Our journey with the kids and educational options went a different direction than I expected. I home schooled my two older kids for 10 years, but by the end of the first summer (2012) with our 3 little ones, it had become clear that different options needed to be found.
Mei-Mei and Hunter participated in a parent co-op preschool (Joy school) which was just perfect for their needs...moms and friends that we knew well, my participation periodically.
At the end of that school year, I wasn't feeling terribly confident about the school meeting Matthew's needs in first grade, mainly because I have a looser definition of what a 6 year old boy needs to be able to do (positive and negative). So, we did a search of charters in Anchorage, and found a Waldorf charter that looked really good. Charter schools sometimes lose students in 7th and 8th grade because kids go back to neighborhood schools for sports or other reasons. In our case, there were spots open at Winterberry for the two older grades, and since Sam was in 7th grade, he got in. Matthew and Mei-Mei came in as siblings.
(Maypole celebration 2015)
We've now been at Winterberry for 2 1/2 years, and the journey has been like many journeys: hard, wonderful, filled with love and learning. For me, as an adoptive parent of child with trauma in their background, the best thing about a Waldorf education is the goal is to educate head, hands, and heart....not just head. What that has translated to in our family is that my children are deeply loved by their teachers. Great effort has been made to understand them, their needs, their challenges, but most of all, their strengths. There is an amazing emphasis on the childrens' strengths that I find unusual in a school setting.
(back to school haircuts, 2015)
