In Abiding Heart's primary teacher training courses, we spend a lot of time learning how to teach literacy or language arts from kindergarten to class 8 in a way that imbues the Buddhist view and experience (meditation). For example, Anna is teaching how to introduce grammar in primary school, and this week she focused on how to teach children the structure of a sentence in an experiential and integrated way. Meyrav then explains to the trainees how to bring together teaching grammar, for example, the tenses (past, present, future) through the Buddhist lens.

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In the first semester of our training the trainees take the Abiding Heart's Experiential Buddhist Foundation Studies course where they learn about Buddhist view of nature of reality. Later on, from semester 2 they learn how to teach the primary curriculum content together with the Buddhist view and meditation or experiential Buddhism. In teaching grammar to children, the trainees learn how to sow seeds of understanding true relative reality: everything is constantly changing or impermanence, it is made of many different parts that are interdependent. When introducing the present tense to the children, for example, we bring it through meditation and contemplating being as it is or present moment wonderful moment. We nurture in the children awareness of the state of being or the being mind. We also link learning about past tense with contemplating change and impermanence. Through that, our trainer learn how to skillfully sow seeds in the children of contemplating on what is a sense of self? Something which they will pick up in the upper grades. At Abiding Heart, we weave in the Steiner/Waldorf education methodology of sowing seeds in primary school to be then cultivated in high school.

 

Here is another wonderful example of the Abiding Heart approach, which is a fusion of the Buddhist view and Waldorf education methodology in teaching all subjects in primary and secondary school.

May this be of benefit to all.

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Our Literacy course is part of the full time primary teacher training programme. The trainees have weekly classes for two years on how to teach literacy/language arts from class 1-8. Our aim is to send our trainees with a high standard literacy teaching skills. The Abiding Heart's methodology for teaching literacy fuses Waldorf, Montessori, and other contemporary approach to teaching speaking, listening, writing, reading, comprehension, grammar, spelling and composition. It rests on experiential learning and is imbued with the transformative Buddhist view and Dr Steiner's pedagogical indications. It is a fun, effective and nurturing way of teaching children how to read and write.