FAQs

How do I order?

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Can I order booklets individually?

  • The Live Education! books are sold as a package that includes an initial consultation as well as free follow-up consultations through the school year. . However, quite often our clients will create a customized package of books by either choosing from our various offerings from each grade or by adding to the suggested books for a given grade level.

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What is the difference between Live Education! and other Waldorf inspired curricula such as Oak Meadow, Enki, and Christopherus?

  • Though our materials were written to be user friendly for the Waldorf inspired home school teacher, we are proud of the fact that more than 60 Waldorf schools internationally have purchased the entirety of our curriculum for the use of their faculty, and more than 100 Waldorf teachers internationally have sought out our materials for classroom teaching. That is true peer recognition from our colleagues of the usefulness, artistry, and quality of the Live Education! curriculum. The other mentioned curriculum vendors cannot claim this.
  • Oak Meadow is designed to help conventional homeschoolers en masse to satisfy state requirements with a Waldorf flavor. Their curriculum is mostly designed for the student to work on their own and not for the parents to be trained as main lesson presenters.
  • Live Education! is for the Waldorf purist. Main lesson directions and guides are included with artistic work and are oriented towards training the parent to be a home school class teacher.

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Can I have the curriculum without the consultations?

  • No. The consultations are included as support for the main lesson guides. Even trained Waldorf teachers occasionally have questions regarding drawings, presentations, and outside resources. Our inclusion of consultations is similar to tech support provided by software companies. Although our product speaks for itself, we expect that at some point you may have questions or be in need of advice. We are not selling you a product and leaving you on your own.

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What other material will I need?

  • At this time, Live Education! only sends materials we have written, illustrated, and published ourselves. These should be ample materials for your main lesson organization.
  • We do include suggested source reading for each year to go deeper into each subject. For example, in 1st grade, we recommend Grimm’s fairytales as a must, a story book on Norse Myths will be needed in 4th grade, as well as a story book on the Greek Myths in 5th grade, etc. Those editions that have proven to be most useful for teaching are always listed in our Live Education! books and are usually available as inexpensive used copies or in the public library.

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How are pricing discounts reflected?

  • Discounts are given to returning customers, the multi-sibling family, and families working in groups.
  • Our pricing structure is not designed across the board in a specific manner. Pricing is based on time of year, customer needs, consultation demands, etc.

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How often will the materials change?

  • We are constantly revising our packages and expect the amount of revisions to increase each year.
  • We are excited to be regularly adding new subjects to our 6th, 7th and 8th grade packages, allowing us to customize them according to student needs and interests.

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How can I network with other Live Education! customers?

  • Your curriculum purchase includes membership in the LE online Community Center. When you login, you will have access to the members’ directory and discussion forum, where you can search for other Live Education! families living near you and post messages to the international community of educators using our curriculum.

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How can I set up consultations as needed?

  • Consultations are always initiated by the LE customer. Feel free to contact us with questions that may be answered in a paragraph or less. For more detailed support, you may request a consultation. When we receive your request, you will be contacted by a LE staff member and an appointment will be scheduled.

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How much time is customary to wait for contact from LE?

  • We are improving on this, but at this time Rainbow and Bruce are still the primary people to answer all questions that are presented. Due to schedules and travel, it may be up to a week before contact is made. We hope to have someone on staff daily in the near future.

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How closely aligned to a Waldorf program is LE?

  • As mentioned in FAQ number 2, Live Education! strives to be not only Waldorf purist in its approach but also strives to be a model curriculum that parallels the education that a child would receive in a Waldorf classroom. Often our materials surpass the content imparted by the class teacher.
  • We believe someone using our program for a specific year will be able to go into the next year or mid-year at a Waldorf school and feel right at home. Of course that is also determined by how the parent uses and presents our materials.
  • Our main lesson guidelines come from years of experience as class teachers and they reflect that work and inspiration. However, we must add that Waldorf class teachers strive to be artists in the classroom. They have a certain amount of freedom in creating their curriculum and therefore have control over what subjects to bring to the class and how deeply those subjects are worked with in the classroom. For example, we know some teachers who have done a full block in each of the ancient civilizations and others who have done only a week or two. We know of some teachers who do Asian geography in the sixth grade and others who wait until the eighth grade. There is much variation in how main lessons are presented so we make no claim that ours is strictly followed by all class teachers in all Waldorf schools.

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Is it possible to have a package customized between two different years?

  • Absolutely. That is one of the unique benefits of Live Education! and Waldorf homeschooling in general. Waldorf education was designed as a curriculum to meet children at certain stages of development. Those stages of development are met in a larger institutionalized situation only in a general way but home schooling can meet them in a much more specific way. For example, a child in fourth grade in a Waldorf school is supposed to be turning ten and going through certain developmental stages as most children in their tenth year will. However, your particular child may go through such stages early on in the year or later in the year and require a different organization of main lessons that would be tailored to his or her needs. Live Education! can determine more closely and accurately through our questionnaire and parent interview exactly what stages your child is going through. We can then adjust the curricular choices to meet the child’s specific needs. It’s more common than not to mix some years to truly reflect the needs of that child and family. We feel very happy and privileged to do so.

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How do we deal with multi-aged situations with siblings who must be around the child?

  • Again, Live Education! is very proud to arrange and consult around such common difficulties. Certain years go very well together. For example, second grade and fourth grade are a good combination. For other multi-aged situations we give very creative and imaginative approaches on how you could include siblings in the presentation. Live Education! goes on record as valuing family relationships more than a specific adherence to single age lesson-giving. Thus, we feel that to exclude a child because they are younger or older is actually more damaging than presenting material to a child who peripherally hears it and is not ready to receive it. Our interpretation of Waldorf education is not that this material is damaging but rather the child simply does not utilize it to the best degree possible. For example, Old Testament studies and the presentation of Biblical stories are perfect for a child in his or her ninth year, but isn’t damaging for a kindergartener or first grader. So peripherally hearing such stories and yet not working intensely with it in the same way as the nine year old is not problematic. We believe it facilitates the necessary community that draws so many people into homeschooling in the first place. Much of our consulting with families and groups with multi-aged children concerns this kind of work.

