Gateways

Download the article: A Trip to Africa

In March, I spent three intense but wonderful weeks in Africa. My journeys took me first to Baobab Teacher Training Institute in Alexandra Township in Johannesburg. There I had the good fortune of working with Truus Geraets who helped found Baobab and who now lives in Los Angeles, as well as Jane Johannson, a kindergarten teacher and class teacher from the L.A. area. On the Baobab faculty are two of the long-standing kindergarten teachers, Fundie Mndende and Catherine Sefatsa, and new this year is Anna Marie Hernandez, a kindergarten teacher and eurythmist originally from Mexico. After a few difficult years, Baobab is struggling to build itself up again. The faculty is working very hard and is in need of much help.

My second stop was in Cape Town at the Centre for Creative Education where the township work has been growing rapidly. Block courses were taking place while I was in town, and it was wonderful to see the puppetry work led by Eldbjorg Paulsen, a visiting Norwegian kindergarten teacher. Together we performed “The Winning of Kwelanga,” and doing that beautiful Zulu story in Africa was a wonderful experience, as was giving talks to township parents and teachers.

Download the article: Book Review - The Challenge of the Will

Written by Margret Meyerkort and Rudi Lissau

This small book is a tremendous offering for anyone interested in deepening her understanding of the will and how it works in many facets of human life. Steiner characterized the will as an aspect of human life to which we are asleep. The authors, both Waldorf teachers of many years experience, offer some guidance for our own waking up to the working of the will in young children and in human beings of all ages. The various levels of the will, as described in lecture four of The Study of Man by Rudolf Steiner, are presented in a very accessible manner. From there, we are led through the penetration of will into the development of walking, speaking, and thinking.

Download the article: Book Review - The Wonder of Lullabies

CD and Songbook by Mary Thienes Schunemann

Mary is a trained Waldorf kindergarten teacher and she has compiled a CD of simple and beautifully sung lullabies with a songbook. Her collection includes traditional as well as nontraditional songs. She describes the collection in this way: “I am recording a CD to celebrate the wonders of lullabies [and] to help encourage parents, teachers, and care givers of young children to sing these beloved songs once again.” The greatest challenge will be to resist playing the CD directly to the children but only use it an adult aid for learning the songs. The children need to hear them live with our own human warmth streaming through our voices, for as Mary says, “Singing to children shows we care and love them.” – J.A.

Mary may be reached at W2870 County Road ES, East Troy, Wisconsin, 53120. Telephone (262) 642-5921; Fax (262) 642-3375. She is also available to teach workshops.

Download the article: Book Review - Agatha Christie's Autobiography

In this excerpt, Agatha Christie, whose mysteries are read worldwide, gives us a wonderful picture of a young child’s experience of separateness leading up to calling himself “I.” At the same time, young children also experience a oneness with the world. They are fully connected with all they experience and it is from this that the child’s total trust in the world arises. The experience of separateness develops slowly, reaching a crescendo at the nine-year change. Can we consider how both of these perspectives can be true? These polarities of separateness and oneness exist simultaneously in the child’s development and challenge us to be flexible in observing seemingly contradictory realities. – S.S.

Download the article: Anna Keefe - Memories of a Friend

My dear friend Anna Keefe died on Sunday, November 28, 1999, in her own living room at about four o’clock in the afternoon. She was having tea with Mary, a high school friend she had known for thirty-seven years. She suddenly said that she felt faint. When she sat down and leaned back against the couch, she lost consciousness. All efforts to revive her were futile.

Anna’s death came as a complete surprise to all who knew her. We had been together the day before with friends and colleagues at the Christmas Fair of the South Shore Waldorf School in Conquerall Mills. On that rainy day we had bought our wreaths for the next day’s lighting of the first Advent candle. Anna had also bought a doll for her new grandson and had taken photographs of the festivities. She was in the midst of the animated conversation of a busy lunchtime crowd.

Download the article: Letter from the Co-Editors

A Farewell…
In a dusty little cabinet in my office, there is a folder of back issues of Gateways and the Waldorf Kindergarten Newsletter, as it was previously named. The first is dated Fall 1981.

This first issue set the tone for what has developed over the past nineteen years. There is an article translated from German, and news about developing a kindergarten association (The association was formed in July 1983.) There is a report about the international Waldorf kindergarten conference in Hannover and information on how to join the international association. We were happy to announce Bronja Zahlingen's forthcoming book on puppetry, and we were delighted that Margret Meyerkort was going to reissue her six books with music. We listed sources of silk and other kindergarten materials. These back issues contain much of our history.

Download the article:  A Conversation with Joan Salter

“Being a Mother is one of the highest achievements possible for a human being. The world would be a sorry place indeed without the love of motherhood.” – Wilhelm Zur Linden, from A Child is Born

About Joan Salter
Joan Salter is the author of three books: Modern Man: Reflections Arising from a Study of the Spiritual Scientific Knowledge of Rudolf Steiner (1979); The Incarnating Child (1987) on the care of the child; and Mothering with Soul (1998) on mothering.

