Reminder -- Festival this Friday / Tilth Saturday

Dear Families,

Please remember that our Autumn Festival for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, parents, grandparents, and friends takes place this Friday morning, September 25, from 9 to 10:30am around, in, and near the Butterfly Room at the Whidbey Island Waldorf School.

Here is an approximate schedule

9am Gather Outside -- butter making and play on the playground
9:15am Outdoor dance to the fiddle and continued butter making
9:20am Picnic of bread and butter and vegetable soup
9:40am Washing up and continued outdoor play
9:50am Puppet show inside the Butterfly Classroom
10am Walk to the teepee, during which we might find some pleasant surprises
10:20am Return to school, graceful departure with our harvest gifts

Elementary students will gather for recess shortly after our festival. While you need not rush, I recommend departing without too much delay.

For students/families unable to make Friday's festival, or interested in getting a sense of making more of a connection after our summer break, know that I will also be playing violin and fiddle at the Tilth Farmer's market from about 10am to 2pm on Saturday.

With Warmth and Light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Invitation to the Autumn Festival and Fall Session

Dear Families,

Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers, Parents, Grandparents, and Friends are invited to our Autumn Festival on Friday, September 25, from 9 to 10:30am.

As summer changes to fall, days shorten, and the frost and cold of winter approaches, we as humans need strength and courage to help us stand upright through the darkness of winter. Different cultures have received inspiration from the meteor showers (heavenly iron, shooting stars) they observed around late September; the iron from the stars of heaven gave people strength. In various cultures and religions, this comes forth as a tale of a hero--a knight like St. George or Archangel Michael conquering or taming a dragon. For Rudolf Steiner, this battle between a knight and a dragon goes on inside each one of us--the dragon is not some other out there to be excluded, but, rather, that part of ourselves that we need to confront, acknowledge, and tame so we are ready to be free individuals capable of serving humanity and the world.

Explanations of a psychic battle inside each of us or battles with dragons can be too much for children birth to 4, who, rather, find seasonal inspiration as days shorten and nights lengthen by looking in wonderment toward the stars. An early childhood teacher could simplify the celebration of Michaelmas toward an examination of stars--singing "Twinkle Twinkle" and cutting open an apple to reveal the star come to earth on the inside.

On Friday the 25th parents and children will gather outside to play and share a snack (Nursery children and I will have baked extra bread and made extra soup in class that week). We will also have a harvest dance to tune of the fiddle. Then we'll go inside for a puppet show. After that, we will walk to the woods to meet (as a surprise for the children) a knight from the stars and Mother Earth--they will both present us with gifts. After the walk, children and parents will depart with their gifts.

While this festival is open to the community, it also commences our school year for Dewdrop (Thursday) and Rosebud (Friday) classes. We will have class as usual from 9 to 11am beginning on October 1 and 2. Here is an electronic copy of our parent & child brochure; you may also procure one at school.

For families new to our program or are considering enrolling, this synopsis of the parent & child morning may help provide a sense of what your child and you will experience each week.

Here is additional information about our program:

Our classes take place in the Butterfly Room, the first room you come to when you go down the stairs in the main building.

Vegetables and Extra Clothes -- We will make vegetable soup and bread every week; children love to explore, play, and help when their parents and teacher join together in community work such as cooking. Please bring a vegetable if possible. Our classes try to make activities such as washing dishes inviting for children (and their parents). While I try to keep splashing to a reasonable level, your child may get very wet. Please bring a change of clothes.

Our 7 week session runs from October 1 to November 20. There will be no Rosebud class on Friday, October 16, and no Dewdrop class on Thursday, November 19. You will be invited to join the nursery for our lantern walk in the early evening on November 13.

At 5pm on Wednesday, October 7, adults are invited to a parenting talk in the Butterfly Room.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Song of the Seeing Being, Moving in Slow Motion

Farewells from Whole Child/Whole Parent

Polly Berrien Berends

As the truly parently parent is the childlike parent,

As the truly nourishing parent is the nursing parent,

As the truly teaching parent is the learning parent,

As the truly freeing parent is the obedient parent,

As the truly unifying parent is the unified parent,

As the truly beautifying parent is the truthful parent,

As the truly creative parent is the beholding parent,

As the truly communicating parent is the listening parent,

So is the truly loving parent after all no parent at all, but only the loved child of God.

Song of the Seeing Being

The more we see that seeing is the issue in life, the more we look at everything for what it has to teach us.

The more we look at everything for what it has to teach us, the more we see that we are being taught.

