Acorn Waldorf School is a community where young children’s play is valued as the lens through which they make the world their own.
Here, we cultivate a space for intelligent play, allowing the children to engage with the physical world and each other. This is the true work of childhood, the essential basis for critical thinking, problem solving, and social interaction.
In our warm, home-like atmosphere, the children are guarded from sensory overload (so ubiquitous in our culture) that can disrupt and even arrest this fundamental activity from finding expression.
Journeying through the year we honor the seasons and celebrate festivals. The daily rhythm balances time spent indoors and out, restful times with active, and individual with group activities. This provides a nurturing and sustaining creative space, fostering self-confidence, physical health, and social intuition.
At Acorn Waldorf School, experiential tasks, great and small, build the foundation for cognitive learning. With song and story, literacy and linguistic capacity are strengthened, along with a sense of the beauty and expressiveness of language. Counting games and rhyme provide a solid basis for memory and mathematical skills. Concentration, small-muscle development, and hand-eye coordination are all skills significantly promoted through tasks such as baking, braiding, finger crocheting, sewing, modeling with beeswax, and watercolor painting.
All these elements work together, creating not only a superior foundation for elementary school learning, but also a basis in areas such as artistic ability, ethical values, social awareness, resilience, and health.
Daily Rhythm
The Acorn Waldorf School day is designed to create a balance between the individual
and group creative, and between active times and restful times.
Our Daily Rhythm
The morning begins between 8:30 – 8:45am as children are welcomed by the teachers and say good-bye to their parents or caregivers at the gate.
Creative Play – For young children, play is work, through which they make the world their own. To stimulate healthy imaginative play, the child needs time, a quiet, positive atmosphere, and play materials taken from nature that allow open interpretation. Supported by the adults who are engaged in meaningful, practical tasks of life, children can experience and understand the purpose and process of these activities.
Cooking – During this time, the children participate in the preparation of the meal we will share that day. This may include the kneading of bread dough, chopping vegetables for soup, or grinding a grain to make flour for baking.
Creative Arts – For family festivals, we use many ways and mediums to create seasonal crafts. Activities such as watercolor painting, crayon drawing, finger crocheting, sewing, and even woodworking all encourage each child’s natural sense of beauty and the development of fine motor skills.
Clean-up Time – All playthings and materials are returned to their places and the table is set. This activity teaches children to be good stewards of both their belongings and their environment. It also begins to develop good organizational skills.
Circle Time – Songs and verses throughout the seasons are learned, sung, and explored with gesture and movement. Hearing and seeing, feeling and imagining, moving and acting are all intertwined and become a whole through the child’s participation. Older children familiar with the words and choreography from the previous year act as models, strengthening the self-confidence in older children and giving the younger ones incentive to imitate them.
Outdoor Play – We go outside rain or shine to run, climb, swing, sled, garden, construct, push wheelbarrows, pull wagons, and jump rope. This is essential free play in which the children delight.
Short Rest and Story Time – Children love stories and fairy tales. These carefully chosen tales contain wisdom and life experience, profundity and cleverness, thoughts and logic–all of which is expressed not in abstract terms, but through imagery. With countless details, entire landscapes are painted, delighting the soul. As the teacher presents a puppet play or tells the story by heart, it is the individual child who creates the pictures with his or her own imagination.
Hand Washing and Lunch – A lunch of organic whole grains, fruits, vegetables, milk, and cheeses are served family style. Clean up is shared by the whole group, with rotating assignments. Table manners and warm conversation are practiced.
Good-Bye Verse – This is for those children going home for the afternoon.
Siesta – After clean up, a quiet time begins until everyone is ready to lie down on a mat. The teacher tucks each child in with his or her own blanket and pillow accompanied by lullabies, lyre music, and a story.
Quiet Imaginative Play/Projects – Some children continue to sleep while others wake up gradually in the care of the assistant teacher. Those that are ready and awake engage in creative play indoors and out in the company of the teacher until pick up time at 3pm.
Acorn Waldorf School is a member of the
Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America.
Waldorf Early Childhood programs provide children and families with a warm and nurturing experience. Free play alternates with group activities, such as circle time for songs, finger plays and games, movement, painting, beeswax modeling, crafts, cooking, storytelling and puppetry. Children experience all the activities with a sense of joy, yet each develops capacities, including fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and language. Daily outside play encourages children to engage in larger, more active movement. The seasons of the year are observed and celebrated with festivals.