For many years she has been deeply concerned with the care of infants and young children, as well as the recognition of mothering as a valuable womanly art and path of development. In her mid-life, Joan worked for twenty years as an infant welfare nurse in migrant hostels, working largely with refugees from World War II.

Download the article: Can I Take Care of Other People's Children?

Parenting is a life-long, full-time job. One can never set that responsibility aside, night or day. The question for me as a professional care provider is whether I can take care of other people’s children.

Am I able to provide the individual consideration that each child requires? I don’t want to replace the parents, but I do want to create a stable and caring everyday environment.

I would not be able to if I weren’t myself a mother (I don’t consider being a parent a prerequisite for others but a necessity for me personally), or if I did not carry an anthroposophical understanding of humanity. It is always meaningful to work with children, but to go deeper into the spiritual development of the human being and to consider my work as a part of my own self-education links my work life with my personal life in a holistic fashion. As a spiritually striving person, I can through Anthroposophy gain an understanding of human development and the significance of the individual. This understanding helps me to meet the child, hold myself back, and let the child show the way along its own path. I do not try to make the children be as I want them to be. Rather, I offer the children a meeting with an adult who takes life and the contact with each person seriously. My inner work is mirrored in my outer action. Through my insight into the child’s needs, I create a safe environment within which the children can unfold. What we do in the kindergarten is not just what I feel like doing, but something I have consciously and thoroughly thought out before I act.

Download the article: Activating Our Health

Happy autumn everyone! At this year’s regional meeting of kindergarten teachers at the Denver Waldorf School we heard from Dr. Philip Incao on the subject of how we kindergarten teachers can maintain our own health. It was a good talk, full of funny stories and inspirational quotes, and I will try to condense the high points for you here.

Dr. Incao began by saying that when he became an anthroposophic doctor he wanted to help people from the very beginning of our lives, so he started by delivering babies. The mothers came to trust him and ask him about caring for their newborns. Of course, he told them, the babies should be swaddled and kept warm and away from all stimulation. He reminded us how important it is, when speaking with parents, to remember our own confusion and hesitation when we first encountered this esoteric approach to health and childhood.

Download the article: Honing Our Observations

What characteristics can one expect in a child who is ready to enter grade school? Part of the work with kindergarten-aged children is to become aware of their degree of readiness and to provide pedagogical opportunities for their development. We can develop this awareness through careful observation of each individual child over time. At our school, we have developed a four-page form that the kindergarten teachers use as an aid to their observation of the children. Each teacher keeps a notebook of these forms, one per child, and in it keeps track of his or her observations throughout the school year. The point is to gain a full picture of the development of each child without separating him or her from the group to do it. With the help of the teacher’s notebook entries, a sort of moving picture of the child’s development becomes possible. By observing carefully throughout the year, the teacher is also already prepared for parent conferences and end-of-year written reports.

Download the article: Group Size: Some Further Thoughts

I read Christiane Maria von Königslöw’s article (Fall 2000 Gateways) with great interest, and I want to take up your challenge to send comments! I base them on several years’ experience working in a group of about twenty-five children aged one to seven.

The questions the author raises in relation to the size of groups when the children are very young is something I have been thinking about for a long time. She brings up the very important point of the small child’s need for the intimate meeting of the ‘I’ with another ‘I’ (my italics), and concludes that groups should be no larger than ten as a maximum. I agree with the first part, but do not think that the second is necessarily true — though if the group is larger than ten it requires great commitment and real fellowship since it means there would also be more adults in the group!

Download the article: Playground Apparatus: A Woodworking Project

This article comes from The Beating Drum, the newsletter of the Early Childhood Education Assocation of South Africa, Autumn/Winter 2000.

The netric measurements in the original article have been changed to inches and feet. SAFETY NOTE: If one is using linseed oil, be sure to clean rags immediately after use. Rags soaked in linseed oils are well known to spontaneously combust. A safe alternative, especially for indoor use, is beeswax polish.

Playground Apparatus a Woodworking project can be viewed and downloaded as a pdf file with all diagrams.

Download the article: Remembering Agnes Trepte

Agnes Trepte passed from this earth on Saturday, September 9, 2000. She was on the little sofa in her living room, which had become home to her in the last months. Her daughters at one side, her sister on the other, and a few close friends reading and singing accompanied her as she departed. The room was filled with flowers, a mobile of hundreds of many-colored origami cranes that were made by some of her former students hung at the window, and the room was warmed by the soft glow of candles.

