​After a beautiful Winter Festival at Birdsong Kindy, the children have enjoyed a long rest and many adventures over the holidays, and have come back with a spring in their steps. At the end of last term we planted brown bulb babies into pots, and there was much delight as the returning Birdsong children were greeted with golden daffodils.

So far this term our stories and songs have been focused around ‘Winter in the Bush’, and each child has blanket stitched a wattle blossom cape to make their own gumnut forest friend.

Mother Earth, Sunny Sun and the Rain Dancers have all been helping our plants in the veggie patch to grow tall.  In the warm winter sunshine the children are harvesting beans, snow peas, and other yummy herbs and vegetables.
 
Kara Mallory
Kindergarten Assistant

​Congratulations to Year 10's rising soccer stars Daisy Scriven and Jade Kerry, who were recently selected to represent Football Gold Coast in their under 16 girls' team who traveled to Cairns to compete in the Queensland State Community Cup tournament.  The girls' team came second out of all regions in Queensland! 

Both girls started playing soccer at the age of seven and fell in love with the game, for its fun, freedom and fitness, and now train three to four times a week.  Daisy plays in the Brisbane Women's Premier League with her Gold Coast club, Broadbeach United, and Jade with her Lismore club, Liverpool.  Daisy, whose whole family have played for the Mullumbimby Football Club was also selected for trials for the professional pathway training program with the Queensland Academy of Sport.

Well done Daisy and Jade!

Magnum Brotto
PDHPE Teacher

The 11-year-old child learns fast, developing graceful agility in all endeavours, thus ushering in a ‘golden year’ of childhood. With a subtle balance in heart rate and breathing achieved, new neural pathways emerge.

This year, we have begun to deepen our learning into many of the subjects introduced in previous years. We have expanded fractions into decimals, dollars and percentages and approached science through the observation of natural phenomena. 

The thematic thread in 2019 has been the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. Whether through myth, history, mathematical knowledge or artistic pursuits, the quest for beauty and perfection has broadened the children’s scope and attitude towards learning, with artistic work embracing more individuality. We traced the influence of Ancient Greek on the English language and began to recite passages from the works of Homer. This was complimented in Eurythmy with Greek poetry and the representation of the Ancient Greek alphabet. 
 
After our sports carnival early this term, we began training for the Greek Olympics, which will include several other Steiner schools from our region. While some of the events will be similar to those of the athletics carnival, many of the techniques will be different, with an added emphasis on grace and beauty, in addition to speed and strength. Long jump will be done from a standing start and javelin introduced, along with discus. The students will also compete in wrestling, for which training has begun, with much enthusiasm (pictured above)! Our regular classes in Bothmer Gymnastics have also been building the students' strength, agility and coordination.

Our first main Lesson of Term 3 is a study of the Antarctic. Along with the fascinating animal forms and dramatic geography, the students were enthralled by the incredibly heroic journeys of Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott and Mawson. We have also done numerous experiments involving ice, salt and water, one of which involved measuring the temperature of ice in fresh water, compared to ice in salty water. While the fresh water was measured at two degrees celsius, the salty water plunged well below zero. We will conclude this fascinating main lesson with a project and an ice skating excursion.

The students are currently weaving , knitting and learning leather craft, and soon will begin to build and fire a Greek urn, a classic Class 5 project. We have also begun to learn the alto recorder and some fun pieces on our violins, violas, cellos and basses for a concert at the end of term.

William Keyte
Class 5 Teacher 

Up to the age of 10, teachers should strive to make everything live for the child. Let them make the plants speak, and the animals act as moral beings. Let them turn the whole world into imaginative stories and fables.
 
Stories are the medium through which the world, and all the things in it, are communicated to Primary School children, and the art of story creation and storytelling is something that teachers are encouraged to develop. Rudolf Steiner also encouraged teachers to make up their own stories, particularly in circumstances where everyday issues are causing concern, such as social disharmony, family break-up or serious illness.

Steiner described a vivid picture of the teacher hurrying off to school with a new story to tell the children and how their faces radiated in the listening of it, as if they were themselves part of the story.
 
