Greetings!
It has been a difficult transition back to work and school after winter break while collectively grieving the loss of our friend, colleague, and teacher, Nigel Harrison. We truly appreciate the outpouring of support from HVWS parents and friends past and present. At the end of the last school year I requested little blurbs from our specialty teachers describing the work they do with our students. I have been holding on to Nigel's, on Therapeutic Eurythmy, and would like to share it with you below. Before break I began assembling this newsletter and upon returning to complete it, found it fitting that I had included a number of photos of the beautiful 7th and 8th grade eurythmy performance guided by our Eurythmy Teacher Laetitia Berrier-Saarbach. Many of these students were Mr. Harrison's students when they were younger. Nigel once told me that whenever 8th graders would ask, "Why do I need to study eurythmy?" He would reply, "You'll thank me when you take your first driver's test!" Nigel, you have given us so much to be thankful for. We miss you.
With light,
Christina Dixcy
Communications Director and Office Manager
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On Therapetutic Eurythmy...
Eurythmy is in itself a difficult subject to grasp, unless we give the simplest characterization of making speech and music visible through movement.
Eurythmy as Visible Speech and
Eurythmy as Visible Music are essential reading for those who go through eurythmy training, not exactly light but informative. So when I am asked to share what Eurythmy Therapy is, I try to look at the person in front of me to see what angle I should approach from. In this case, I have no particular audience in sight.
So come on into my space. I will ask you to skip around the room, to walk like a prince, or a tall and upright Native American chieftainess with a beautiful headdress with eagle feathers that flow down your back. We might also jump like a frog or test our balance.
Such exercises help me to perceive what challenges you may have. I am not doing this blind as I have written referrals from the class teacher. I usually speak to the teacher before and/or during the sessions to confirm my observations. Often children act quite differently in one-on-one or group situations.
From this point I choose particular exercises. These may be a classic sequence of spoken sounds to work with asthma; or jumping forwards, backwards, side to side, in a particular rhythm, to help with rhythm and sequencing; or walking a geometric form such as a square, triangle, or star. There are exercises for almost anything from bed-wetting to blood pressure, scoliosis to sleep issues.
Now why? I would say that all eurythmy experiences are health-giving. Eurythmy can be experienced in three ways: as a participant in a class; as a performance where one can be performer or audience member; or in a therapeutic setting. In the first two possibilities there is an interplay of giving and receiving, in itself a eurythmical experience. However, in therapeutic eurythmy, the student is being given the essence of movement in homeopathic doses, small but concentrated! that they receive from the therapist. I would ask you (as the student, if you are still in the room with me) to do the gesture with the imagination that you are in large bubble so that the gesture can work back on you. This immediately changes how the exercises are done; they become more substantial and stronger. The movement and gestures work onto the whole child, both the visible and invisible parts. This is similar to many kinds of bodywork; the unique aspect to this constitutional healing is that the individual works to balance themselves out. At the end of the session you will rest, allowing the exercises that you have done to work all the way in, seep into the deepest parts.
-Nigel Harrison
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Annual Fund Giving Levels
Red Leaf ($5,000 or More)
Red Leaf ($1,989 - $4,999)
Red Leaf ($1,000 - $1,989)
Red Leaf ($500 - $999)
Yellow Leaf ($250 - $499)
Green Leaf ($100 - $249)
Green Leaf ($1 - $99)
Thank you for your support! Housatonic Valley Waldorf School is a non-profit 501c3.
Your contribution is potentially tax- deductible.
Tax ID # 061310057
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It Takes A Village Community Painting
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You may now
make a donation online to be included in the BEAUTIFUL art piece being created by Emily Remensperger!
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Visit our
calendar for a full listing of events.
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Tuesday, March 12
6:30 PM
Lower Level, Compass Hall
1 Jacklin Rd., Newtown, CT
You are cordially invited to the 4th grade's production of
The Fate of Baldur.
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8th Grade Graduation Project Presentations
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Thursday, March 14
6:30 PM
Atrium, Compass Hall
1 Jacklin Rd., Newtown, CT
Witness the culmination of the hard work our 8th graders have been putting into their months-long graduation projects. Don’t miss this presentation!