The more we see that we are being taught, the more we know that we are loved.

The more we know are loved, the more lovingly we are seeing.

The more lovingly we are seeing, the more loving we are being.

The more loving we are being, the more we see that seeing is the issue in life.

[start over]

Dear Families,

      My hope is that these updates from parent & child classes are helpful to you.  As we look ahead toward the summer and the new school year, I want to make information available to you without these posts becoming an annoyance.  For current Rosebud children who are moving on to the Butterfly nursery, please let me know if you want me to keep you on the parent & child list as well next year.  For everyone else, I will assume that you wish to continue to receive information unless you tell me otherwise.  You can email me or call the school 341-5686 or tell me in person.  You can also visit the Dewdrop and Rosebud google groups page, click on Edit my Membership on the right side of the page, and click on Unsubscribe.

      As I have written before, Polly Berrien Berends' Whole Child/Whole Parent continues to provide me inspiration and insight.  I recommend her book.  Our school library will procure new, updated copies this summer.  One of my favorite aspects of Berends' style is that she places revisions and additional reflections in updated copies of this book--"This is what I thought 20 years ago, but here, now, are my additional reflections."  Her style of writing reflects her recommendation for parenting--rather than seeking an easy answer, we accept the challenges as an ever-continuing opportunity for development and growth.  At the end of her book, Berends reprises "The Song of the Seeing Being" and reframes the concept of farewell and good bye as "bon voyage"--or, for her, "good seeing."  

Here is a talk on orality, literacy, and excitement by Professor Barry Sanders--author of A is for Ox and founder of the Pasadena Waldorf School.  Although Sanders' style and topic may seem different from Berends', and although his piece provides a response to times of crisis in the broader culture, his complex search for simplicity and renewal in the human breath harmonizes with Berends' approach.  Like James Joyce (and many others), both Sanders and Berends help show us that the "longest way round is the shortest way home," that often to find the simple solution, we have to take the complex path.

        I will be presenting songs, music, rhymes, gesture games, and puppet shows at the Langley library on Tuesdays in July at 11am.  Some of the material will be familiar to your child.

Bon Voyage and Good Seeing,

William Dolde

Two more weeks of classes left

Dear Families,

       Thank you for coming to the festival yesterday, and thank you for bringing friends along.  Along with the school, I hope to host four festivals for young children a year (with children being invited to other festivals such as the Lantern Walk):

1)  An Autumn Festival, in which children take a walk and meet Mother Earth and other imaginative characters who give them gifts to prepare for winter.

2)  An Advent Spiral in the morning for young children.

3)  A Spring Festival, with Mother Wind, Sister Rain, Father Sun, and Brother Wind.

4)  A May/Summer Festival, much as what we experienced yesterday.

Although yesterday felt conclusive, we do still have two more weeks of parent & child classes.  I look forward to seeing you and your family in the weeks ahead.

With warmth and light,

William Dolde

Further Preview of Thursday's Festival

Dear Families,

       The forecast is for sunnier and warmer weather on Thursday.  Our festival is outside, and I am setting the Butterfly Room up for a summer puppet show (to which I'll invite everyone at 9:30am).  To preserve a sense of wonder and magic, the Butterfly Room will remain closed until the time for the puppet show; if you come as an 8:30am earlybird, be prepared that the weather may be cool. 

Whenever you arrive, feel free to start dyeing silks right away.  Because Brazilwood sawdust was unavailable, I am offering 3 dyes:

Osage Orange sawdust -- which generally produces yellow

Madder Root -- which produces orangey red or reddish orange

Annato -- another reddish dye in case the Madder is acting particularly orange

A challenge and blessing of plant dyes is that they produce slightly different results on different occasions.

Because I want the process to be more tangible, I choose not to use dye sacks or strainers; the sawdust or bits of roots are floating in the pots, and you may have to pick them off once you take your silk out.  Although someone seeking a "perfect" silk may find minor flaws with this method (idyes and rit dyes and other synthetics do a much better job of producing absolute uniformity if that is what you seek), parents and children in past years have found the process and results very satisfying.

Although the dye pots themselves are hot, I will have tubs for rinsing.  Once the silk has entered the cool water, children tend to love to help with rinsing.

Brief process description

1)  Put your silk in the first color for 5 seconds to 5 minutes (observe how others are coming out).

2)  As best you can, allow the liquid to drip back into the pot as you take out your silk.

3)  Rinse in cold water.

4)  Hang to dry (and keep track of your silks' location).

