Waldorf to Montessori, Bank Street to Reggio,
there's a lot of options when it comes to early childhood education.
So this series is a who's who and a what's what.
Let's get started.
Welcome to the Sunflower Garden.
So where are we?
We are in the Sunflower Garden at the Chicago Waldorf School.
And who are you?
I am Jackie Votanek.
I'm an early childhood teacher in a mixed-age kindergarten
and I'm also the current level chair of our early childhood level.
And what do the kids call you?
Teacher or Mrs. Votanek.
Mrs. Votanek. Tell me little bit more about the Waldorf philosophy.
Sure. Waldorf education looks at the whole child. We look at where they are
developmentally and we look at them in terms of their physical development,
their emotional development, their social development and their academic development.
And that's all the way through from parent-child classes
all the way through through 12th grade.
You could potentially be in a Waldorf school from birth until 18.
So it really does follow you through all those transitions of life.
Tell me how did this all get started?
Well, this is based on the philosophy of
Rudolph Steiner who's a philosopher from the turn of the century in Germany
for students of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory workers.
The owner of the factory wanted
to have education for the factory workers' children
and asked Rudolph Steiner to develop the curriculum.
Tell me about this area.
This would be the kitchen doll area
where the children will play home, home-like games.
So I see really thoughtful dolls. They're so cute.
All the Waldorf dolls are made lovingly by hand.
So these would all be wool felt, hand-stitched and there's very little detail on some of them,
so that the children can bring their own details to it.
Can you tell me about what's happening in here?
There's many things to choose from in this area. There's the wooden blocks that can be made into
anything on any given day and then there's the more natural rough blocks
that can also turn into anything. Homes, stones, money, whatever it may be.
There is the biggest table I've ever seen inside of a classroom.
This is taking up a lot of real estate. What happens at this table?
This is where our snack is. This is where preparation for snack is.
So we make bread every week and all the children help. We cut vegetables for soup every week
and the children help. We do crafts here, we paint here.
Oh my goodness, more gnomes. Gnomes and crystals.
So tell me about the crystals.
Crystals are also of the earth and have
I mean I believe have healing powers. So it's nice to have that within the classroom.
May I touch this?
This is also of wool. So this is wet felted wool as opposed to
the puppets that were over there were sewn, this is made by laying tufts of
colored wool and then wetting it with soap and felting it down.
Do the kids make these?
This would be an older class.
I think a high school class made these. I was going to say, what? This is an insane project.
They could do that with...we've done smaller projects but not something this big.
That's awesome.
Are there any major misconceptions people have about the Waldorf philosophy?
I think that sometimes people think that we don't teach reading until second grade.
I've heard that you don't teach until your teeth fall out.
And it's like really? That's not true.
I mean all the way along even if you're doing a parent-child class,
if your child is in the pre-k classroom
or the mixed age classroom it's all about language in terms of the
circle that we're doing, the songs, the poems or rhymes and then of course the stories
that we're telling are all rich in language. But there's no alphabet on the wall.
There's no alphabet on the wall.
You're not doing the letter of the week.
We're not doing the letters.
And so what we're doing is planting the seeds and planting the ability to
comprehend the story and make the inner pictures of the story that the teacher is
telling every day for one or two weeks at a time that the child can make
that picture themselves and then they're comprehending what this story is.
And so that later when they are learning the letters that all goes in deeper and they have that foundation.
Thank you so much for coming for a visit today. I'll see you next time!