2019 Projects
Madeleine Abramson: Tap Dancing
Rose Bertram: Yoga
Alice Blyn: Welding
Tristan Counter: Cooking
Helena de Castro: Portraiture
Daschel Knuff: The Science of Laughter and Art of Comedy
Isabelle Redpath: Scottish Gaelic
Beckett Reynolds: Parkour and Freerunning
Esther Yu: CGI and Animation
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(NEW DATE) Thursday, March 28, 6:30 PM
6th Grade Classroom, Compass Hall
1 Jacklin Rd. Newtown, CT
Mr. Vojack-Weeks invites your 6th-8th grader to join the Middle School Book Club. For the first meeting students should read and will discuss
The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove.
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Biodynamic Gardening Club
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Friday, March 29, 3-5 PM
Grade School Campus, 1 Jacklin Rd. Newtown, CT
The Biodynamic Gardening Club is designed for parents, but children are welcome to attend meetings along with their parent(s). Alumni welcome! With questions, e-mail Marcella Kapsaroff.
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Saturday, March 30, 10 AM
Grade School Campus
The Puppetry Committee is pleased to present
The Girl Who Spun Gold.
The puppet show in the Waldorf tradition features hand-sewn puppets, sumptuous plant-dyed silks, and a simple, age-appropriate performance style suited to young children’s attention spans and level of awareness. A peaceful and enchanted mood prevails. Our puppet shows are appropriate for 3-8 year-olds.
Puppet shows are free, however the Puppetry Committee will happily accept a goodwill offering to support
Women for Women International, an organization helping women survivors of war rebuild their lives. Families interested in touring our Early Childhood campus immediately following the performance should call Therese Lederer at 203-364-1113 or
register online.
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Save the Date: Spring Benefit
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Dinner and Live Auction: Saturday, May 4
Online Auction: April 29-May 8
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Dates and themes are now up on our
Summer Camp page and registration is open!
If you have questions about the upcoming Summer Camp season, please e-mail
camp@waldorfct.org.
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Circus Arts After-School Classes
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Classes begin April 24
Circus Arts with Laura Geilen will include basic instruction and practice in tumbling, acrobatics, juggling, clowning and balance skills, including rolling globe, balance board, and unicycle.
Who: For students in grades 3-8
When: 6 Wednesdays, 3-5 PM, April 24, May 1, 8, 15, 22, 29
Where: Eurythmy Room, Compass Hall
Cost: $175.00, payable through TADS
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Bluebell Nursery
Marcella Kapsaroff and Liz Koors
The Bluebell class was happy to be back from their February break and Ms. Marcella and Ms. Liz were happy to find all 12 Bluebells happy and healthy at school on Monday. The Bluebells will begin work on their spring gala project next week, which will be sure to delight all who see the finished work of art! And don’t forget our March Parent evening will be held on Tuesday March 26, 2019. In our winter circle we are kittens under the care of a watchful mother who leads us to London town, to visit the queen, and helps us when our mittens are soiled and shushes us when she smells mice nearby! All the while King Winter implores Jack Frost to nip our nose and toes.
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Sunflower Kindergarten
Isabel Gandara and Aliz Mihok
The Sunflower class enjoyed many festival celebrations during the month of February. Candlemas is always an exciting celebration where all the classes get together and make hand-dipped beeswax candles while singing our Candlemas song. The Valentine's Day celebration was also very fun and very simple.The children made their valentine at school (a heart made out of paper) and then they exchanged these gifts with each other while they played a fun Valentine's Day game. At snack time they had a beautifully decorated table with some glass hearts and a special heart-shaped candleholder, and enjoyed some very delicious heart-shaped cookies. To finalize the celebration they gathered with the Rose class to watch a special puppet show of the story,
The Valentine Baker of Pink. The story is about a baker who lives in a small town named Pink and makes magic pink heart-shaped cakes for Valentine's day. Word spread far and wide that if you ate one of these heart cakes on Valentine's Day you would feel especially happy and cared for. And in this way the Baker of Pink was able to help a sad princess who lived in a kingdom far away from his town. During the month of February, our circle has been about a little boy named Sammy who makes a snowman that suddenly and magically winks his eyes, dances a snowflake jig, and takes Sammy by the hand to go together into a wonderful adventure that includes visiting King Winter's icy tunnel and rolling down a hill.
