What is Online Education?

The goal of Living Lessons is to provide a solid Waldorf education for your student.

Waldorf education is based on the balance between head, heart, and hands. Unfortunately, all kinds of video learning are in the “head” category, even if they do contain “heart” information and “hand” activities to do. For this reason, be sure you spend time outside the videos to focus on practicing the lessons, discussing the lessons, doing main lesson book work, expanding on main lesson book work, doing supportive field trips, and connecting to the lessons in the physical realm.

As an ethical Waldorf school, our goal is to educate while also reducing your students’ online time. Towards this goal, we provide the main lessons for your students and specialty lessons (if you choose music, art, handwork, and movement). You, as the teacher or parent, are responsible for using these lessons. Each block comes with a commitment from you to make sure the student practices what they learned.

For example, in the math block, once a child learns about addition, you will want them to practice what they learned. We have provided worksheets and some sample practice videos to guide you. Another example is with music. Once a student learns how to do a specific skill on the Ukulele they need to spend weeks practicing that in different ways.

We purposely do not provide “practice space” and “empty space” videos with our Living Lessons because your student must spend the majority of their time offline and in the space of “doing.” Some educational institutions (a good example is the public school system during COVID) will try to keep your student online for hours to create the illusion of “more education.”

As enlightened educators who may be teaching in an alternative school or homeschooling, we know this is an illusion, and this is one reason we chose all chose alternative education or homeschooling. We know that “head” education happens in only an hour or two each day. We know that beyond that, we want to make sure our students are getting real-life experiences and taking time to reflect on what they learn each day more deeply.