Our Faculty & STAFF
Motria Shuhan
A graduate of Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Education at Sunbridge College, Motria has fourteen years of experience working with young children including Director and Founder of the Acorn School, a developing member of WECAN. She spent nine formative years at the Mountain Laurel Waldorf School in New Paltz, NY. There she worked in the nursery and kindergarten and served as the Pedagogical Chair for three years. She also serves as a student mentor and teacher educator for WECAN (Waldorf Early Childhood Association) and Sunbridge College. With a special interest in the art of puppetry, Motria has staged shows for conferences, festivals, and other community events. Mrs. Shuhan completed a three-year Advanced Therapeutic Course for Early Childhood Educators taking place in Denver, Co., where she continued to deepen her understanding of the young child. She lives with her husband and two sons in Accord, NY.
Mia Reed
Mia Reed is proud to have been at Acorn Waldorf School since the start. She started as Motria’s assistant and is currently leading the Roots & Shoots Parent Child and the Sprouts Garden Gate. Mia has completed her Waldorf Teacher training at the Alkion Center at Hawthorne Valley in Ghent, NY. She fondly recalls when first reading Theosophy by Rudolph Steiner, that it simply changed her view on life!
At home Mia enjoys spending time with her two girls, cooking and baking, and when time allows, curling up on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book!
Melanie Indelicato
Melanie Indelicato completed her Elementary Education studies as well as an A.A. in Theater Arts at SUNY New Paltz. In 2017 Melanie completed the Teacher Training for Early Childhood Program at Alkion in Hawthorn Valley N.Y. Melanie has been a beloved and trusted assistant teacher at the Mountain Laurel Waldorf School since 2010 in the Kindergarten and Nursery, including many opportunities to step in as a lead teacher when the need arose. Melanie has also been a faculty member of the Acorn School Summer Camp for the last four years. She is currently the Lead Teacher for the Acorn Nursery.
Melanie and her husband, Joe, and son, Anthony, live in New Paltz. Her son Anthony is a MLWS graduate and attends New Paltz High School.
Minka Wasylyk Hrechniw
Minka is a sincere and eager student for all things Waldorf-inspired with a keen eye and a penchant for organization. She brings joy and warmth to our circle that is infectious and much appreciated. Her kind inquisitive nature is a pleasure to be around. Before embracing her role in the Acorn family, Minka enjoyed a successful career in the graphic design industry for over 20 years. These days, when not at Acorn, she also works alongside her husband, Taras, as a finisher to his custom base-making in their home-based studio — both are graduates of the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Over time, Minka and Taras have come to a mutual obsession with all things lighter-than-air.
They currently live in a house built of their own design in the Heights of the Catskill Mountains, with their cat, and take great pleasure in occasionally flying off their front lawn in their solid blue hot-air balloon, BluRadius.
Laura Klimenchenko
In 2005 Laura and her family moved to the New Paltz area and discovered Waldorf Education which aligned perfectly with their values and what they had envisioned for their children. Laura is completing the Early Childhood Teacher Training at Sunbridge Institute in Springvalley NY. She began teaching at Mountain Laurel Waldorf School where she has gained experience as the Handwork and Sculpture Assistant and later as morning assistant and afternoon lead in the Early Childhood program. She is currently the Lead Afternoon Adventure teacher for the Oak Kindergarten. Laura also holds her BA in Fine Arts from Montclair University.
Laura’s gentle and warm gesture around the children facilitates their trust in what we do, and her love for the arts inspire them.
Catherine Kreibich Domitrovits
Catherine grew up in Ridgewood, NY and has worked for over 15 years in the Photo/Art industry in NYC, until she moved up to the Hudson Valley where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education. Catherine worked in the Human Service field and various public schools, until she met her husband, John, and had their three amazing children. Catherine and John were first introduced to the Acorn school in 2011, when their daughter Katrina attended.
Catherine enjoys sharing her love for the outdoors with her family and is thankful to be part of this amazing community.
Kristina Gonchoyan
Kristina was born and raised in Russia, and landed in NYC when she was twenty years old. She studied Pedagogy and Linguistics at Orenburg State University with a passion to become an English teacher. After moving to America, she switched her course to Nonprofit Management and graduated Baruch College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Affairs. In Russia, she interned as a teacher assistant and worked in summer camps, and while in college, she volunteered for an Early Literacy program, and currently organizes a monthly family yoga program at the Ashram in Walden, NY. Her son Kai inspired her family to move to Hudson Valley. Together they enjoy fresh air, mountain hikes, water holes. Kristina began volunteer twice a week at Acorn when her son came to school, and over the year she became a substitute teacher. She wishes to continue her education in Waldorf pedagogy. This year she will be assisting Miss MacKenzie in the Afternoon Adventure program & Mrs. Indelicato on Fridays.
