Heart to Hand School

Heart to Hand is a school for children ages 2 to 6.  Dedicated to the Waldorf educational philosophy, we strive to create a haven of warmth and safety where each young student is accepted and nurtured.  We cherish the individuality of each child’s unique emotional, physical, and cognitive development.  We foster imagination and exploration that stimulates not only the intellect, but also will and feeling.  Our curriculum develops each child’s powers of concentration, ability to form compassionate relationships, and passion for experimentation and discovery learning.

Children are supported by experiencing a daily and a weekly rhythm that nurtures the whole child through assimilative learning.  The daily rhythm is characterized by caring interaction that includes both outdoor and indoor imaginative play, circle times of song and storytelling, and family-style meal and snack times.  Each day also includes at least one special activity that is always enjoyed on that same day every week.  Depending upon the age group and season, this weekly rhythm may include such activities as gardening, wood working, beeswax modeling, wet-on-wet watercoloring, drawing with block crayons, walks to nearby Manzanita Park, and food preparation (soup & biscuits).

Each adult in the classroom is very conscious of serving as a model for the students.  Young children absorb and imitate our words, actions, attitudes, and unconscious mannerisms.  Being a teacher bears with it the imposing responsibility of being worthy of imitation.  To this end, we as teachers encourage one another to become increasingly open, aware, and inwardly peaceful so that we may engage the world in a manner similar to the young child – not from our heads alone, but from our hearts and our hands, our emotions and our senses.