Preview of Spring/Summer Festival, Thursday, May 21

Dear Current Families, Relatives, Alums, and Friends,

You are invited to our parent & child Mayfaire and summer festival for young children and parents on Thursday, May 21, from 8:30 to 10:30am (you are also invited to the school's larger Mayfaire on Sunday, May 3, from 11 to 3pm). Feel free to come later if 8:30am is too soon. Here is a provisional schedule. It is an outdoor festival--rain, snow, or shine.

8:30 to 9:30am Arrival, conversation, outdoor play, silk dyeing
9:15am First set of Maypole dances
9:30am Puppet show
9:40am Outdoor snack (picnic)
10am Reprise of Maypole dances
10:10am Dancing to the fiddle
Continued outdoor play and conversation until 10:30am.

To celebrate the gifts of plants and sun and bring us toward a summer mood (when the sun's fire is manifest), we will be dyeing silks in brazilwood (which produces red/orange) and osage orange (which produces yellow) plant dyes. The school will provide every visiting family with 1 30x30 silk (a good size for making a cape with for a young child). If you wish to dye more than one silk, we will also be selling additional 30 x 30 silks at cost ($3 per silk), payable by cash or check to WIWS (cash would make the administrative work easier).

You might choose, for example, to dye 3 silks--one red, one yellow, one with a yellow sun in the middle of a red background. You might want to dye extra silks for older siblings, as gifts, and the like.

It will help us procure and mordant the right amount of silks if you email me (wdolde@gmail.com) to let me know if you plan to buy silks in addition to the one the school is providing you. Please let me know as soon as possible. If you are not sure, do know that we will try to have some extras on the day of the festival.

I will do the work of preparing the silks (mordanting with alum and cream of tartar) and warming the dye vats. If you feel inspired to try this at home, or if you wish more information, I recommend Joan Almon's First Steps in Natural Dyeing.

Here are a few pages to give you a sense of the book. I am experimenting with ways of sharing pdfs on line, so here is the same selection given to you in 2 different ways. Please let me know if option A or B works for you.

A. This is a version uploaded to scribd.com.

B. This version uses google's document viewer.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Last Child in the Woods, walks at end of class

Dear Families,

     In preparing to view Where Do the Children Play (there is another showing at school this Wednesday night with a discussion), I was inspired to read Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods (available in the Kathrine Dickerson Memorial Library once I return my copy).  I recommend the book highly.  Even as we live in a place where nature seems relatively easy to access, Louv's book helps us as islanders (and friends near the island in beautiful places) frame questions about stewardship, safety, freedom, and exploration.  Louv encourages us to allow children to find secret spaces, to get dirty, to build and feel, to participate in nature and not just develop an abstract sense of nature.  Our school is blessed with its berry bushes, large amount of fallen logs in the woods, and absence of irritants such as poison ivy or poison oak (and the nettle, if one were to call this healthful herb an irritant, tends not to grow on any of the paths on which the nursery children and I walk).

       Louv's book and a thought to helping the transition to the Butterfly nursery class for your children next year or in a future year encourages me to offer the following:  after each Dewdrop and Rosebud class for the rest of the session, I will walk with interested families to the teepee near our school (the site where Mother Earth met us during the Spring Festival).  We'll probably leave at 11:10am or so (once everyone who wants to go has had a chance to get dressed for the outside).  Stay as long or as little as you want.  This is optional and not officially part of class, so if your child is exhausted and you need to leave (or if your child wants to stay on the swings at the Berry Patch playground), feel free to do so.   

       There are many potential benefits to this activity.  Here are a few:

1)  The clearing near the teepee is close to school (children can walk themselves at their own pace) so this will not be a forced march for the children (longer walks for parents have their place, too, but I have learned that young children can be quite satisfied with a shorter walk with more chances to explore, touch, smell, dig, and explore).

2)  The clearing has lots of uneven terrain to explore.  What we offer in playgrounds and curriculum such as gymnastics attempt to replicate the motor development activities humans have found in nature.

3)  We begin our nursery day outside and walk every day to the teepee at about 9:05am or so (once all children have arrived).  It will help the nursery next fall if a number of children know the way to the teepee.  Without judging the way other teachers might do things, I find--through my reading, observations, meditations, and books like Louv's--that young children benefit much more from a nature walk if they can go at their own pace and are not forced to hold hands or hold onto a rope (if we were an urban school with traffic or other perils I would of course adapt and do things differently).  In my nursery, I go towards the front, making sure children go the right direction while my assistant walks in the back with children who choose a slower pace (sometimes a much slower pace, but our method prevents this from causing tension or a power struggle).

