This year RSCC features three early childhood related courses in weeks 2 and 3 of the Summer Festival. That’s in addition to eleven other courses on anthroposophy, Waldorf education and the arts. The first week of the festival, July 7-11, is devoted to grade intensives for grades 1-8. The full range of courses is outlined in our 32-page Summer Festival brochure which can be read or downloaded here. But you can read the course descriptions and presenter bios for the early childhood Summer Festival courses below:
Co-Creating with the Living World – Discover and Make Marionettes of Elemental Beings
July 14-18, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
This is what the children of our times long for and know is necessary for the future of humanity and for Gaia, our beloved home. We have heard fairy tales with gnomes, trolls and mermaids. Our children love to adorn nature tables with little figures and make houses for fairies. What does this have to do with our existential questions of how to face the shocking events where wind, water and fire wreak havoc in nature and also the human built world? The time is at hand to begin to forge a relationship that is reverent, creative and loving with the non-sense-perceptible beings of the elemental world.
This is a full day course. Elyse will lead the morning sessions with exercises that include inner imaginative practices, communication that includes art as the language for “speaking” and “listening”, and encounters with the mature trees who have been participants in co-creating and communication with children and adults for the last 15 years! You will learn how to bring children into these growing co-creative experiences with nature beings. Elyse will introduce the work of many anthroposophists, artists and visionaries who are developing the relationship with the living world.
In the afternoon sessions Laurie will lead us in co-creating a story using marionettes which we will share with each other. You will learn how to hold, ensoul and move the puppets with graceful and true movements. You will create the environment where the story will unfold. Finally, we will go into the forest to present this beautiful work to the trees as a gift and a further step towards acknowledging and communicating with the nature beings.
Elyse Pomeranz
Elyse Pomeranz was a Waldorf class teacher and has been a mentor for RSCC for 10 years. Elyse completed the Arscura School of Living Art 3-year programs in Art Capacity for Life and Biography Counseling. She studied with Marko Pogacnik (UNESCO artist for peace), co-creating with him and a North American team the geopuncture installation at TWS in 2011. Her own research with mature and ancient trees began in 2011 and she has over 1000 drawings co-created with trees around the world, some of which are as old as 5000 years (www.thetreeconversations.com).
Laurie Harper-Burgess
Laurie Harper-Burgess has been a Waldorf early childhood teacher for many years and a LifeWays home care provider for the last twelve. Three of her ongoing passions are working with children, puppetry and nature. This course brings these together in a way that will inspire the participants as well as giving them real experiences to transform their lives and the lives of the children they live and work with. Since retiring in the summer of 2023, she has been mentoring and teaching more frequently at the RSCC.
A Puppet Story for All Seasons
July 14-18, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm
“Puppetry is a remedy against the ravages of civilization.” – Rudolf Steiner
Using a felting needle, pipe cleaners and coloured fleece we will craft puppets to tell four puppet stories, one for each season. This will include how to make animals and easy backdrops. With these you can create many magical puppet shows on your lap, or table top, in a living room, in a garden or on a forest walk for your children, grandchildren or class. Celebrate birthdays, seasonal festivals, or just have fun. As we work, we will explore ideas for staging, movement and gesture.
Dianne Goldsmith
Dianne Goldsmith taught with the Toronto Board of Education for fifteen years. After the birth of her first son, she discovered the Toronto Waldorf School community. For many years she had a Waldorf-inspired home playgroup after which she joined the early childhood faculty at TWS, first as a kindergarten assistant, then as a lead teacher until her retirement in 2015. Currently she mentors EC teachers and teaches puppetry at Rudolf Steiner College Canada. She is a founding member of the Silk and Strings Marionette Troupe.
Who Shall Raise the Children? The Living Art of Parenting for the 21st Century
July 21-25, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Through inspiring presentations, artistic activities, and movement exercises, together we shall create a space to find and explore our own unique question in the field of parenting. This question will become the North Star that guides you through the turbulent waters of raising children in these times. Throughout the journey of following the Star, you develop new parenting skills and capacities which then become an inner compass. Our intention for this course is to plant seeds together for connection and to inspire new social forms out of the ever-deepening inner knowing of what is needed for the future. It does, after all, take a village to raise a child.
Marg and Kati, as New Adult Education facilitators, apply individualized spiritualized learning processes based on Coenraad van Houten’s work and will introduce My Child Myself, a parent education process developed by Arlene Thorn. As students and facilitators of these modalities they will call on the work of Kim John Payne (Simplicity Parenting) as well as Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi. Please note this is a full day course. Bring a notebook, sketch book and coloured crayons.
Marg Beard
Marg Beard has been a Waldorf educator/mentor for over 30 years. It started with the homeschooling, from birth to grade 12, of her three now adult children. She became, for many years, a mentor for RSCC’s Foundations Studies in Anthroposophy Distance program, Homeschooling and Early Years streams, a co-founder and director of RSCC’s Healing Education and Remedial Training (HEART) program, and now a facilitator of the New Adult Learning programs My Child Myself as well as My Home, Family and Community (www. newadultlearning.com).
Kati Gabor
Kati Gabor, New Adult Education facilitator, mentor, parenting coach and Waldorf consultant is an experienced Waldorf teacher who has worked with parents, teachers and healing professionals for the past 20 years. Her focus on the inner work of the teacher led her to Michael Chekhov’s drama exercises which inspired her to complete the Art of Acting course at the Threefold Educational Center, NY. Kati facilitates Connections and My Child Myself programs of New Adult Learning (www.newadultlearning.com ).
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