Panyotai students learn about the world through experiences of the hands and the hearts, as well as the heads. Practical activities pay off academically, enrich the intellect, and enhance the natural joy of learning, providing a solid foundation for lifelong learning.
Learning in a school setting surrounded by nature, where materials and products used are mainly natural, human and environmental friendly, fed with organic food, and playing with toys from natural materials—pinecones, shells, cloth, wood, etc., contribute to the children's connection with as well as appreciation of nature.
Our students are encouraged to stay together with a sense of community, helping and caring for one another. The care is also fostered to extend to the wider community, not merely by instructions but through action.
Such practice helps broaden the students' perspectives on social issues and fosters a sense of engagement in activities that benefit others. They learn to connect with and contribute to the world in a personally and socially meaningful way.
Our education is experiential and takes place both on and beyond campus, from simple day trips in the early classes to longer and more challenging activities in the higher classes.
These rigorous adventures build physical fitness and self-confidence, strengthen the will and perseverance, while nourish a connection with the natural world. Besides, students learn to work as a team, become more independent, and gain valuable social and life skills.
Wonder at what nature creates leads to gratitude and reverence in gifts from the earth. Students in each class are appropriately involved in environment maintenance, nourishment and care, and sustainability work according to the age, from raking leaves, cutting grass, pulling weeds, watering the plants, ploughing to pruning trees, managing composting and soil care, conducting waste sorting, and grinding leftover food for biogas production.
Celebration of traditional festivals marking the rhythms of the year and the cycle of the seasons provide a welcome opportunity for children, parents and friends to get together, bringing warmth and unity to the relationship in the school community.
These special social events, highlights of the child's year, are observed with reverence and joy through stories, songs, movement, decoration and often with shared food. Such heightened experience and renewal connect humanity to the rhythms of nature and the cosmos.
One of the highlights of a Waldorf school experience is the class play. Every year each class presents a play drawn from the curriculum content studied in a given year which mirrors the developmental stage of the class.
Besides going to the head, the content learned also goes to the heart and hands by acting it. The aim is not producing a play for the audience in the final stage, but all through the whole process from rehearsing the roles to making the props. By choosing the story and each student's role carefully, the class play can become a healing and transformative experience for the students, shaping and engaging the actors in a subtle way.
In classes 9 to 11, students meet the world undertaking work experiences in primary industry, secondary industry, and service industry respectively.
These opportunities provide hands-on learning experiences allowing students to engage with the wider community in realistic ways, helping broaden their perspectives, and connecting them with people and their work in activities and efforts out of the realm of their daily life experiences.
A major component marking the culmination of the student's whole journey of education is the senior project based on a topic selected by the student and pursued independently from researching to implementation, ending in documentation.
hese projects, undertaken with concentration and perseverance, offer the students an opportunity to undergo both an inner and an outer process, a tool for self-education, individual expression and self-development, allowing them to learn something new about themselves and problem solving skills, to experience self-empowerment and growth, as well as to gain insights and life lessons.