Dear WSPB,
As our community and our country continue to face COVID-19, we are truly blessed to be part of a supporting, comforting, and loving school. The Board of Trustees is working to ensure that the School has the tools it needs to safely open our campus in the Fall for the 2020-2021 school year. While this past year has brought us many changes and challenges, it has also brought us opportunity and growth. From our structure and governance work with Lisa Mahar, the organizational consultant, to our growing and ongoing team-building work with our Faculty and Staff, and looking forward to our new Administrator, Wendy Gittleman, joining us from the Sacramento Waldorf School, the Waldorf School of Palm Beach is ever so bright.
We look forward to the upcoming 2020-2021 school year with warmth, optimism, and much gratitude to our community.
2020-2021 RE-OPENING PLAN
As is traditional in Waldorf education, our teachers are working diligently to define a Waldorf education based on the current data for next year and keeping the development of the students at the forefront of our thinking.
See our 2020-2021 Re-Opening Plan here.
We expect to release additional details and information for the 2020-2021 school year after Palm Beach County announces their plan next week. We will be sharing our plans with the community the week of July 20th.
FROM OUR Faculty
Rosebuds and Apple Blossoms:
Ms. Charissa & Ms. Andrea
The Rosebud & Apple Blossoms have had a very full year! While the two classes began the year as separate classes, after our Holiday Break we came together to form one larger group. This was an unexpected change but it brought with it many wonderful gifts---new friendships, new experiences, new teachers—and the children thrived. We spent our days busy with our good work, and whether it be baking, sewing, painting or dishwashing, the children eagerly and joyfully participated. We heard nature stories and fairy tales, and sang many, many songs to help carry us through our transitions of the day, and through the changing of the seasons. We jumped, skipped, crawled, twirled, and danced in our circles, and had a wonderful time with our fingerplays and handclapping games. Outside we were proud of our work in the garden and enjoyed the times we were able to pick herbs or lettuces to nibble on. Many forts were built, many cakes and ice cream cones were made and sold in the sandbox bakery, many fairy houses were created, and many flowers were picked and gifted to each other. We had a wonderful year, and are so very much looking forward to our return to school, and being together in person again in the fall! ~ Ms. Charissa & Ms. Andrea
Buttercup Kindergarten:
Ms. Mindy
We had an amazing year. Many new children joined our Buttercup Kindergarten this year,their families coming from many different countries joining together to create our beautiful school community. We learned new words and customs and songs from our diverse group that we incorporated into our class. The children created wonderful crafts that reflected our seasonal celebrations, beginning with Michaelmas. We learned songs and dances and ate food that reflected and captured the holiday spirit as we moved through the year. The children made many new friendships that will continue to grow and flourish as they move together into first grade. They grew tall like sunflowers, they shined like the stars, and their eyes twinkled with the magic of the fairy tales and their hearts were full love and joy ready for a new day.
1st Grade: Ms. Wilner
As the young child enters the First Grade, the big transition is coming from play-based learning to becoming part of a class community through form and imitation. The children learn that we do all that we do together as a class and through imitation everyday the learning is natural. Form drawing is how we start the year, straight line and curved line, which then leads into learning the letters. Form drawing also is pre-geometry.
2nd Grade: Ms. Hawk
The exuberant second grader is living in the world of imagination while learning more about the world around us. The Waldorf curriculum met this moment in the second grader's life with stories of fables, saints, and legends of great people. These stories helped the child to ponder the follies of the fable characters and reflect on the consequences, while the stories of saints illuminated the human potential of goodness, strength and the ability to overcome challenges. This year, second graders stepped though an important doorway in their academic learning with the deepening of literacy skills through daily writing and reading, both in groups and individually, and expanded foundational concepts in arithmetic with the learning of the times tables to twelve and place value. Music, form drawing, handwork, gardening, and games were practiced throughout the week in second grade, supporting their growth in many capacities.
3rd Grade: Ms. Wilner
As young children enter the Third Grade they awaken to the world around them in a new way, and they want to learn how to be in it. In a Waldorf School the curriculum meets them and teaches them how to cook, garden, weave, measure, and about shelters to name a few of these ways. During the block about shelters we look at the first shelters human beings lived in, caves, trees, and work our way to modern civilizations. The class builds a shelter as a class, a lean-to, work in pairs and build a stilt house, and finish the block with an individual project where they choose a shelter from around the world and build a model of it with a written report about it, too.
