Grade Six Squire Duties Begin Soon!

From Movement Teacher Jacqueline Gabe:
In connection with the sixth grade curriculum study of the Middle Ages, every year the sixth grade students are each assigned to an adult "knight" who provides them with opportunities to be of service to others. Students are asked to visit their knight once a day for six to twelve weeks and offer their service. Students learn about the seven knightly virtues--courage, justice, mercy, generosity, nobility, hope and faith--and are asked to uphold these qualities while performing their acts of service. Some squires take up cleaning duties, others work with younger children, and still others take on the repair and upkeep of the grounds or tools. 

During Medieval times, squires served under an elder, proving their capacity and building skill through on-going, dedicated work before being knighted; so, too, the OVWS students take up squire duties in preparation for the Medieval Games and their Knighting Ceremony.

In early May, sixth grade students from Lake Champlain Waldorf School will join our sixth grade students for a full day of rigorous games, challenges, and events with a Medieval flair such as knife throwing, archery, and a quest. The day culminates in the Knighting Ceremony, a truly moving, right-of-passage ceremony for the squire who worked in earnestness and with perseverance.

Following some of the ancient ceremonial protocol, each student comes forward and kneels before an elder and is recognized by his or her knight for their service with their community as witness. The knight speaks on their behalf, stating what the squire has done to be ready for knighthood. Recognizing children for their striving at an age that can be confusing and tender for the child is of great benefit, and indeed, similar rituals are taken up by other cultures and religions.

This year's Knighting Ceremony will be held on Friday, May 5, in the afternoon. All are welcome to attend!  

Care Group and Social Harmony Committees Join to Support the School Community and Student Needs

We're excited to announce the joining of the Care Group and Social Harmony committees into one, called Care Committee. Its mission is to support the school community to strive to interact with one another in a non-violent communication environment, while also supporting students' individual social/emotional and academic needs. Our intent is to maintain the good work achieved in the past by both committees while expanding it thoroughly. In an effort to support our students effectively, we intend to work closely with teachers and families to develop and sustain a supportive and warm-hearted environment for students.   
 
Care Committee feels strongly that each child should have the opportunity to learn on a three-fold level--involving head, heart and hands--in a supportive environment. At times, when a student needs space to regain the ability to learn, s/he may be asked to leave the room. Stemming from a desire to shift from a "punitive" experience, and in response to our commitment to providing a supportive environment for all, the "study room" is now in existence. This space will provide a nurturing environment for the child to process feelings and needs, at an age-appropriate level, with an adult, under the guidance of the Social Harmony curriculum. It is our hope that through healthy modeling of empathy, we can provide the ideal environment to support the development of this skill in students. Individual teachers have signed up to be the adult a child processes with. As a result of his/her work in the study room, it is our goal that students can re-enter the classroom with clarity about classroom expectations and targeted positive behaviors he/she will demonstrate. 
 
Home/school communication is paramount for student success. When a child is asked to leave the room and redirected to the study room to process, parents will receive an email from the office informing them of the situation in hopes that the student will be able to process what happened at home as well.  
 
The Social Harmony curriculum, based on the work of Kim John Payne and Non Violent Communication (NVC), was established at OVWS under the expertise of Jane & Julia Martin. Its scope includes workshops with students, workshop with parents, 8th grade training, and conflict resolution. The Care Committee is in the process of restarting the workshops with great enthusiasm and will be eager to find volunteers interested in this work. Grade 1, 2/3, 4 and 5 have already had a first Social Harmony workshop on an age-appropriate topic, such as Telling vs. Tattle Telling, Verbal bullying vs. Kidding Around, or Bystanders vs. Upstanders. For the next couple of weeks, we have Social Pulse workshops planned for grades 6, 7 and 8, as well as an 8th grade training for our special Social Harmony Teen Support force.

For more information about the Social Harmony program, please contact Paule at the Main Office.

The Winter Spiral Journey: Bringing forth personal and collective light at the darkest time of the year

From Music Teacher Emma Back: 
On December 1st, Grades 1-4 will walk the Winter Spiral, guided by their 5th grade angels. We will gather as a community to honor the darkness and welcome back the light.

The dark time of year is a time of being receptive, still, and listening to our inner truth.
Vermont offers the perfect winter environment to work with these qualities. The cold and the snow support us in pausing, slowing down, surrendering and reflecting. But, if our full lives prevent us from finding the time for self-reflection and reverence, we can lean on our Waldorf community to provide us with opportunities to experience spiritual wonder, spaciousness, and beauty. In creating this time for ourselves, we can take a necessary pause to connect a bit more deeply to each other and our own truth. We can be filled up with the light our children offer, to support us through the dark days and busy time of the holidays.
 