As I step outside this scene and picture it from a distance, I see how fitting it is: Agnes in her little house in the woods just past the pond. This cozy little cabin with a warm and gentle light radiating from the windows, a bit secluded but close to the water and the woods. A tiny house, but so full of beautiful and wondrous treasures there was never room to fit them all. This little house had truly become a haven for Agnes in the last year and a half of her life as she underwent treatment for cancer, just as her classroom and her lap (literally and figuratively) had been haven for so many children and parents over the years.

Download the article: Kindergarten Teachers Around the World

This is one in a series of upcoming articles describing the work and life of kindergarten teachers from around the world. The idea is to offer pictures of a variety of approaches to the young child. This issue we feature a synopsis of an interview by Stephen Spitalny of Ronna McEldowney who worked in Bronja Zahlingen’s kindergarten near Vienna, Austria, as a part time assistant in the 1979/80 school year.

Bronja Zahlingen was born of a Jewish family in Poland on January 8, 1912. When she was a baby, her parents bundled her in furs, put her on a sledge, and the family walked to Vienna. Bronja was courted by Hans Zahlingen in Vienna before WWII, but as a person of Jewish background, Bronja had to leave Austria, and she went to England for the duration of the war. When the war was over, Bronja’s future husband sought her there and brought her back to Vienna where they were married. They had one son in 1950.

Download the article: Alliance for Childhood

From the mid 1980’s to the late 1990’s, in the country of Belgium, a man named Marc Dutroux committed horrific crimes against children. He gained worldwide attention not only because of the nature of his crimes but also because of the negligence and amateurism of police and government officials involved in the investigation. The Dutroux case caused such outrage among Belgium’s citizens that it caused a shake-up of the Belgium government including resignations and dismissals of several government officials, and prompted one of the largest peacetime demonstrations since World War II. “Something needs to be done” was the cry of the people.

This event and the sentiments around it as well as the acknowledgement that Brussels is the seat of the European Parliament, were the main reasons that Brussels was selected to be the venue for the first major international conference of the Alliance for Childhood: “Right to Childhood - A Bridge for the Future”, held October 11 - 14, 2000.

Download the article: Working in the Townships

In February of this year I once again had the opportunity to work for several weeks in Philippi and Khayelitsha together with Ann Sharfman, one of the main people responsible for the projects run by the Centre for Creative Education in the Townships. The Centre is situated in Cape Town and provides part-time primary and kindergarten teacher training, full-time eurythmy training, and also part-time training courses for “Educare” teachers in Philippi. Falling under the mentorship of the center are several schools and kindergartens in Philippi, Tambo Village and Khayelitsha.

Last year when I spent about two months working in the Centre, I was given some insight into the work that has been and is being done in the slum areas. My admiration grows, the more I see and experience.

Download the article: Khukuleka: Sisters Worlds Apart

The Santa Cruz Waldorf School is on a journey, moving beyond our school and our American culture to a world most of us will never experience. We are sponsoring Khukuleka, a developing Waldorf School in the Philippi Township of Cape Town, South Africa. What connects our two schools is Waldorf education.

Thirteen years ago, I attended a conference in San Francisco. There was a presentation by Jürgen Flinspach, treasurer of the International Association of Waldorf Kindergartens. He brought slides and stories of kindergartens from around the world. My attention focused on one slide, a picture of a school without a classroom. Kindergarten was under a very large baobab tree and a hundred and fifty students came from miles, with no tables, toys, play cloths, or equipment. This image impressed me because such a school in our country is unheard of. I longed to go to South Africa to see that school (which is near Johannesburg and a thousand miles north of Cape Town) and to see Waldorf education flourish in a country that is so different from the world in which I teach.

Download the article: Support a Sister School/Tashi Waldorf School

Among Waldorf schools and kindergartens in North America there has been a growing interest in establishing sister school relationships with developing Waldorf initiatives around the world. If your school is considering a personal relationship with a particular school that is in need of support, it is a good idea to check first with someone who does know the school. Joan Almon and Susan Howard, because of their membership on the International Kindergarten Vereinigung, are good sources of information. They recently met Meyrav Mor, a young, dynamic teacher, originally from Israel, who did her Waldorf training in Los Angeles. She is building up Waldorf early childhood education in Nepal and working to develop a university-based kindergarten training there.

Download the article: The Philippine Waldorf initiative on Early Childhood

In 1992, a handful of caregivers in an orphanage in the mountain province north of Manila met for a three-day orientation on the principles of Waldorf education in early childhood. This initial meeting led to the forming of a playgroup for the children of the biodynamic vegetable farmers in Quezon City, Manila. In 1993, another orientation was conducted among families living on a sugar plantation on the island of Negros. Along with a series of public lectures, and short workshops, these small activities served as seeds for the currently expanding work in Waldorf early childhood education in the Philippines.

In July 1994, the first Waldorf kindergarten began in Quezon City, now part of the Manila Waldorf School, with ten children. By 1996 the number of children had grown to sixteen.