4th Grade: Ms. Cleveland
In Fourth Grade, students find their feet planted on the earth and from there are able to stand upright and observe the world around them. They find new meaning and understanding of both themselves and their environment. Study of Human and Animal brings deeper insights into the gifts of being human, with focus on the head, heart, and hands. Students discover infinite intelligence found in nature while determining the similarities and differences between humans and animals. Local Native History, Geography and Map Making provide a hands-on learning experience about the land we walk upon, a taste of ancient culture, understanding of the development of mankind, and a clear sense of placement in the world. In Language Arts, study of the Norse Myths present a safe opportunity for students to explore morals. Learning about the Norse Gods, who are not always so “God-like,” allows children to decide for themselves about right and wrong and to become aware of and process mischief, a behavior often displayed by fourth graders. The children are ready to experience more complexity in our world and are happy to learn about fractions, long division, and grammar. Fourth grade is a delightful year in which children encounter deeper levels of thought and learning while simultaneously unfolding greater wisdom in their hearts.
5th Grade: Ms. Hourican
Equipped with the more enhanced 11th-year consciousness, the fifth grade year is known to be one of balance and harmony. The children were led further into the world through the study of geography and physics, yet brought in towards themselves through the study of the ancient civilizations of the Mayans, Egyptians and Greeks. The children studied botany, language arts, decimal fractions, the metric system, graphing, pentathlon events, German, music, painting, woodworking and clay modeling.
6th Grade: Ms. Bowes
Sixth grade is a year of transition from childhood to adolescence. Rapid physical growth is accompanied by corresponding brain development, which quickens the unfolding abstract thinking. With this came an increasingly complex study of history and geography and the development of Western cultures from the founding of Rome through the growth of chivalry and monastic life during the Middle Ages. Together, we stood with Romulus and Remus, traveled with merchants along the Silk Road, discussed the fears of the citizens of Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and, taking our lessons from Geology considered the thrill of the archaeologists who discovered this important site hundreds of years later. Science and Mathematics become more specific in Sixth grade as well, with the study of Geometry, Geology and Mineralogy, Astronomy, Business Math, and Physics. With Distance Learning, our students were devoted to Physics, both with the recitation of our play, “Archimedes’ Greatest Challenge,” and through our introduction of Physics (with Ms. Hourican’s rising sixth grade class) where we were able to perform several experiments dealing with sound, electricity, and heat. The sixth grade year has been a beautiful combination of academic and artistic growth.
7th Grade: Ms. Abbade
Seventh Grade is a year of struggle and transformation. Just like the caterpillar is constrained in the chrysalis and pushes against the boundaries of that cast that no longer serves it, so does the seventh grader, pushing against the boundaries of all authorities and forms that no longer inspire them. The Waldorf curriculum meets that moment with lessons that explore the dramatic shift in human consciousness through biographies of people who struggled with existing authorities and social institutions to bring about the changes that led to the birth of modern art and science in the Renaissance. They sail with explorers out of known lands into the unknown and protest with the Reformers against an authority they did not believe in. In Math there are introduced to Algebra while in Language Arts they explore their fervent emotions through Creative Writing. Chemistry, Physics and Physiology compose the science curriculum.
8th Grade: Ms. Domokos
Eighth grade is the year of the Waldorf grade school when the many seeds planted in the previous years come to fruition. All subjects connect to create a wholesome view of the world. History is intertwined with geography. In organic chemistry they learn how plants produce the nutrient our bodies use and what chemical reactions happen in our digestive system. This year the 8th graders learned to separate gluten from flour, test materials for starches and sugars, make plastic from milk and so many other wonderful "food things". They read biographies of Fredrick Douglass and Mahatma Gandhi, got a taste of dystopian literature and closed the year exploring The Book Thief by Mark Zusak. They visited the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Museum in the Everglades, The Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach, FAU's Music Department. They saw Les Miserables at the Broward Center, and played basketball with the Waldorf students from Miami. In history they traveled from the American Revolution to the current day. They tested the boundaries of watercolor painting by making their own paints and using old ones in new ways.
All year long they worked on a project that was special to them. The projects were meant to be presented live before the entire school community. We hope that you got to watch them on YouTube.
On Saturday, the faculty and staff of the school said their emotional good byes to this class in a drive-by graduation. (We'll be sharing pictures soon.)
They are now ready to embark on a new adventure. We wish them good luck as they enter high school. They will be scattered around in Boca High, Spanish River, Broward Prep, Grandview, FAU High and Stoneman Douglass.
2020-2021 School Calendar
We are pleased to share with you our school calendar for the 2020-2021 school year. We have scheduled our festivals assuming that things will be back to normal and that it is safe to have gatherings for our community. Please take a look and mark the dates on your family calendar.
Some key dates in the 2020-2021 school year:
First Day of school for Grades Campus: Monday, August 24th.
First Day of school for EC Campus: Tuesday, August 25th.
Last day of school: June 3rd, 2021
In case we have to close the school due to a hurricane, we allocated hurricane make-up days on the calendar. These are June 4th, 7th and 8th.
You can download a printable copy of the calendar here:
www.waldorfschoolpalmbeach.org/calendar