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Rose Kindergarten
Carrie Reilly and Heather Hemphill
The Rose children are enjoying all that King Winter is sharing with us! “I like winter, I like snow, I like icy winds that blow, I like snowflakes oh so light, making all the ground so white!” We are sledding and sliding down the hills! Catching snowflakes on our tongues! The “Sun” children have been sewing and making snowmen to take home with them. We are listening to the story of “Mother Holle” and learning that when her feather bed is shaken properly, the feathers fly and snow falls upon the Earth. Enjoy your winter!
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Class of 2026 (1st Grade)
Emily Remensperger
The first graders are busy with another exciting Language Arts block. Now that we have mastered the alphabet and are familiar with the vowel sounds, we can finally start to craft our own words, using written language to retell the many stories we hear each week, or to tell stories of our own! Much work goes into decoding new words, but much reward is reaped when we can say “We are reading!”
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Class of 2025 (2nd Grade)
Jennifer Chapman
In the second grade we have been working very hard on our multiples of three and four. We just learned about Saint Valentine and Saint Veronica. We heard the story of
The Boy Who Cried Wolf and it gave us something to reflect on. We are working on our sight words and building up our reading skills. We just learned many of the “SK” blends. Just ask any second grader and they can share some of words with you with “SK” in the beginning, middle, and end of several words. We are also finishing up our fantastic Auction Project! It exudes the energy of this very special group of individuals.
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Class of 2024 (3rd Grade)
Allison Washington
Just before our winter break, the third grade put on a wonderful performance of their play,
Morning Star, which told the story of the Jewish holiday Purim, and how Queen Esther saved her people. (Scroll down for photos.) Most recently, third graders have started a Shelter block and will begin working on their shelter projects which is exciting! We had a nice field trip earlier in the week to view a Native American encampment and to observe the maple syruping process. It turned out to be a very sweet experience!
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Class of 2023 (4th Grade)
Leslie Lew
4th grade recently studied fractions and we are now back in a Language Arts block. It is an interesting process to go from concrete numbers and processes to something abstract such as fractions. It helps if the lessons are planned around concrete items, and helps even further when those items are food!
We fit in a visit to the Shepaug Eagle Observatory in January, and are preparing for our play,
The Fate of Baldur, which we will perform on Tuesday, March 12.
Pictured below: the Newtown Rotary Club visited the 4th grade and gifted each student their own dictionary. Thank you to David Freedman and Mary Griffin for coming to our classroom.
Red-shouldered Hawk by Rowena Sawyer
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Class of 2022 (5th Grade)
Laura Hayes
The fifth graders have been working intensely on finishing their state projects and polishing their presentations for Friday, March 1. The students have researched states from Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Vermont as well as U.S. territories Guam and American Samoa. We look forward to some culinary treats paired with the students’ presentations.
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Class of 2021 (6th Grade)
Vincent Vojack-Weeks
The 6th grade has just finished up their first-ever Physics block. Using mostly everyday materials, they discovered underlying principles that govern sound, light, heat, and magnetism.
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Class of 2020 (7th Grade)
Marleen De Grande
Life has been very busy in the 7th grade. In addition to giving a Eurythmy performance for the HVWS community earlier this month, grades 7 and 8 performed
Sulaiman and the Elephant King at Primrose Hill School in Rhinebeck, NY. During this trip we visited the Culinary Institute of America for lunch and sat outside in the blazing sun. At the moment we are finishing our Renaissance/Age of Exploration main lesson block. All students created their own version of a Renaissance work of art (Bruegel, Botticelli, Durer and Fra Angelico) as part of a Renaissance artist project. Each student also studied the biography of an explorer and presented these to the class through a postcard project. We heard about Amundsen, Wills & Burke, Livingstone, and Ponce de Leon.
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HVWS 7th grader
Alexis Steger and her Skyliners Open Juvenile team returned from the 2019 Eastern Synchronized Skating Sectional Championship in Worcester, Massachusetts. 29 teams in the open juvenile division first competed in the qualifying round, with top 12 teams advancing to the championships. Skyliners won the Eastern Open Juvenile sectional title, capping off their all-gold season.