       In the video, Where do the Children Play, a professor, after talking about the manner in which mass media can inhibit child development, suggests that he could train children to be environmentalists using the mass media because it is such a powerful teacher.  Louv (also appearing frequently in the video) would disagree; Louv worries, in fact, about some environmental organizations that do so much teaching of the mind but won't allow children to pick flowers, catch frogs, or build tree houses.  Louv writes about John Muir chasing gulls with his homemade gun as a boy (Muir was apparently a bad shot); Louv worries that if we try too hard to train children to always leave nature in peace as young children (not that we should encourage children to violate hunting laws), they will grow up with the sense of nature as an abstraction and feel, as adults, no connection or need to preserve wild and natural spaces.

  The professor in the media also suggests that children who do have a lot of media exposure have a richer vocabulary and know more about the world.  Louv, again, laments that children know about the Amazon rainforest but nothing about flora and fauna near their home.  I want to quote here Louv quoting D.H. Lawrence:

. . . Twenty-first century Western culture accepts the view that because of omnipresent technology we are awash in data.  But in this information age, vital information is missing.  Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing below the "transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it," as D.H. Lawrence put it, in a relatively obscure but extraordinary description of his own awakening to nature's sensory gift.  Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the "know-it-all state of mind," that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder:

Superficially, the world has become small and known.  Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or Central Park.  There is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it.  We've done the globe and the globe is done.

This is quite true, superficially.  On the superficies, horizontally, we've been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it.  Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically.  It's all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean and saying you know all about the sea . . . .

As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything.  When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room.  We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves:  "It's very much what you'd expect."  We really know it all.

We are mistaken.  The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilization.  Underneath is everything we don't know and are afraid of knowing.

Last Child in the Woods (57-58), Richard Louv

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

 

Lyrics and Words to Verses and Songs this Session

Dear Families,

        Please remember that we have no classes on April 9, 10, 16, & 17.  Our school is closed for spring break.

Here are the words and lyrics for the finger games, songs, and puppet show at the table in the middle of class.

As I typed these out, it became quite clear how much onomonapoeia, phonemic play, and nonsense exist in my spring repertoire.  My guess would be that it is easiest to learn these verse and songs from class, and I wonder if my typed out words make any sense to families not currently attending class.  If you are interested, there are three books of games and songs composed by Wilma Ellersiek available in English (currently), with other drafts floating around from workshops.  Her directions for the gestures are thorough (at first I found them overwhelming).

        I offer so many Ellersiek games and songs because children seem to respond so well to them.  Ellersiek was a university teacher of music, drama, and Eurhythmics (not Waldorf's Eurythmy) in Germany.  In the fifties, she was disturbed by the elimination of play from German kindergartens and began composing verses and songs based upon nature observation as a balance, or antidote, for the increasing and (she believed) improper academics and precocious intellectual work.  Even though the academic kindergartens in Germany were a flop and there was a return to more play-based kindergarten (though today, apparently, in much of Europe there are government pressures to follow a No Child Left Behind approach to early childhood [decisions based upon questionable research, but that is another topic]), Ellersiek continued with her passion of observing nature and children at play and crafting these into games and verses for teacher or caregiver and child.  Some of the gestures that seem strange or awkward at first (such as twisting the wrists above the head) are ones Ellersiek observed children using in spontaneous joy and play.   Although these can be hard at first for an adult, children tend to love them, and in the long term I find them helpful for adults as well (as a nice reprieve for the wrists, for example, after a busy night of typing songs and verses).

  A story goes that Ellersiek was on vacation in the Black Forest and met Klara Hatterman, a Waldorf kindergarten teacher, also on vacation.  The two discovered the harmony in their work, and this was the introduction of Ellersiek games into Waldorf early childhood programs.  Kundry Willwerth has carefully translated these verses into English.  Here is Willwerth's tribute to Wilma Ellersiek.  (It seems the pdf version of the tribute does not contain Ellersiek's poem "Call to Deeds" that Willwerth alludes to.  I will post this on a future blog).   Even if we are not destined to compose intricate songs and verses for the classroom, we can find a model of attention and mindfulness in Wilma Ellersiek.  The qualities that Magda Gerber, Emmi Pikler, Dorothy Corkille-Briggs, Susan Weber, and others working with and for young children hope to cultivate in adults--careful observation, creative not-knowing, trust in the child, genuine encounter and presence--blossom in the artistic work of Wilma Ellersiek.

       Here are lyrics for our dances around the Maypole at the end of class.  Please do not worry if your child does not stay at the Maypole.  Please do keep dancing.  My observation has been that as weeks progress, more and more children like to join in, and even children who do not join for every dance have an authentic experience as they watch adults and others dance.  

For new families or families that seek a refresher, here are the lyrics to many of the other songs I sing throughout the morning.   This is the same document I have distributed earlier in the year.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde