25th Anniversary
Posted:Mark your calendars! The weekend of May 25, 26, 27 we will be celebrating our school’s 25th anniversary. The event will coincide with our popular annual May Fair festivities. Plans are already underway. Check back soon for details.
If you are Edge Hill school alumnus or know someone who is, please contact us at 519 369 3195 or info@edgehill-school.com
If you attended the school previous to 1986 or know someone who did we especially want to hear from you.
Come and celebrate with us!
Doll Making Workshop – March 24th
Posted:
Join us for an all-day workshop at Edge Hill School to create an individual Waldorf doll from basic materials. Made of cotton knit fabric and wool stuffing and using techniques drawing on traditional European dollmaking, the Waldorf doll allows the child to improve or strengthen imagination and creativity. These dolls feel soft and warm!
The workshop is led by Dorothy Lind, a veteran Waldorf homeschooling parent of over 20 years, creating her Waldorf materials along the way. She has taught grade 5 at Edge Hill School & was a summer Camp craft instructor at Aurora Waldorf School in New York. Dorothy ran “Gifts of the Goddess” gift shop in downtown Durham several years ago, and has led workshops for adults and children in doll-making, moccasin-making, hoop-drum construction, buckskin coat making, and assorted other craft and art workshops, both in Ontario and New York.
Cost: $65, includes all materials, payable by cash or cheque. Please register by calling 519.369.3195 and leaving your name and phone number. We’ll get back to you to confirm. This workshop is geared for those 14 and over. Children 13 and under require the help of a parent to participate in this session – both will be admitted for one workshop fee and will receive materials for one doll.
The class is Saturday, March 24th from 9:30 am to 4 pm at Edge Hill School, Concession 2 north of Edges Side road
Advent Spiral
Posted:We are looking forward to the very special festival that we call the
Advent Spiral, that is happening this Sunday November 27th at the
Glenelg Town Hall.
What is it all about – what can you expect?
We meet outside at 5:45 and huddle in the very small foyer to keep
warm. Soon after, Tony Masset, who has been leading this event for
many years, lets us all know that it is time to enter. This is the
time to shift into the quiet nature of this festival.
Throughout the evening, there is alternating singing and recorder
playing as children are individually led by an angel to journey the
spiral of evergreen boughs, find the light and carry it safely to
designated place on the spiral. This is a special festival as we
enter the time of year where short days and long nights can carry us
to a quiet place within. Let the beauty of the evening fill your
senses.
Although there is no specific age or grade limit we ask that everybody
remember the reverent quiet nature of this special festival.
For safety, we ask that the children not wear long or gauzy dresses.
At the end of the evening, families wait outside or in the foyer to
receive a candle and apple holder to bring home.
Depending on the number of children that go through, we are usually
done the evening by 7:30.
The Glenelg Town Hall is at the corner of Concession 4 and Baptist Church RD.
We meet at 5:45 and start at 6pm.