Carol Jordan
Carol was raised in southern Indiana in a very fun and loving family. She has a BS in political science from Purdue University and a law degree from Indiana University. She practiced trial law until becoming a mom in 1998. In 2000, Carol and her husband Mark, who is from Brooklyn, moved their family to New Paltz so their children could attend Mountain Laurel Waldorf School. Carol was the Business Manager at Mountain Laurel for eleven years. During this time, she served on the Board of Trustees, the Finance Group, the Personnel Group, the Enrollment Group and was the chair of the Full Faculty Business meeting for three years. Carol is honored and excited to serve the Acorn Waldorf School community as Administrator and also looks forward to the continued opportunity to deepen her connection to the Waldorf movement, such a vital and powerful gift to the world.
WHAT PARENTS SAY
“For over three years, Mrs. Shuhan’s Kindergarten has been a paradise for my children. She applies Waldorf Education principles in a gentle and potent manner, creating an atmosphere that is ideal for the development of young children. Her communication with the parent body through regular updates, sharing of articles, and parent meetings allow parents not only to understand and participate in our children’s learning process, but also to engage in the process of learning ourselves. The principles and values parents receive from Mrs. Shuhan’s engagement provide a natural segue for sensible education, parenting, and life principles to find their way into our homes and lives.”
Jason Stern /Chronogram Magazine, kindergarten class of 2011
“We feel very fortunate that our daughter Annabella had Motria as her kindergarten teacher. With no other person have we felt so confident that our child’s needs would be taken care of, both on a physical and emotional level. Motria has become our role model as a teacher with infinite patience, serenity, deep perception and playfulness. She epitomizes the nurturing and caring teacher that every child deserves.”
Samrat Pathania / kindergarten class of 2012
“Motria has led Wild Earth’s young children’s summer camp (ages 4-7) for many years to wonderful reviews from participants and fellow staff alike. She brings creativity and consciousness to all she does. Motria possesses the unique gift of being able to hold an extremely safe space for children while at the same time freeing and empowering them to discover the world and their place in it. I highly recommend Motria Shuhan and Acorn School as you consider preschools for your children.”
David Brownstein / Co-Founder & Executive Director of Wild Earth
“We were lucky enough to have Mrs. Shuhan as a teacher for our son for four wonderful years. Her patience and knowledgeable guidance was invaluable to our family. We watched our son flourish in her classroom and I am forever grateful for her kindness and dedication to the children at Mountain Laurel.”
Laura Gharrity / kindergarten class of 2009
“Motria Shuhan has been a true blessing to our family. Her wisdom, experience, and creativity have clearly been a boon to our son (and us!) during the two years he has been in her class and care. Motria’s grounded, gentle presence creates spaces in which children can discover their own foundation, their own creativity, and flourish within themselves and the community. My gratitude as a parent to Ms. Shuhan can not be adequately expressed in words, but the positive impact she has had in our son’s life speaks all that needs to be said.”
Tobias Anderson /kindergarten class of 2012
“When I asked Henry (10) what he remembered about kindergarten, the first thing he said was “the tasty-toasty tortillas.” Then he said there was one time when he was outside and it started raining and Mrs. Shuhan told him he had to “run between the raindrops” to get his coat. He didn’t seem to recall the crying and struggling he had saying goodbye to us every morning for those first weeks — it was a struggle for us too, made bearable knowing that he was with Motria, who cared about him and would help him. That he remembers food first is not surprising to us. That he remembers a moment of poetry next and not the hardship of transition (like I do) is the best testimony of his great, great time in preschool.”
Peter Ferland /kindergarten class of 2008
“Mrs. Shuhan truly embodies the spirit of a waldorf teacher. While always acting with each child’s best interest at heart she is much loved and admired by us parents for her eloquently worded and always insightful guidance and expertise as well as her quiet and humble wit. Our experience in her class has been of immeasurable value to us as a family. While in her loving care our daughter was given the freedom to thrive and flourish as a child should.”
Mia & John Reed /kindergarten class of 2012
– Dana Rudikoff, parent at Acorn School
– Jeffrey Davis, writer, Tracking Wonder
– Mia & John Reed, kindergarten class of 2012
Acorn Waldorf School is a Full Member of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America
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The ACORN WALDORF SCHOOL seeks a representative community of diversity, welcoming students of any race, religion, sexual identity, ethnic and economic background. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender expression, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational or admissions programs and policies.
©2018 Acorn Waldorf School ◦ 2911 Lucas Turnpike ◦ Accord, NY 12404 ◦ Call (845) 443-1541 ◦ Email info@acornwaldorfschool.org
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