There are three types of stories told to the children in Primary School: age and development-appropriate stories, lesson stories inspired by lesson content, and curative stories. All good stories will contain all three of these elements. They may manifest as episodic narratives, fables, legends, myths, poetry and verse, plays, songs or fantasy. Fundamental to locating the content of stories is a thorough understanding of the Primary School learning program, based as it is on child development.
 
This learning program or curriculum was initially developed at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and subsequently built on by Steiner schools throughout the world. As Steiner schools spread to other continents, the Euro-centric curriculum has often followed. In 1971, Lorien Novalis was established as Australia's second Steiner school. Part of its charter was to take into account its regional and local geography and culture. Shearwater has continued this lively process, developing its own program to include an appreciation of this time and place. This creative approach has provided a source of inspiration to teachers who look to local geography, flora and fauna in their story-telling.

Winter is well and truly here - a time to turn inwards to find our own inner light and warmth. We hope all of our Preschool families are enjoying this time of candlelight and warm fires at night, with gentle, nourishing stories for the children. Eating delicious warming foods as we rug up and keep our feet snuggled into woolly socks and slippers.
 
At Preschool, all of our children have celebrated the longest night – with each group holding their own Winter Festival. In readiness for our festivals, the children have been involved in preparing apple crumbles and pumpkin soups to share. We have been busy making gnome hats, lanterns and candles and practising our songs and our 'Lantern Spiral’, a symbol of the inward reflection that is marked by the longest night and an opportunity to help create a rhythm of quiet inwardness in the children.
 
As well as the lantern walk, another important part of our winter festivals are the special songs that we practise and sing at this time of year. The following are two of our favourites:

This term, the Year 11 Visual Design students have taken on the role of specialist teacher, choosing a design-making activity they are interested in and then teaching it to the class. This role saw them do research, prepare an example, create an informative and aesthetically pleasing handout, organise the materials, consider and address relevant Work Health & Safety issues, instruct the class and reflect on the feedback given to them by their peers. This experience provided the students with a unique learning opportunity and one that they really enjoyed, despite being nervous to begin with.

Anna Delzoppo
Visual Art & Design Teacher

Over the last six weeks, our Year 10 students have been on a journey through time, beginning with a study of humanity’s oldest surviving written story, Gilgamesh, (which they learned, was a lot more interesting than the version they read in Class 4) to the literature of the Baroque period. This was a time where Man was looking out at the stars for the first time, with the aid of newly invented telescopes, as well as at the less visible world through microscopes, where they were greatly inspired. Through each text, we inquired into the development of human consciousness and asked ourselves, ‘What does the story reveal about the human condition at this time?’
 
In Lynne’s class, students were immersed in epic poetry; reading an abridged version of The Iliad, where ancient battles for Troy washed over us, and we wondered about a time when the collective consciousness of the group outweighed that of the individual, and where the gods manipulated the human beings for their own pleasure. We pondered on what causes we might willingly devote 10 years of our lives to.
 
We dipped back into The Canterbury Tales where the satirical characters offered stories that surprised us in their forward thinking. We revisited Camelot, with King Arthur’s knights, and enjoyed the powerful female characters. We inquired into the values of each period, as represented through the stories, in order to understand how human identity and society have changed over time.
 
We explored the origins of writing in cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rei instructed us on the art of writing simple Japanese kanji and Shiri explained the basics of Hebrew, both of which are read from right to left. We created timelines in groups, which reviewed all the significant periods and events studied since the beginning of Primary School, building a picture of major events shaping human evolution up to today.
 
Under the microscopes last week, we examined a number of prepared slides - from a drop of human blood to a rat’s tail and a bumblebee, and wrote inspired poetry to express our wonder at the natural world. We attempted to view the natural world from a religious perspective, as most during Baroque times did, and then narrowed our focus as an exercise, to look at a natural object from other perspectives, including aesthetic, legal, ethical, emotional, artistic and mathematical.
 
It has been a rich journey for most students, and one that we hope has planted seeds of wonder about the human condition, that will continue to germinate for years to come.

Lynne Holian
English Teacher