Mulberry Open House
Saturday, February 11th from 10:00 am to noon
Top Floor, Grade 1/2 Classroom:
Laura Gerrity will be highlighting aspects of the Grade School curriculum and addressing questions.
Top Floor, Grade 7/8 Classroom:
Alumni Students will be speaking about their transition to and experiences in High School.
Main Floor, Clover Garden Classroom:
Cheryl Reid, Financial Officer will be addressing questions on making Mulberry an educational choice for your family.
Parent Discussion
THERE’S MORE TO READING THAN MEETS THE EYE
Developing life long readers
February 28, 2012 at 3:45 to 5:00.
Join Mulberry’s Early Childhood teachers for a discussion on laying the foundation for developing literacy skills in early childhood. Parents – please sign up your children (in advance) for After Care if required.
Mulberry Waldorf School
25 Markland St. Kingston ON
(613) 542-0669
Chocolate Fundraiser!
Drop by the office or Thursday After School market to pick up Cocoa Camino products, which are fair trade and organic. We have milk and dark hot chocolate, cocoa and baggies of mini dark chocolate bars.
Lunch Box Survival Tips
Lunch Box Survival Tips
By Sara Gabova
I marvel over some of the delicious bits and bobs, morsels and great easy, fit, fast whole food ideas that are packed in the lunches of the children in my care. I think to myself “I wish my parents had thought of that’ which leads to “I’m going to pack that for myself.” I also chuckle to myself when I see some foods eaten because of the way they’re cut, for example carrot sticks are rarely eaten, but carrots cut into rounds children will eat!
Here is a summery of some essential lunch box practices (inspired by Family Fresh Cooking) that work for parents.
1. Be prepared: The better prepared you are in a pinch the smoother & quicker your lunchbox creations can be made. Many parents have said once they bought the Tiffin canisters their lunch prep seemed simple. Glass mason jars with the plastic lids are also a wonderful popular alternative.
2. Have fresh veggies and fruits at the ready.
3. Leftovers! Dinners from the night before or warm breakfast foods (French toast) are always a great lunch box meal.
4. Healthy choices in foods lead to healthy bodies and minds. Healthy, low glycemic whole foods feed our bodies and minds with the nutrients they need.
5. Remember to create balanced meals that help to sustain energy levels; Lean proteins, healthy whole grains, healthy fats, fresh fruits and veggies.
6. Healthy snack foods are a great backup and filler in a lunch.
7. Presentation, when all else fails!
Some parents were asked to contribute their tried and true lunch ideas, and specify foods used to create their scrumptious combos. Here is what they said in their own words.
Start with good wholesome, warm breakfast- Apple pancakes, French toast (multigrain bread) – porridge, use good cream or yogurt
Pasta is limited and I try to use other types – millet, buckwheat, and quinoa etc.
Breads are varied – rye, multigrain (Stone mill), some wheat, Finn Crisp,
Cheeses – home made fresh cheese, hard cheeses, goat Gouda (Golden Rooster), cream goat/cow cheese (Norwegian Snofrisk),
Cold meats – Mennonite Abner salami (Pan Chancho), some cold meats from the Baltic Deli, home made roasts can be eaten cold, meats – all, local as much as possible – “breaded” cutlets are easy in sandwich and can be reheated – use oats or buckwheat flour as bread crumbs for pork, chicken, turkey, ?Ground meat balls/ burgers (cold or hot)?Bone/meat broths as soup base,
Eggs, Eggs, Eggs, Fish – salt/ fresh – mainly dinner – http://www.wildbcfish.ca/index.html, Loblaw’s, also friends
Milk products – raw and home made, Tara has some good products http://www.saugeencountrydairy.com/yogurt.html (non homogenized)
Fruits – ripe & local, berries, grapefruit, pineapple
Veggies (raw and cooked) – local, leafy, broccoli, beans, carrots, peas, roots, sweet potato, ?legumes – chick peas, lentils, lima, mung.
Food suppliers: Tara, No Frills, Quatrocchi’s, Jesse (meats and eggs), Pig and Olive Butcher, Old Farm Market, Glenburnie Grocery (local apples), Golden Rooster (but most of their meats have MSG), City Market, local gates.
#1 Leftovers in thermos (I thought this might be harder, but it only takes a few minutes to heat up a small portion)
#2 Deconstructed sandwich – meat, cheese, 1/2 piece of bread on side (so we aren’t eating too much bread)
#3 If we are out of lunch ideas (i.e. it’s Friday), I try to keep the following in for emergency lunches: frozen veggie burger (read ingredients – not all are healthy), healthy can of soup, beans and rice (sometimes with egg), samosas
#4 I try to send fresh fruit every day. If we are out of fruit, I try to keep nuts, dried fruit, and unsweetened applesauce to use instead.
#5 Snacks – carrots and humus, muffin and fruit, 1/2 avocado, cheese and crackers
As teachers we see what actually is eaten with gusto and what is ‘snubbed’. Here are a few choices I’ve seen eaten over and over again.
Fruit: Sliced apples and pears in a jar. Any kind of berry (fresh)!
Veggies: Sliced rounds of cucumbers, carrots, cherry tomatoes, halves of avocados, strips of red or yellow peppers. Little containers for dips like hummus make veggies appealing. Mini salads that the children ‘build’ are popular-allowing them to top the salad with dressing, croutons, nuts, or berries. Little jars of olives and pickles as condiments. Some will eat lightly steamed green beans!
Drinks: Water! Some will drink milk, but all will drink water.
Snacks: Tamari almonds, raw or unsalted roasted nuts, wholesome crackers, cubes of cheese, granola cereal that can be topped with yogurt, wee yogurts (it’s cheaper to buy a large container and dollop it out yourself then to buy those little packages and lessens the packaging).
