl (aka Douby’s Mom)

Here in Toronto it has also appealed to many of us from the film industry, theatre and literary circles. From my own experience working in the  film industry on a few great shows such as Good Will Hunting down to the iconic Half Baked(what can I say)  it was clear that creativity was the key to success. And I am not talking about imagination but disciplined creativity. This does not require that a child watch more TV or play video games. Those activities are clearly passive and will not develop the skills required to imagine, conceptualize and deliver an original script or story or even a new medium.

When you work in film it is also abundantly clear that a lot of what we are making is crap that is designed to get children to comsume more and more junk and pester their parents mercilessly until they cave in. And so the same goes with hi-tech.

As my nieces from LA noted at Terroni’s one night, that even though a family with three kids, one was under two, each had  hand held devices,  they still made a racket, knocked over their drinks, fought and got out of their seats.

Another interesting experience occurred on a family holiday to Mexico in the hotel lounge. Four large families had gathered near our group and all their children were sitting quietly next to each other playing their own solitary computer games. The parents started playing a card game called Wizard. It just so happens that my youngest who was 7 years old lat the time, loves the game and joined in with the adults.  There was laughter, conversation, trickery, elation, defeat but it did not include their 6 children. They simply did not interact.

Which brings me to the latest NY Times article on Waldorf Education.  No longer is it just the film industry sending their kids to Waldorf but the hi-tech gurus themselves. You gotta love it! Waldorf education has stayed true to the needs of the child for almost 100 years and it has not led them astray. Despite the trends in each new generation, it works. One has to choose whether they want to support the profit margins of the hi-tech companies and waste valuable funds on equipment that can at best be only regarded as a mediocre tool or invest in educational pedagogies  that respect and support passionate and creative teachers that understand child development.

More articles of interest:

A ground-breaking article in Scientific American, The Death of Preschool, lends full support to the Waldorf approach in the early years.  Although the article does not mention Waldorf, all the research quoted as beneficial to childhood development supports what we do and how we do it.

This article is going viral as we speak.  Please follow the link to get a preview of the article: The Death of Preschool, Scientific American Magazine

A great book my friends at Savvymom  recommended to me and has been our bible for watching film classics:

Best Old Movies for Families: A Guide to Watching Together By Ty Burr

Jen Deathe

Marketing Manager

HELP!!!

For those of you doing crafts for the Winter Fair and wanting some tips, talk to other parents, ask other crafty people you know, or get some help from a web site. Here are some useful web sites (for example, if you find yourself sleepless at 1 a.m. and suddenly confused by the blanket stitch):

• blanket stitch (with pictures!) <http://www.futuregirl.com/craft_blog/2007/09/tutorial-hand-sew-felt.aspx>
• basic embroidery stitches <http://www.sublimestitching.com/stitches>
• French knots: <http://www.feelingstitchy.com/2007/06/french-knot.html>
• all about needles: <http://www.feelingstitchy.com/2007/08/needle-in-haystack.html>

If you are not yet doing crafts, try one. They don’t take much time, are easy to learn, contribute to the school, role model good stuff to our children, and can get pretty darn trance-inducing.

Bean Bags

Bean bags are really easy to make, fun as toys and paperweights, and handy for gifts. If you make many at a time and bundle them in groups of 3, you have gifts ready to wrap and give.

What you need:

• cotton fabric—to cut into rectangles each measuring 7 inches by 3 ½ inches
• sewing thread in a complementary colour
• sewing needle (sewing machine: optional)
• rice for filling

Steps:

1. Measure and cut each rectangle and then fold so that right sides face each other to create a square.
2. Leaving a seam allowance of ½ inch, hand sew with small stitches (or use a sewing machine) to close all sides except an opening 2 inches wide.
3. Trim fabric at the corners to make turning the sewn square right side out easier.
4. Turn the sewn square right side out.
5. Fill the square bag ¾ full with uncooked rice.
6. Hand sew the opening with small stitches.

For a variation, use the same skills to create rice pillows. See Wise Craft’s Rice Pillow instructions < http://blairpeter.typepad.com/weblog/2008/02/make-a-rice-pil.html >.

Knitter Pin

These could make small gifts for the knitters. (The coin in the photo is simply to show scale.)

What you need:

• 2 small wooden beads
• 2 round toothpicks
• leftover yarn
• sewing thread in a complementary colour
• broach backing or safety pin
• sewing needle
• white glue

Steps:

1. On the end of each toothpick, glue a wooden bead (to make a knitting needle).
2. Cross the “knitting needles” and wind leftover yarn around them to form a small ball of yarn around the needles.
3. With sewing thread, sew a broach backing or safety pin on one side of the yarn-and-needle combination.

Books

Need inspiration? Here are some ideas for books, some new and others older but all enduring. Check for them at your local bookstore or library:

• Fa la la la Felt by Amanda Carestio, Lark Books
• Stash Happy Felt by Amanda Carestio, Lark Books
• Super-Cute Felt by Laura Howard, Ryland Peters
• Martha Stewart’s Handmade Holiday Crafts
• Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts
• Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts
• Sublime Stitching by Jenny Hart

While attending a conference at the Rudolf Steiner College in Sacramento, California I was able to go back and forth to the dorm accommodations via the most beautiful biodynamic garden. This garden includes a beehive, poultry, sheep, goats and cows. It feeds 60 people. They offer all kinds of courses. The one that intrigued me the most was the beekeeping course- after one weekend you will be all set to start your own beehive at your school. click here for more info about this beautiful college and farm

The Annex Eco-Park Alliance Inc

Present a proposal for the Mcpherson Eco-Park
Located at the east corner of Spadina Rd and MacPherson Ave and extending to Davenport Rd, “The Eco Park” will provide green space for the Annex Community and supply renewable energy to the surrounding neighbourhood. The park site is approximately two acres in size and is an active utility corridor.  The site was previously used as a parking lot but is now abandoned and no longer serves the growing community in a positive way.  Through the efforts of the local councilors, Hydro One has donated this site to the City of Toronto under the condition that it is used as a park.

The central concept behind The Eco Park is to transform this abandoned parking lot into a park space that will feature renewable energy sources and a full ecological restoration of the site.  The original plan was to install a geothermal heat exchange system, solar pavilion and wind turbine in the park space,  additionally, native plant species will be planted throughout the park to reduce CO₂ levels, increase Toronto’s tree canopy, and provide green space for the surrounding community.

That was an excerpt from the proposal.  Councillor Josh Matlow has announced it has been approved but there are many changes that had to take place as a result of the feasibility study and the many stakeholders involved.

For more info please contact Josh Matlow or Peter Griffin