Keep up-to-date with your child’s learning with these short weekly updates from their teachers. Click on the buttons below to go straight to your child’s class, or find out what others are up to!
Kindergarten/Boronia Room
Our beautiful beeswax modelling was inspired by our story this week called “The Butterfly and the Rose”. You can see that the children’s skills and abilities to shape and craft the beeswax has really grown and blossomed over the year. The children are now able to make a range of detailed and refined sculptured images.
Next week we enter Week 6 of the term, and we will begin work on our final Festival for this year. We have 3 full weeks and 3 days remaining of school. Oh, that’s seems almost unbelievable!
Please send in your Bushwalking permission note for our end of year adventure with Kath Turner and Class 1/2 on the Charles Darwin Walk in Wentworth Falls on the new date of Tuesday, 18 November. Don’t forget to pack some extra clothes for the water play.
A reminder to families coming into Little Kindy and Kindergarten for 2026 that our Orientation Morning Tea will be held on Saturday 22 of November at 10am until 12 noon. This is an opportunity for the children and their families to spend time in the Kindergarten space, meet each other and ask questions. The children will get to bake bread, play in the space with their parents present and listen to a story before heading home.
Have a great weekend.
Francine
Class 1/2
Class 1/2 were fortunate to begin our week with Paul Glass accompanying us on a local bush walk to the waterfalls behind our school. Paul generously played the yidaki against a rock wall while we listened to the waterfalls. We explored Fairy Glens, shared crackers, splashed in the water, jumped off rocks, spotted King Parrots and Black Cockatoos. Another opportunity to be deeply grateful for our beautiful environment and unique community.
Our Main Lesson stories this week have included how the Banksias came to be and the story of the Currawongs and Magpies. We are learning to care for country and respect the birds, insects and plants around us here in the stunning Blue Mountains.
The children are progressing with skill and grace during our weekly Eurythmy lessons with Isabella. Each week I am stunned by the children’s progress, focus and reverence. Thank you, Isabella, for the skill and care that you apply to each session.
Our spelling words this week have included the diagraph ‘ow’, including owl, howl, cowgirl, cowboy, flower and clown. Children practiced spelling the words in many ways, wrote silly sentences and illustrated them. Well done my splendid spellers!
Next week is our Class Camp! Class 1 will be going for a bushwalk and staying for a camp dinner before heading home to their home beds whilst Class 2 will be going for a walk to spot Glow Worms before sleeping over at school. How exciting! Our Class Camp is a highlight, and we simply can’t wait!
Enjoy a restful weekend!
Warmly,
Kath
Class 3/4
It is busy, busy times in Class 3/4 as we have descended into Class Play mode. Our Class Play is Wednesday Week 8, and we are performing the Norse Myth Idunn’s Apples. It is a tale of Idunn who is the Goddess who supplied the Aesir gods and those in Valhalla, with apples of eternal youth, providing them with endless vigour and strength. In the play she is stolen by giants which causes the gods to age, until they set about to rescue her. I have chosen the story and written the play as it spoke to me personally and connected with the children when we looked at it in Term 2. The children are incredibly excited already.
We also began to design and decorate our handmade Viking swords and shields, which we will use in the play and then the children can take home and keep, and use them again when they fight the dragon in the Autumn play during Class 4/5/6.
The children came to the “armoury” to select a sword and shield that felt beautiful and comfortable for them. We looked at and chose authentic shield designs, backed by archaeological evidence and are also selecting colours that were used on shields at this time. Adding to the excitement we are using wood burning to burn runes onto both sword and shields. Children are selecting what they want to say and translating this into runes, so everyone’s designs are unique, meaningful and personal.
Designs are going through the pre-design process on paper, then being transferred onto the shields and swords in pencil, to be coloured with watercolour paint that continues to show the wood grain. In this way of slow, deliberate planning and thoughtfulness, the students are feeling deeply into a sense of respect and reverence for the task. They are also processing that they have choices, but within a framework, and there is respect for others culture, tradition and history in our actions. This is an important thing to uphold, in a fast, self-centred and highly disposable consumer society, and something that Steiner education continues to see as important skills for the Class 3/4 child.
Camp is coming up fast. It will be wonderful to have the mini-Vikings off on an adventure together overnight.
These are busy, exciting and emotionally, socially and intellectually challenging times for the children. We are balancing this with enough settling tasks and routine to provide an equilibrium to the heightened state of being that plays and camps and timber swords seem to bring on 9- and 10-year-olds! The children may need similar extra grounding at home to regulate their nervous systems over the last month of the school year. Baths, early nights, good breakfasts, time in nature, shared novels read aloud, doing less and doing it slowly and well where our life allows.
Kind regards
Jeneva and Meredith
Class 5/6
It has been an honour spending an extended time with your children. As exhausting as it is, being on call for three full days straight, it is also equally enriching. The class were truly beautiful. Our team leader at Yarramundi was Sam, and he said so many things that made me see even more objectively, how lovely our class is, plus what Steiner education brings to the children.
He said that our group were so caring and cohesive, curious and thoughtful. They were courageous and adventurous, comfortable in nature and he could see that they were not afraid of being in natural surroundings (compared to many children he meets). Lee and I were mightily impressed at how the children had a good sense of their limitations, but alongside that, were able to move out of their comfort zones and try things that expanded their experiences of life.
In an activity called ‘Initiatives’, Sam said he’d never seen groups approach solutions in such inventive and lateral ways. What a gift to know that our children have those kinds of creative minds which can find solutions and approaches to problems, in ways that are expansive and less fixed.
As their teacher it has been great seeing qualities of their personalities and abilities reveal themselves in ways that are often more hidden in the context of a school day. Activities included the Giant Swing, Cave Maze, Alpine Rescue, Orienteering, Archery, Teams Challenge-Block Build, Music Trivia evening and Rock Climbing. Within those activities, skills were gained, such as how to put on a safety harness, how to belay people in rock climbing, plus many other skills which could only work when there are healthy group dynamics and a communal mindset, in order to achieve successful outcomes for the group.
These last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind and I just want to reiterate, how fantastic it has been to work with your children as we prepared for the Greek Olympics (Class 5), rehearsed and performed our Class Play, climbed up the granite tors of Evan’s Crown, and then went on camp to Yarramundi. All of that in amongst everything we’ve been learning about the history of Australia around the time of Federation.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Martin who came and supported our Class at Yarramundi every evening/night in amongst the heavy workload of his days at the school.
May you have a lovely weekend,
Julie and Lee