We gather at dusk. Soft, pure voices penetrate the cold twilight air. The large spiral of dark evergreen boughs (collected by the children during the day) lay in contrast to the snowy ground. At the center of the spiral stands a tall candle, a single glowing light. The children, dressed in white, walk the labyrinth one by one, as the faculty and parents sing. The "angels" (5th graders) bring each child to the entrance, offering a gentle encouraging hand to begin their journey. Watch them as they walk their path: Some dance lightly on their toes, eager to reach the light as quickly as possible. Some walk slowly, with reverence, perhaps overwhelmed a bit by the solemn task of carefully lighting their candle and finding the perfect place to lay it to rest. As we watch them, we see this is how they move in the world: each with her own dance, each his own song.
 
By the end of the evening, the entire spiral is filled with light and every child has made this journey: going ever inward to touch the soul light, and returning having gathered this light, grown it and brought it forth in our community.
 
As we enter the holiday season, there will still be dark days ahead. But with reverence, guided by the seed of our personal truth, our "lit flame," we can navigate them with poise, purity, and ease. We can see where we must accept the darker days and learn from them, always keeping our inner light aflame. We can be joyful as we face any challenge. We can know that each of us carries the gift of light.
 

OVWS Annual Meeting - A Note from the Board

Thanks to everyone who came to the annual meeting on Friday evening (10/28)! 
It was a lovely evening that began with a ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new spaces on the Grace Farm campus: the Grades Building renovation and the new Farm and Forest Program. To celebrate all that our school offers, parents, faculty, and friends of the school gathered in the new 6th/7th grade classroom to recall moments of magic we have experienced at Orchard Valley. We recorded those moments on beautifully hand-painted apples, then strung them up in the yurt, where we enjoyed a potluck dinner. We voted to approve the nomination of two new members of the Board of Trustees! Welcome to Andy Hatch and Brian Doyle. Their bios will be posted to the Board of Trustees page on the website soon.
 
After dinner, the Board gave an update of accomplishments that came out of the ideas generated by our community at last year’s Annual Meeting:

* We renovated the grades building to create larger classrooms, space for educational support, a quieter, calmer hallway, an efficient main office, a dedicated woodworking room, and an indoor space for movement, music, and performances.

* We opened the Farm and Forest program--the first full-time outdoor kindergarten in the state! This is just a first step in developing our land to support outdoor education for children of all ages.

* We opened our Little Lambs Early Care Center--meeting a need for high quality daycare in central Vermont.

* We hired a full-time Enrollment and Outreach Director to help us fill these programs and hold our new families as they integrate into our community.

In the long run, these new programs will help ensure robust, healthy first grade classes, which will in turn help the growth of our grades school. However, these new initiatives required a great leap--a necessary leap--to launch our school into its next phase of growth and sustainability. They are an investment, and we knew we would face 1-2 years of financial challenges as we wait for them to take root and bear fruit.
 
The Board has been working diligently to address the current financial hardship facing Orchard Valley. Some initiatives the Board and Development Committee are working on include: fundraising for the renovations, the launching of our regularly scheduled Annual Fund which is a part of our budget aimed at supporting our teacher salaries; an initiative to increase enrollment across all programs in the coming year, with the ambitious goal of having 15-20 new families join our school; and the introduction of a Special Gifts Campaign to raise $100,000, which comes with a remarkable $50,000 matching gift that has just been pledged to inspire our community to raise the other $50,000.
 
We hope all of you will be inspired by the work we have accomplished over the past year, and we ask you to join us in our development and planning efforts.
 
Sincerely,
The Board of Trustees

"In Partnership:" The Parent-Teacher Relationship

Outside, the sunflowers at the Child's Garden hang low with heavy, dark heads. Petals still golden, curl at the edges. Children pluck them to put into pots of soup and bowls of salad at their restaurant underneath the bare, sheltering branches of the lilacs and honeysuckle. Inside the classroom hangs a felt and fabric sunflower. This sunflower hardly displays the perfection of the natural world. Its lettering, "Child's Garden," is somewhat a-kilter, the petals a bit floppy. Even over time its colors never fade. Like nature's sunflower, however, this sunflower speaks of growth and transformation. Just as magical as the burnished disk of the sunflower drying to show its meaty seeds, the interior Child's Garden sunflower holds the wishes and hopes of parents for the children.
 