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Class of 2019 (8th Grade)
Laura Wittmer
The eighth grade just finished a Physics block in which we explored the light spectrum through our work with prisms. We enjoyed seeing rainbows everywhere and drawing what we observed. We also learned some basics about electricity as we built simple, series, and parallel circuits using batteries and light bulbs. We learned about current, amperes, and volts and built our own simple motors. Each student got their motor to spin! We also enjoyed hosting the Valentine's Tea for the faculty and staff and had a wonderful time at our Talent Night (scroll down for photos). Now we are focusing on our upcoming eighth grade projects.
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As part of the worldwide Waldorf 100 celebrations we are recording our voices and sharing our stories through The Waldorf Chronicles, an archive project. Waldorf schools and teacher training institutes in North America are adding interviews to the StoryCorps Archive, the largest collection of human voices ever gathered.
If you would like to be interviewed for the Waldorf Chronicles please e-mail Christina Dixcy at cdixcy@waldorfct.org. You can read sample questions on
The Waldorf Chronicles' page.
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Thank you to
Lisa Buckley and
Claudia Larsson for their generosity this week.
Thank you to
Meyer Glaser, Ph.D. for speaking with our upper grades students and being available on campus for counseling. Thank you to
Gabriel I. Lomas, Ph.D. who coordinated the effort to have two providers on campus to support our school community. Dr. Lomas heads up a regional crisis response team and is a Professor of Counseling at WCSU. Thank you to the
Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry and
Leah, for bringing warmth and comfort to our students and staff. (Below, Leah visits the 4th and 7th grade classrooms.)
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Thank you to
Anne Kupferberg for volunteering in the office one morning a week.
Thank you to our
Spring Benefit Committee volunteers for all of the work they are putting into the upcoming event!
Thank you to the Diversity Committee:
Emily Remensperger, Laetitia Berrier-Saarbach, Camille Lawrence, Alex Exley, Christina Dixcy, Heather Hemphill, Sunshine Lucas, Patricia Campbell, and Marcela Perez for their work organizing the inaugural panel of our Deepening the Dialogue series,
Dimensions of Gender. Thank you to
Leah Julliet,
Jessica Vooris, and
Stonewall Speakers Roberta, Dave, and Barbara for their compelling and generous stories. Special thank you to honorary filmographer
Henry James, HVWS Class of 2017, for filming the panel.
Thank you to the Puppetry Committee for their lovely production of
The Donkey:
Isabel Gandara, Aliz Mihok, Jessica Khoshabo, Christina Dixcy, and Linda Straub.
Thank you to
Bobby, Kylie, and Khloe Hudak for baking for the puppet show and early childhood tour.
Thank you to all of the
parents who cook for faculty meals!
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7th and 8th Grade Eurythmy Performance: Sulaiman and the Elephant King
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3rd Grade Class Play: Morning Star
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Support HVWS While You Shop
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Amazon Smile
If you shop through Amazon you may designate Housatonic Valley Waldorf School to receive .5% from your purchase. Please designate HVWS as your chosen charity and make your Amazon purchases at the Amazon Smile website.
Amazon Smile
Box Tops
Please clip and save your box tops and send them into the office. We are looking for a new Box Tops volunteer! Please e-mail
office@waldorfct.org.
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HVWS Fleece Jackets are Here!
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Click for a
PDF Order Form. Orders may be shipped to your home or picked up from Tiger Sports in Ridgefield. Sizing guidelines for youth sizes:
YXS 4
YS 6-8
YM 10-12
YL 14-16
YXL 18-20
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The Rainbow Garden School Store is Open!
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Star Meadow Cottage, Rear Door
40 Dodgingtown Rd.
The store is open Tuesday-Friday 8:20-9 AM on regular school days.
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Treehugger (2/20/19)
The New York Times (2/12/19)
The Atlantic (10/1/15)
The Washington Post (2/8/19)
Intellectual Takeout (11/30/18)
Digital Journal (2/3/19)
Love What Matters
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To provide a lasting education that cultivates resilient and creative human beings who are capable of free thinking, confident action, and deep connections with others and the world.
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Housatonic Valley Waldorf School | 203-364-1113 | office@waldorfct.org|
waldorfct.org
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