Welcome back for Term 2!

We are heading towards the tail-end of Djeran and into Makuru as the chilly air and frosty ground greets us each morning. Our forthcoming three-week winter school holiday means that this is a shorter term, but a busy one. Semester 1 reports come out during the last week, closely followed by parent -teacher interviews. Please note that parent-teacher report interviews will not be available during Term 3, so book in while you can.

In other happenings this term, we have a few plays to look forward to (Class 7, 5 & 3), a camp (Class 8/9), Reconciliation week in Week 5, and a few musical happenings (the Denmark Festival of Voice and Albany Eisteddfod). The best way to keep abreast of school goings on is by reading the weekly emails (landing in your inbox Sunday evening in preparation for the week ahead), as well as via the online school calendar. 

In addition to my role as principal at GHSS, I also have the pleasure of teaching our lovely cohort of Class 8s practice maths classes a few times a week. I love mathematics and was particularly excited when it was time to bring in the topic of octal numbers (a base-8 numeral system that uses digits from 0 to 7), as well as other number bases. As could be expected, one student called out, “But why are we learning this? We’ll never use it in our jobs when we are adults.” And rightly so- they likely won’t. It got me pondering just how many things we bring to the children in a Steiner school that could be classed as economically & practically ‘useless’ or ‘irrelevant’.

Take knitting and crocheting, bush school, beeswax modelling, wet-on-wet painting, or learning how to divide and multiply complicated fractions, for example. Acquiring any of these skills is unlikely to result in direct career paths (although I have heard there is money to be made in knitting pattern sales!), but the gains and growth that children experience through engaging in these activities often goes beyond the purely practical. Through knitting and handwork, children learn respect for the process of making something from scratch, and gain resilience and confidence in their ability to complete a task. All sorts of other invisible things, such as hand, eye and brain coordination and sensory integration, are also taking place.

Likewise, the end game of manipulating fractions or understanding octal numbers is not necessarily to become a maths whizz or to apply these processes ‘when they grow up’. Instead, these kinds of lessons ‘stretch’ thinking, encouraging the children to look at the mysterious language of numbers through a new lens, developing greater mathematical thinking and new neural pathways. So many elements of the Steiner curriculum are tools for transformation, rather than ends in themselves, with the end goal being to educate the ‘whole’ child so they may eventually unfold into their highest potential. Now I just need to convince the Class 8 students to persevere with those ‘brain-frying’ octal numbers!

Have a wonderful Term 2 everybody- looking forward to seeing you out and about around the school.

Eliza Allan

Principal