Professional development for Waldorf teachers and home school parents. Read all about Summer Series 2025.

Taught remotely in real-time, this course offers you an invaluable opportunity to focus entirely on your upcoming seventh grade school year in five days brimming with presentations, discussions, and practical activities.

Under the guidance of an experienced class teacher, you’ll discover ways to enliven your teaching and learn how to approach the blocks so that they may meet the seventh grader in a meaningful and lively way. With the insights of anthroposophy, gleaned through a child development discussion focusing on your class’s age group, you will get to know the seventh grader as they explore new horizons both within and without.

Along with time and space to consider and hone your skills in such practical matters as main lesson books, block planning, projects and activities, and classroom management, your course will include such key topics for seventh graders—and their teachers—as:

• Topics in language arts, including listening and speaking, literature, and crafting narrative and expository essays, poetry, and short stories
  Topics in math, including perspective geometry and intro to algebra
  Topics in history, including the Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, and the Age of Colonization and Exploration
• Topics in geography, including suggestions for teaching topically (e.g., biomes, economic geography) or regionally (Asia/Pacific, Africa)
• Topics in science, including mechanics, intro to chemistry, and human physiology
• Plays, projects, community service, and trips
• Report and assessments
• Parent work and colleagueship

You’ll gain many valuable opportunities for building connections among a community of parallel colleagues from across the country to carry with you throughout your teaching, while participation in an anthroposophical study undertaken in common with all Grades participants will help enable you to build bridges between colleagues and parents once you return to your school.

Grade-specific resource materials useful for your year, including poems, songs, stories, and main lesson book ideas, will be provided to you electronically.

NOTE: This course is taught with the expectation that you have a foundational background in Waldorf education.

Lead Instructor 

Laura Purdom is currently grades 7-8 class teacher and middle school chorus teacher at Ashwood Waldorf School. Since joining AWS’s faculty in 2006, Laura has served as class teacher for all eight grades and taught the middle school grades multiple times. Among her many strengths as a class teacher, Laura brings an understanding of the strengths and challenges of mixed-age classes, meaningful student assessment, and balancing skills development with social-emotional learning. Before turning to Waldorf, Laura was a writer, editor and communications consultant for a variety of nonprofit arts and educational institutions. She also researched and wrote travel guidebooks covering Canada, Southern England, New England, and Boston. She has studied improv theatre and performance in Boston and Paris and delights in bringing her theatre training to students; she will be teaching clowning and music at Ashwood’s circus camp this summer. Laura holds a BA from Hanover College and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. She attended Sunbridge College’s Foundation Year and received her Waldorf teaching certificate with Alkion Center’s first class.

Your course also includes sessions in eurythmy with Alexandra Spadea, math with Olga Domokos, physics with Rosana Portillo, and chemistry with Caroline Martin.