ABOUT | Lightsong School

Lightsong Outdoor School, A Waldorf Initiative

Welcome to our small community school. Here, at Lightsong, we are striving to bring healing components to education, based on the indications given by Rudolf Steiner, so the children may gradually become more true to themselves. Every academic, artistic, physical activity is thoughtfully prepared to meet what is needed by the individual children before us. The children are empowered as they learn meaningful work in the garden and with the animals as well as on paper. Both in our academic work and through much working together socially and individually, we look toward a future in which every child may freely connect with their true heart and be ready to offer their gifts in service of each other and the greater community.

At Lightsong, your child will be working with teachers dedicated to fostering connections. Connection to loving teachers is the foundation for any young person on their educational journey. Our teachers work hard to truly see the children, meet them as they are each day, and actively listen to what might be needed in this journey of therapeutic education. Education must be living, challenging, meaningful. Spending most of our four-day school week outside cultivates a connection and reverence for the natural world, the seasonal cycle of the year, as well as an interest in listening to what the unseen world wishes to communicate.

By being outside with trees and earth and sky in all types of weather, children not only benefit from increased cognitive flexibility, emotional capacity and imaginative creativity, but they are more resilient! When invited to navigate wind and weather, children are more prepared to meet and cope with adversity within and without. Even as young children, an interest in the natural world and in each other supports the later development of interest in how to solve big questions by working from the experience of being part of the big picture and finding how all the pieces fit or do not fit together.

Because of our small school community, the children are able to really know each other and we cultivate compassionate collaborative problem solving as difficulties arise. We practice observation of the natural world in a way that invites reverence, wonder, and trust. From this lens, we learn to trust and naturally help each other.

If you are interested, read more about the researched benefits of outdoor education here.

Education as a Healing Art

In public and private schools alike, educators have noticed an increase in the number of children suffering with myriad difficulties. Rudolf Steiner brought, through his indications regarding the developing child and how to meet each stage of growth, as well as through his Curative Education lectures, a path for teachers to act as healers in the classroom.

The movement exercises we begin each day with at Lightsong are designed to help all children land more solidly in their bodies.These exercises help them feel at home in the physical body they have been born with and to develop and draw out strengths which, while already living within the child as a seed, may need a homeopathic dose of intervention to overcome whatever hindrances are keeping the child from manifesting their genius. Paintings are therapeutic in nature, and stories are brought pedagogically, with a similar intention, always looking toward what might serve as a balm for an individual child or for the whole group.