By Traci Newell

Waldorf School 5th-grade teacher Sandy Schneider leads his class in a song. Music is an integral part of Waldorf education. Joe Hu/Town Crier

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula has begun its search for local space to house its new high school. Last week, the school’s board of trustees approved the program to begin next year.

The Waldorf School, recognized for its unique approach to education, has educated students in Los Altos since 1984.

“We teach the children according to their developmental stages,” said Katharina Woodman, board member.

During a student’s first seven years, the school offers a healthful environment for children to become free individuals. It believes children learn by imitating actions, thoughts and feelings. For ages 7 to 14, the school emphasizes a respect for authority and understanding of equality and rights. Ages 14 to 21 are tasked with learning to respect and build a love for humanity.

The Waldorf educational program uses no textbooks and places children with the same teacher from first through eighth grade.

“Classmates become siblings more than anything else,” Woodman said.

Instead of textbooks, students create their own subject lesson books, which reflect the diversity and breadth of the curriculum through illustrations, paintings, hand-drawn maps, form drawings and essays.

The school uses academic and artistic experiences to develop movement and sensory motor skills, skills in perception of self and the outside world.

“We do not teach to test,” Woodman said. Students are graded on lesson books and class contributions.

The school requests families follow a no media policy of no television and no video games at home. Woodman said the school believes television stunts the imagination of the students, who then begin to build images from what they have seen, not what they imagine.

The educational process at Waldorf provides myriad opportunities for its students. In addition to educating them in standard core subjects such as math and English, Waldorf offers gardening, knitting and sewing, music, eurythmy, movement, cooking and foreign languages.

Eurythmy, unique to the Waldorf program, is an art of movement that engages the whole student, integrating body movement with soulful feelings. Students recite poetry, usually integrating nature, and move as inspired by the verses.

Music, both vocal and instrumental, is an integral part of the daily learning pattern for students at Waldorf. In the younger grades, students use recorders to practice their music skills, and in the fourth grade, they select an orchestral instrument.

The Waldorf campus in Los Altos includes a garden where the children can experience the process of seasons and harvesting. The children play an active role in creating everything in the garden.

“It shows the children that everything the children need can come from the garden,” said Carolyn Brown, the gardening teacher.

Sewing, knitting and other projects provide the vehicles for teaching handiwork.

“We take seriously the education of the hands,” said Alecia Dodge, handiwork teacher. “We draw attention to the hands being our most useful tools. Our hands are the eyes to our brain.”

The students begin in first grade building their own tools, which eventually aid them in their future hands-on work such as knitting, sewing, spinning, dyeing, weaving and cross-stitch. Eventually the students make their own instructional book for sewing and knitting patterns.

“We are teaching the head, heart and hands,” Woodman said.

Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher and scientist, developed Waldorf education in 1919. Emil Molt, owner of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, asked Steiner to start a school for the children of his workers. Steiner agreed under the conditions that the teachers would run the school and the students would study a highly ambitious curriculum.

Though the Nazis shut down the original Waldorf School, several other schools had been started around the world. Today there are nearly 1,000 independent Waldorf schools in 60 different countries, including 157 in North America.