more than just a
School
We are a diverse, passionate and engaged community bound by our shared commitment to doing good in the world.
Calgary Waldorf School invites you to explore our philosophy and curriculum. Central to Waldorf education is a deep respect for childhood and a sense of higher purpose. Our philosophy prioritizes the integration of arts, imagination, and movement into all academic disciplines. Our curriculum fosters intellectual flexibility and creative thinking, with an eye to ethics and morality. Knowledge is important but understanding what to do with that knowledge is critical. We believe that becoming a successful human is a function of weaving together a rich tapestry of capacities and abilities.
IMAGINATIVE - EXPERIENTIAL - ACADEMICALLY RIGOROUS
For almost thirty years Calgary Waldorf School has been dedicated to supporting families raise confident, well-balanced, lifelong learners. Our independent private school was founded in 1985, and our curriculum encompasses Parent and Tot programs, Preschool and Kindergarten, and Grades One through Nine. The nurturing environment at our school helps children develop exceptional interpersonal skills, self-confidence and self-reliance, fostering their own personal integrity and sense of social and environmental responsibility.
Calgary Waldorf School: there's nowhere else like it.
Boots crunch in the snow on a cold winter morning, dappling sunshine dances with snowflakes. Rosy cheeks and smiles adorn the faces of parents and children as the students file indoors—Calgary Waldorf School is a welcoming space.
The campus boasts 50,000 square feet of indoor learning on four and a half acres of land: we have outdoor play areas, an amphitheatre, forests, gardens, and a dedicated kinderwing. Our exceptional indoor facility is airy and open, and flooded with natural light. It includes a full-sized gym; performance space; assembly hall; library; woodworking, art, music, and support rooms; science and computer labs; and a commercial kitchen. We recognize that every age has a different capacity and a different developmental stage, and every inch of the campus was thoughtfully designed to strengthen and enhance our academic programming, and nurture the adventures of childhood.
The kinderwing houses the early childhood programs, it's an enchanting play-based sanctuary that serves as a natural transition from the security of home-life to school. It is alive with activity, but unhurried as children follow the rhythms of the days and seasons — this is an integral part of early learning and growth. The adventure continues outdoors with the wooden play structures, sand pit, and forest that make up the kinderyard.
Our Vision
At Calgary Waldorf School, our vision is to foster the development of our students through care and respect. We strive to nurture reverence, imagination, creativity, independent thinking, academic excellence, enthusiasm for life, and capacity for life-long learning.
As teachers, staff, and parents, we are committed to realizing these qualities in our consciousness and in our daily actions.
Our Mission
Recognize and honour the stages of child development as elaborated by Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy, to ensure that these stages inform our pedagogy and curriculum, so that teachers will bring appropriate educational content through appropriate educational methods to their students at the right developmental time.
Provide a full, interdisciplinary educational program that balances and integrates the humanities, sciences, mathematics and world languages, along with visual, musical, dramatic and speech arts, applied practical arts, movement, and athletics, and that fulfils both the Waldorf curriculum and the Alberta Education curriculum.
Create a safe, healthy, respectful, caring, and welcoming school environment for all members of our school community.
Foster the development of students’ self-confidence and self-responsibility, in order that they can create and take opportunities to fulfil their potential.
Prepare students for their further education beyond our school by helping them become adaptable to different teaching and learning styles and expectations.
Create for everyone who works in the school an environment in which each person is supported and able to do his or her best work, and is given opportunities for ongoing professional development; foster the continual growth and development of teachers and staff, within an active and collegial learning community.
Raise awareness in all members of our school community of the importance of the capacities for moral, spiritual and ethical values and reverence for life and nature, in the education, development and upbringing of children.
Ensure observable and measurable progress and excellence in student achievements and in teacher and staff performance.
Encourage and facilitate the active and meaningful involvement of the parent body in the life and work of the school; provide parents with opportunities to learn more broadly and deeply about Waldorf Education and about our school.
Maintain clearly delineated and collaborative governance and leadership structures and practices; maintain financial stability, administrative responsibility, and shared responsiveness to the school community’s needs.
Our Guiding Principles
Recognition of the spiritual nature of the human being
We believe all children have a spiritual nature which is nurtured and drawn to consciousness by meaningful content in the curriculum and by teachers and other school community members who uphold universal values such as acceptance, care, compassion, kindness, generosity, diligence, respect, and honesty. We strive to honour, nurture and protect the childhood of our students, to guide them into healthy adolescence, and to help them become fully human in ways that go beyond the simply material aspects of our nature and our world.
Reverence for the spiritual nature in ourselves and in all things
We seek ways to highlight and bring value to learning in deliberate measures that support children’s openness to awe, wonder and inquiry, through the unique qualities of goodness, beauty and truth, as well as maintain a reverence for life in all its forms. We consider this as work with the spiritual nature of life and phenomena. We recognise this education is entirely non-denominational without connection to any specific religious doctrine.
Education of the whole child
We strive to nurture the healthy, timely development of the whole being of the child: the willing or doing (hands), the feeling (heart), and the thinking (head). We impart an engaging, enlivened and balanced curriculum that challenges our students academically, artistically, and physically. It is not just what the child learns in facts and concepts that measure success, but the care, effort and thoughtfulness embedded in the learning processes and products that bring value and meaning to the child’s experiences.
Social, cultural, and economic inclusion
We strive to provide an educational program that values the inclusion of families, teachers and staff from diverse social, cultural, religious, ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds.
The uniqueness of each child
We aim to assist children to make the full use of their innate qualities, their skills, talents, ranges of abilities and unique potential, while empowering them to be proactive in their environment and adaptive to change. We seek to develop identifiable skills while nurturing each child’s capacity for living fully in whatever future unfolds for her or him.
The teacher as mentor, role model, and guardian
Our teachers strive to teach with moral imagination, make use of their emergent creative skills and talents, and be active researchers and learners in the subject areas they teach. In teaching the same Class of children for longer cycles of time, our teachers have greater opportunities to become aware of and foster each child’s deepest and essential being.
Community
The school serves as a community in which children benefit from teachers, staff and parents striving together to support education and learning. We also strive toward sound, socially-conscious practices for stewardship of our environment and for serving the wider world outside our school.
Integrating the philosophical and the practical
Decision-making is guided by practical and philosophical principles: we respond to our social, cultural, physical and economic environment, and we emphasize teamwork and consensus-building.
Land Acknowledgement
Calgary Waldorf School acknowledges Treaty 7 territory – the ancestral and traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy: Kainai, Pikani and Siksika as well as the Tsuu T’ina First Nation and Stoney Nakoda First Nation. We acknowledge the many First Nations, Métis and Inuit whose footsteps have marked these lands for generations. We are grateful for the traditional Knowledge Keepers and Elders who are still with us today and those who have gone before us. We recognize the land as an act of reconciliation and gratitude to those whose territory we reside on or are visiting.