A Waldorf Public Charter
Using a Waldorf inspired educational approach, Madrone Trail Public Charter School strives to achieve the following objectives:
- Provide a solid academic foundation with high academic standards.
- Offer an arts-integrated curriculum, wherein core academic subjects are enlivened, made relevant, and given contextual meaning by incorporating music, singing, art, storytelling, drama, and movement.
- Incorporate multi-sensory and multiple intelligence styles of teaching, to provide opportunities for success and balance for all students.
- Create a school atmosphere in which healthy emotional developed is fostered, and where qualities of courteous treatment, compassion, patience and understanding will flourish.
- Build a strong community-family-school partnership with meaningful opportunities for involvement.
- Assess student progress in ways that reflect the whole of a child’s learning while meeting educational and testing requirements.
In public education, you frequently hear the term multiple intelligences referring to how children learn and the different approaches you have to take to meet the learning styles of the child. In Waldorf education the rich environment we create directly addresses the concept of multiple intelligences and helps to give to each student the support they need in a rich art infused environment where they can learn and grow to meet their highest potential.
- A Waldorf inspired education– A balance of head, heart and hands; or of thinking, feeling, and doing.
- Arts integrated teaching method incorporating story telling, drawing, painting, modeling, music, and movement into lesson presentations.
- The curriculum reflects developmental rhythms and the child’s changing consciousness through the grades.
- Strong community-family-school partnership in support of the children.
- Multiculturalism incorporated into the social aspects of learning to help young children keep an open mind and gain a deeper understanding of other cultures.
Educational Approach and Distinctive Teaching Techniques
- Through looping, the class teacher works with each child through a multi year relationship.
- Rhythm of the day is organized to balance thinking, feeling, and doing.
- Core academic subjects are taught in block periods.
- Textbooks are not used in the lower grades. (Teachers add their artistic creativity to curriculum resources to enliven the presentation of the subject.) Children create their own individual books for each subject.
- Science is taught on an empirical basis leading to conclusion of laws and formulas.
- Music is introduced in the first grade with the recorder leading to other instruments, choir, and orchestra in the higher grades.