Edge Hill Country Day School Brings Head, Heart and Hands to Children’s Learning
Posted:The first thing you notice when you pull up to Edge Hill School in the morning is motion. Children are climbing the rough wooden structures, pumping the swings for all they’re worth, exploring in the mud, calling to each other to play. Children, from about 4 to about 13 years of age, are all in evidence in the schoolyard, playing and visiting side by side. They are called to class, in one of the three small buildings on the grassy property, by a school bell, an actual school bell, pulled on a rope by one lucky kid each day. This is life at Edge Hill, a rural Waldorf-inspired school. Edge Hill School, located just outside Durham in Grey County (less than two hours north of the GTA) began as a stone schoolhouse at these crossroads in 1872. It was an ungraded school until the early 1960s and many local residents recall fondly their years there through the decades. In the fall of 1986, the efforts of a small group of parents transformed Edge Hill into Edge Hill Country Day School, a Waldorf “initiative”. That means it draws from the fastest-growing independent school system in the world. Founded in 1919 to serve the children of factory workers in Germany, its originator Rudolf Steiner was charged with the task of developing an educational approach that encourages a sense of social responsibility, respect, and compassion; to teach children how to work co-operatively; and to enable them to contribute to society and culture. Studies have found Waldorf-educated pupils to be unusually oriented towards improving social conditions and having more positive visions of the future The Waldorf interdisciplinary approach to learning, using practical and artistic as well as academic elements to make learning deeper and more memorable, is catching on world-wide. As of 2011, there were 998 independent Waldorf schools and 1400 kindergartens in sixty countries throughout the world. Waldorf schools existed for both races in apartheid South Africa. There’s a Waldorf school for Arab and Jewish students in Israel, and there is a Friends of Waldorf foundation with links to UNESCO. There are some pretty compelling reasons for this rising popularity. As mainstream school systems focus on costs and disparate demands from parents for “more, faster” and the results show up in stressed-out families and over-scheduled lives, the Waldorf movement could be considered a companion to the “slow food” movement. Edge Hill uses this well-established and astonishingly effective Waldorf curriculum and approach for its students from kindergarten to Grade 8. There is a separate Parent and Tot program that operates in Spring and Fall. You notice the difference as soon as you enter any of the school’s classrooms: there’s both simplicity and richness. Each class includes a nature table, beautiful paintings and other student work, a chalk drawing on the blackboard relating to the current lesson “block”. There are basic school supplies, but no computer screens. The Waldorf approach emphasizes the importance of the right thing at the right time and insists on allowing the child the chance to have a childhood, with particular importance on imagination, learning by doing and times to simply “breathe out”. Each day includes a main lesson block, a two-hour period in which students explore that block’s topic in depth. A Grade 3 class, for example, might learn about the pioneer days by listening, observing and doing . They will revisit the topic through drawing or painting, through hearing and creating stories from the era, from learning skills from the time period by creating a useful object. Their other daily lessons will reinforce their learning: perhaps they will improve their hand-eye co-ordination by knitting, or their math skills by calculating the number of trees required to build a log cabin. Many of the activities are developed by the class teacher, who develops a very close bond with each child as a result of the small class sizes and strong sense of community. There is a strong focus on using local assets, from visiting conservation areas to recruiting parents skilled in a relevant discipline. Students here have learned astronomy from a fall sleep-out, medieval cooking from creating their own Rich Man/Poor Man feast and math skills from creating and running their own fundraising activities. Where you really notice the difference is when you speak to the children. They are actively engaged in learning, even when they don’t know it. They take their lessons with them and the transition from learning to recreation is practically seamless. At recess, you can see children re-enacting the morning’s Greek myth or practicing balancing skills on the long logs temptingly laid out in the school yard. The Grade 5 botany block results in those students wandering under the trees, delighting in their ability to identify the different species. You might find the Grade 3 class bringing their structures block to life by building a fort. While these are still children of the 21st century, they are not preoccupied with screens and pop culture. They are involved with the living world and their discovery of what’s in it. Their focus is paying off: many of these children who enter region-wide competitions, in everything from writing to public speaking to music to visual arts, distinguish themselves, often in disproportionate numbers to the size of the school. This, too, is a world-wide trend: we are seeing the results in Waldorf alumnae who have learned good habits of mind and take on the wider world of higher education or making a living with gusto and with great success and personal satisfaction. Visitors often comment that they wish they’d attended a school like this and indeed many families are prepared to make major changes in lifestyle to ensure their children have this advantage. You can see Edge Hill Country Day School in action in May when the students, faculty and parents offer a celebration of the warmer weather with May Fair on Saturday, May 28th. You can watch the students dancing around the May Pole, take part in field day events, listen to music, purchase natural and organic items in the vendor area. And this fall, Edge Hill will begin a year of celebrations in honour of its 25th anniversary. It’s a great time to be a kid, if you’re an Edge Hill kid. Gee, I wish I’d gone there. For more information on the school or upcoming events, please call Edge Hill Country Day School at 519-369-3195, or visit www.edgehill-school.com.