The main course: whole grain bread with butter, and slices of meat, or cheese. Left over dinner food in a thermos like mashed potatoes, soup, or spaghetti.
Mulberry Raffle
Purchase your raffle tickets at the office!
First prize – $1,000 worth of PC Grocery Cards (redeemable at Loblaws, Superstore, No Frills and Valu-Mart across Ontario).
Second prize – Gift certificate for THE LIVE WELL CENTRE ($300 of chiropractic services, 1 massage, 1 initial naturopathic exam as wlel as 25% off the purchase of supplments resulting fromt he initial visit – approximate total value of $600).
The draw will take place at the school at noon on December 21st, 2011.
Memory Garden
A dozen or so members of the Mulberry Community joined together to open our Memory Garden yesterday (November 2) on All Soul’s Day. Candles were lit in memory of loved ones who had crossed the threshold, while we gently sang Dona Nobic Pacem (Give Us Peace).
The following verses were read:
Feel how our loving gaze
Is lifted to the heights
That have called you away for other tasks.
Offer the friends left behind
Your strength from out of spiritual lands.
Hear the plea of souls sent after you in trust:
We need here for our earthly work
Strong power from spirit-lands,
For which we thank departed friends.
- Rudolf Steiner
The love of my soul
Strives to you,
My love’s sensing
Streams to you.
May they bear you aloft,
May they uphold you there,
In the heights of hope,
In the spheres of love.
- Rudolf Steiner
We invite all to help build and maintain the Garden.
Many thanks to all who helped support this initiative.
Montreal Gazette – Do Kids Need Computers to Learn?
Opinion: Do kids need computers to learn? Some schools are saying no
MONTREAL – Are Quebec schools embracing computers too zealously? I don’t know the answer – I’m no pedagogue – but it’s a question worth asking.
Two things are clear.
One is that most parents, school officials and politicians see children’s familiarity with computers at an early age as desirable – nay, imperative – for successful individual careers and for society’s prosperity in a “knowledge economy.” The English Montreal School Board, for one, even provides laptop computers as a teaching tool in pre-kindergarten (where the 4-year-olds use them for recognition of numbers and letters and to do puzzles). In response to strong public support for this trend, Premier Jean Charest promised a few months ago to put a smart whiteboard (a front-of-the-class board that allows for digital touch interaction) in every primary- and secondary-school classroom across the province.
The other thing that’s clear is the backlash against the trend. What makes this contrarian response remarkable is that it’s coming in part from what are arguably among the world’s least Luddite-like people – Silicon Valley’s wizards of the digital era.
As the New York Times reported on Sunday, some of the top technology experts at Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard and other such firms send their children to a private school where computers are off-limits until Grade 8 (when even then their use is limited). The school believes computers reduce attention spans, inhibit creative thinking and interfere with face-to-face interaction.
Says one father, who holds a computer-science degree, uses an iPad and smartphone and works at Google: “The idea that an app or an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” He also notes, “At Google and all these other places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”
His daughter’s fifth-grade teacher introduces fractions by slicing apples and cake into halves, quarters and sixteenths. (“When I made enough fractional pieces of cake to feed everyone,” the teacher says, “do you think I had their attention?”) Knitting socks teaches problem-solving, co-ordination and math. Research projects begin not with Google but with actual volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The school in question, Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located at Los Altos, Calif., is one of about 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide that subscribe to “generating an inner enthusiasm for learning,” as the network’s website puts it. There is one Waldorf school in Montreal, the French-language École Rudolf Steiner in Notre Dame de Grâce. It has 100 students from daycare to Grade 8 (at which level computers are also introduced).
Of course, there’s nothing new about skepticism toward the impact of technology on the intellect. The first Waldorf school dates to 1919; it was founded in Germany by Rudolf Steiner. And, as a thoughtful essay in last weekend’s Le Devoir suggests, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who died in 1976, must now be spinning in his grave.
Heidegger wrote at a time when our only electronic distractions were television, movies and radio. Their entertainment content (as distinct from news reports and documentaries), he suggested, present an artificial world that disconnects us from the real world. It’s like the light pollution that prevents from seeing the reality of the stars.
The essay, by a CÉGEP philosophy teacher, François Doyon, suggests that were Heidegger alive today he’d see the late Steve Jobs less as a cult-worthy modern Prometheus than as a glorified pusher of intellectual drugs on which we grow more dependent with usage: “Why bother wasting time learning things when (Jobs’s) iPhone can think for us?”
Doyon says: “The calculator frees us from having to count, the GPS from knowing how to read a map, spellcheck software from learning spelling and grammar.” These and innumerable other such conveniences numb our minds. Knowledge no longer lives with us, he writes; it’s something we hold in our hands.
Many of his fellow young teachers, Doyon notes, rely on digital technology in class. With them as models, he asks, how can schools help young people hone their ability to think critically and train them to explore questions that don’t have ready-made Internet answers?
A fair question. And, given that three-quarters of the 196 elementary-school students at the no-silicon Silicon Valley school have parents immersed in the high-tech world, it’s not such an airy-fairy question, either.
Inspirational Talk Thursday night by Titia Posthuma
Don’t miss Titia’s next talk November 3rd at 6:30, at Kingston’s Mulberry Waldorf School, again presenting on the principles of biodynamic agriculture.Here’s an interesting article on Waldorf Education in the NY Times
Executives and employees of tech giants Google, Ebay, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo send their children to a Silicon Valley Waldorf School, with a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Here is the link to the full article in the recent NY Times
Children learn through hands-on experience.
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