5)  If you want to dye in more than one color (stripes, tie dye, yellow sun in the middle with a red exterior, and soforth), please start with the osage orange yellow and rinse between colors.  This will keep the colors as true as possible for others.

If you preordered extra silks, I will have them set aside for you.  Because I have not submitted an invoice yet for reimbursement, it is easiest for you to pay me directly with cash or a check to William Dolde, and I will deduct this from what I ask back from the school (rather than flooding our business office with a bunch of checks).

It is probable that we will have extra silks even if you did not preorder.  After I get a sense of how many visitors we have, I will release extra silks.

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Pirates, Metaphor, Festival

Dear Families,

      We have class as usual this coming week (May 14 & 15).  From 8:30 to 10:30am on May 21, all families, friends, and alums are invited to our May and Summer Festival for young children and parents.  Thank you to parents who have let me know they intend to buy extra silks on that day.  You still have a chance to let me know--I will place the order this Monday.

There is no class on Friday, May 22.  School is closed.

We had a discussion about pirates, fairy tales, and metaphor yesterday.  Here are some thoughts about images I wrote for my nursery families that you may also find useful. 

In my most recent nursery blog post, I wrote at length about fairy tales, violence, and gender roles.  If this subject is of interest to you, you may wish to visit my nursery blog to read the latest entry (or anything that interests you).

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde

Helpful Article on Toddler Conflict

Dear Families,

      At Mayfaire I had a helpful and appreciative conversation with a parent about conflict and the permission to sometimes allow conflicts to evolve with children taking the lead toward the solution (while remaining close enough to provide security and physical safety if it comes to that).  When I took my RIE training in Los Angeles, one of my instructors, Bev Kovach, shared her article on assisting toddlers in conflict situations with us.  It is written for caregivers working with groups of children with one or two or three adults, not necessarily for parents or for teachers of parent & child classes.  As such, I have the following thoughts (some of which I shared with this parent on Sunday, or she shared with me).

1)  You will likely find Kovach's ideas consistent with ideas from Vanessa's presentation at WIWS last spring.

2)  When children are of different ages (toddlers and infants together; older and younger toddlers), we may have to intervene, defend, redirect more.  When children are hungry or tired, we need to intervene or redirect more.

3)  RIE's wisdom comes from Loczy in Hungary, which is shown to have fostered excellent child development (not just in light of being an orphanage).  In Loczy, the caregivers are incredibly consistent (same group of carers with children their whole first 3 years; same caregivers stay with Loczy for decades and decades), and their ability to refrain from intervening too soon leads to a more harmonious social network among the toddlers over time.  As parents, we may be in a variety of places all the time, and we don't know how other parents will react to a conflict at a playground or birthday party.  If we feel things might not work out for the best, sometimes our best option may be to come up with a creative redirection (excuse, pretend coughing fit) and decide that there will be other chances for our own to child to learn from conflict later.

4)  As Kim Payne quotes from one of my friends in Baltimore, "Don't just do something.  Stand there!"  Sometimes our calm presence is enough to help.  Sometimes our objective reporting ("both children are pulling on the rope") is enough to help children feel recognized so that they can find their own direction.  It is very helpful at these times if we can project confidence, calmness, grace, stability rather than fear and worry.

5)  The following imaginative picture (which I've written about before) works for me.  Use it if it works for you.  As you may know, Rudolf Steiner provided us with elaborate pictures of the spiritual.  Brian Gray, a teacher at Rudolf Steiner college (and rock musician in the house band), had a gift for translating Steiner to make his insights accessible.  Brian summed up a complex discussion with the following:  "So in essence, when we take care of pets or farm animals, we are practicing to become angels."  As angels tend to each of us, the quiet and removed and strong archangels tend to interactions amongst us.  It helps me, during tense times of conflict, to practice being an archangel--confident, strong, removed.

6)  This image may not work for you.  I've heard others use the term shadowing for being close to children to ensure safety and broadcasting or narrating for the factual, nonjudgmental reporting of what is happening.  Andrea Gambardella, Waldorf teacher of teachers, recommended that as teachers and parents we find our own metaphor to help during turbulent times.  When teaching the nursery class, Andrea meditated upon being a heavy stone in a river.  Water and currents might rush and dash and bubble and gurgle about, but the stone remains strong, steady, and consistent.  Whatever metaphor you use. I recommend finding one.  Our children learn a great deal not just from our words, but from our thoughts (or thoughts expressed by body language, gesture, and intentions).

With warmth and light,

William Geoffrey Dolde