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Are there any opportunities to align with a public school or charter school who then provides families with Live Education! curriculum?

  • We are approved venders for many charter school organizations and independent study programs. If we are not listed for your sponsoring organization, please contact us.

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I was never good in subjects myself. How can I ever teach my child?

  • This is probably the most frequently asked question that we receive. No one knows, understands, and loves your child better than you. No matter how masterful a teacher may be, as a parent you will always be better able to understand your child’s needs and responses. You already have built-in knowledge about your child that no teacher could possibly have.
  • It has been our experience in the classroom that the students became most excited about the subjects that we, as teachers, knew the least about. This is because we were learning about a subject along with the students. Learning the material simultaneously creates a sense of wonder and enthusiasm in the teacher and this in turn is conveyed to the students. The feeling of learning together is one of the most exhilarating a parent and child can experience. Do not allow your own insecurity regarding academia to limit the enjoyment and wondrous experience that you will have educating your child at home.

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Does Live Education! lay out the program so that we know what to do each day?

  • Yes. In the Introductory books for each grade, the teacher will find a block rotation schedule for the entire year and how to set up the learning activities for a typical day of the week. Then, within the context of each Live Education! book designed for teaching the daily main lesson, the teacher is provided with the lesson content to be imparted for each day along with a recommended student activity. If you want to gain some idea of the content of the lessons over a three-week block, we ask that you look closely at the table of contents posted on our website along with the sample lesson from each book.
  • Most often our lessons are sequential, the latter concepts and ideas building upon those previously imparted. It sometimes works out that the amount of time spent on each lesson will vary from family to family. Our feeling and experience is that parents really want flexibility in the education of their child. Oak Meadow directs each family, regardless of an individual child’s need, on a daily/weekly basis. Live Education! recognizes that some families may want to delve more deeply into a particular lesson/subject and therefore, does not want to determine the amount of time spent. Above all, we want to help parents avoid the feeling of being behind or ahead of a contrived schedule. Here is one of the places that the free follow-up consultations included in the cost of the curriculum can be very helpful.

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Does Live Education! provide us with all the specialty subjects that we love about Waldorf Education?

  • Live Education! provides families with original, imaginative booklets that guide you through main lesson presentations through the elementary grades. Contained within these guides are indications for artistic work, crafts, and various other important, grade-appropriate endeavors. Specialty subjects such as eurythmy, music, foreign language, physical education, and handwork are important and we consult with individual families as to how to best incorporate them into their schedule. This sometimes requires a small group to contract with a specific foreign language or eurythmy tutor. However, please note that we do not provide specific written materials for specialty subjects.

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I have a Yahoo or Hotmail email account, how do I ensure that messages from Live Education! will be delivered to me?

  • If you use Hotmail, please add live-education.com to your Safe List:
    1. Login to your Hotmail acccount
    2. Click the “Contacts” tab near the top of your screen
    3. Choose “Safe List” from the menu on the left
    4. Add live-education.com

    Otherwise, you will need to regularly check your Junk Email folder for messages from Live Education! Be sure to reveiw your Junk Mail settings to make sure messages identified as Spam are not deleted immediately.

  • If you use Yahoo Email, please check your bulk folder for messages from live-education.com, and mark any messages received there, “Not Spam.”If you do not receive our emails at all, even in your bulk folder,
    1. Login to your Yahoo account
    2. Click “Options” near the top right side of the screen
    3. Choose “Spam Protection”
    4. Either a. Turn SpamGuard? Off or b. Under “For Messages SpamGuard? identifies as Spam” choose “Save these messages in the Bulk Folder for” (your chosen amount of time)
    5. Click Continue once to move to Step 2 and a second time to move to Step 3
    6. On Step 3, click “Set up Spam Protection”

    To test that you can receive our emails, visit the Sign In page on the Live Education! website, and click “Forgot Your Password?” Enter your email address to have an automatic password reminder email sent to you. Look for the email in your Bulk folder and mark it “Not Spam.”

    If you still do not receive this email, please inform Yahoo that mail you have requested from live-education.com is not being delivered to you.

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Does the Live Education! Curriculum meet the Common Core State Standards?

  • As mentioned above in FAQ number 10, the Live Education! curriculum strives to be fully in alignment with the curriculum content, the timetable order of subjects and timetable of expected student learning skills found in Waldorf schools throughout North America and world-wide. In practice, the Waldorf curriculum, when completed, exceeds the common core standards; this is borne out by the results shown in state mandated tests of basic skills [STAR testing]of the upper grades students (6-8) in Waldorf elementary and middle schools throughout the nation . However, unlike the view of childhood expressed by the common core standards, the Waldorf approach is sensitive to childhood development and seeks to educate not only the intellectual development but also the student’s creativity and imagination. Educate the creative imagination first in the earliest years, and the intellect will have a solid and inexhaustible grounding that will insure success through life. Thus the Waldorf curriculum will tend toward intellectual concepts and ideas more in the upper grades and imaginative characterizations of scientific and cultural ideas in the lower grades, though basic skills in the language arts and math are fully developed beginning in the earliest grades.
  • For more information on this topic, the parent is referred to Recommended Grade Level Placements of Common Core Standards in Waldorf Inspired Public School Programs from The Alliance for Public Waldorf Education. Though formed in recent years, there are so far, more than 40 member public schools throughout the United States. www.allianceforpublicwaldorfeducation.org