Download the article: Book Review - Endangered: Your Child in a Hostile World

A lovely little book was sent to us for review: Endangered: Your Child in a Hostile World, by Johann Christoph Arnold. Arnold is the father of eight and a member of the Bruderhof community. Bruderhof makes the beautiful wooden toys, Community Playthings. It is a quiet, family-oriented community, reminiscent of Amish and Mennonite communities. The theme of the book is modern and thoroughly relevant, yet its tone is quiet, full of warmth and respect for children. There are lovely passages from a wide range of authors, which help illustrate the challenges of raising children today. Arnold’s own warmth and wisdom shine through, so that although the book deals with a difficult theme, its mood is one of encouragement. One feels the best sides of ourselves as parents and teachers being addressed. This is a wonderful book for a parent library and will also provide much food for thought for parent study groups. It is available from Plough Publishing at 1-800-521-8011.

Download the article: Book Review - The "Early Years" Series

Martin Large at Hawthorn Press has launched a new collection of books called the “early years series”, which is described in these words: “The series promises to provide parents and early years educators/carers with an extensive range of authoritative, accessible, practical books. Its principal focus is the promotion of healthy child development… Each book arises from parents’ own pressing questions and concerns about their children…. The series is therefore very much driven by the experience of parents themselves.” Upcoming books include one on play by Sally Jenkinson and an introduction to Waldorf early childhood education by Lynne Oldfield.

Download the article: Book Review - Sing a Song of Seasons

I was excited to receive the new Sing a Song of Seasons songbook and CD. Since my daughter’s birth I had enjoyed singing lullabies from Mary Thienes-Schunemann’s first collection (The Wonder of Lullabies).

My first impression was WOW! What a vast treasury of songs she’s gathered. I counted 48 titles, but once I began listening I was surprised to find that most of the songs (28) were new compositions by Mary. The texts are verses from the series of seasonal books gathered by Margret Meyerkort and published by Wynstones Press. I couldn’t help wishing for a wider variety of seasonal songs from Asia and Africa, or Eskimo snow songs, etc.

Download the article: The Young Child from Birth to Seven

This lecture was given February 21, 2000 as part of a series. It is printed here with the kind permission of Rudolf Steiner College Press who publishes the series under the title Knowledge, Teaching and the Death of the Mysteries.

Today what I would like to address is a difficult subject in the work of Rudolf Steiner, We could say it is the question: What is the etheric? This is a difficult question because the birth of a child into the world, the birth of the physical body of a child, is accompanied by etheric forces from the cosmos that have been working through nine months to form a kind of cupola, a space, into which all of the patterns of organs and endocrine pathways, warmth and cold differentials, membranes, secretions—all of these very complex chemical reactions—have to be somehow coordinated and inregrated in one space, with very little room for error. If we really think of the miracle of organization that it takes to bring an embryo to term, it is mind-boggling. Yet it is a daily occurrence. We look at this great miracle and almost take it for granted.

Download the article: The Importance of Sleep

I will struggle getting my almost 7-year-old son to sleep by eight o’clock. It seems there is a magic window. If we eat by five and I start slowing down his activities by six, there is a good chance that he will fall asleep soon after reading stories at seven-thirty. If I don’t have dinner ready until six or seven and slow down doesn’t begin until eight or eight-thirty, then he seems to get a second wind that keeps him awake and active till ten or ten-thirty at night. The next day is difficult for him. It is hard for him to get up, eat breakfast, and get to school on time. He is tired and more irritable the entire day. What is happening?

If you see an anthroposophical physician with these complaints, chances are your child will end up with a remedy for the liver. Often Hepatodoron is given, made from the leaves of the vine Vitus vinifera, and the wild strawberry, Fragaria vesca. It seems the liver is involved in a good night’s sleep. It regulates our energy level for the next day. The liver follows the cycle of the sun. Around six in the evening it wants to go to sleep and starts to store up the sugars (glycogen) to be used for the next day. It doesn’t want to process any big meals after 3 p.m., especially ones high in protein or fat.

Download the article: Welcoming Babies

“O wonderful, wonderful, most wonderful, wonderful! ...and yet again, wonderful!” I was about to enter the embryology exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Science and Technology and read Shakespeare’s words engraved in the entryway. Yes, I thought, these words belong at the gateway of life and birth. So does joy. When a child is born to the Baka people of the African rain forest, they sing, “My heart is joyous!” Joy is also central in this verse from Rudolf Steiner for parents in relation to the young children:

May light stream into you that can take hold of you
I follow its rays with the warmth of my love.
I think with my thinking’s best thoughts of joy
On the stirrings of your heart.
May they carry you, May they cleanse you.
I want to gather my thoughts of joy
Before the steps of your life,
That they unite with your will for life,
So that it finds itself with strength
In the world,
Ever more,
Through itself.