Teachers at our school speak about the parent-teacher relationship in different ways, because we each are unique in personality, temperament, and biography. Early childhood teachers may talk about building the bridge between school and home. We share with parents verses to greet the morning, bless our meals, and shepherd to sweet slumber. We may sign our letters, "in partnership," to signify that children - and their individual child - will thrive most deeply when surrounded by the loving embrace of teacher and parent together.
 
Our Child's Garden sunflower tells this story. We want the same for the children, our children. We want them to "create strong friendships." We want to create for them a world that is good, beautiful, and true. Our children then will be free for "cheerful discovery," "love and laughter," and "infinite joy." With parent and teacher "in partnership" and striving to be models of imitation, our children then develop their capacities for empathy, kindness, and compassion.
 
Bless the sunflower. Bless our work together, on behalf of our children. ~ Child's Garden Director and Lead Teacher Stephanie Hoelscher
 

Welcome To Our New First Grade - "Older and Wiser Already!"

From Stasha Ginsburg, First Grade Teacher: It was very exciting to be back in school, reunited with old friends and starting first grade. Our week was christened in the mist, surrounded by faculty, friends and family, as we gathered together to form our first circle of the year during the Rose Ceremony. We then heard our first story, about a King, a Rooster and an Artist, and through it we learned about the gifts of practice. 

We started off our week with Form Drawing and began practicing straight lines and curves. One child asked, "Why must we draw a straight line and a curve?" So we looked at the letters on the board in our daily schedule and discovered that they are made up of straight lines and curves. "Oh! Now I understand why we are doing this!" We also found straight lines and curves everywhere around us--in nature, in our bodies, and in our room.

During our main lesson stories, we have been following the adventures of a group of children, who have wandered into 'the magic woods.' The children must create shapes together in the woods in order to unlock secret passageways, receive treasures from nature spirits, and journey further on the quests. These stories are fueling our imaginations, circle time activities, and our main lesson form drawing work periods. Like the children in our stories, we too are learning to make simple and complex shapes individually and together in our circle, as well as on the blackboard and page. The stories feed our work and play and vice versa. 
 
The students have been exuberant in their work, art, and play and are truly ready to be in first grade. Our work together has just begun, yet several of the children expressed that after a day or two of first grade, they feel much, much older and "at least 100 years wiser!"
 

A Peek Into Our New Farm and Forest Kindergarten

From Lindsay Miles, Farm & Forest Kindergarten Teacher: 
The magic of dew-covered spider webs in the morning, the smell of the woolly sheep, the sounds of the goats calling for their breakfast, the feeling of the wind blowing as the children swing higher and higher, the crunch from the apples being eaten as they have ripened on our apple trees...the days of the Forest Kindergarten class are filled with good work and imaginative play as we spend our days exploring this beautiful campus that is our classroom.

Each morning we begin with tending to the animals. The sheep (Moon Silver, Thunder, Flower and Baby --otherwise known as Snowy or Thunder2!) follow the children as they collect the grain and happily eat right from their hands. The goats (twin girls Sugar and Spice) mischievously wait for us to come and feed them grain and treats of goldenrod while showing off for us on their balance beam we made this summer. Mama Hen guards her babies well, but happily comes to us when we bring them all our leftover snack from the day. The Farm and Forest children are helpful workers who take great pride in their responsibilities as animal caretakers.  
 
Our Farm Days this year will be focused on work and play on the farm as we flow through the seasons. These days of the week will have us grinding grain and making bread, churning butter, collecting apples to cook applesauce, crafting with wool, dying silks and cloths with plants, boiling sap for maple syrup, and making and tending garden beds.
 
Our Forest Days will send us on wondrous nature walks into the forest where we will work with the elements--earth, air, fire, and water. We may build bridges over the water, make shelters, build fires, or make salves to protect our faces in the winter months.
 
Each day is held with a sturdy rhythm and by the changing of the seasons. Our circles are held outside, giving us plenty of room for good movement and connecting us to the nature-themed songs we sing and verses we say. Our stories are told in the sunshine as the weather allows, but as the cold creeps in we will seek respite more in the tepee. The tepee is also a place for indoor free play, daily activities like painting, coloring and bread making, and as a place to find warmth by the fire, with hot water bottles and wool blankets and playful activities through the winter months.
 
In all ways, our days are deeply rich. All of our activities and experiences are carried out with an organic breathing in and out, so the children always feel held, rhythmic, and intrigued. This year promises to be year of discovery.