Bright Water Waldorf School offers a developmentally appropriate, multidisciplinary, experiential, and academically rigorous approach to education. The Bright Water Waldorf School curriculum and pedagogy aim to enhance and enrich learning, enable students to fully develop their unique capacities, and to inspire life-long learning. 

Teachers integrate an artistic sense of wonder and beauty into all subjects. By combining handwork, art, music, and movement with the study of science, mathematics, literature, and history, students learn that there are many different ways to see and understand the world. The curriculum immerses students in image, sound, and movement. This strengthens imaginative powers at every level. 

The curriculum is multicultural; students study the mythologies of the world. The history of humanity as it unfolds through time is at the core of the curriculum. The students learn to recognize the relationships of a culture’s archetypes to what that culture produces, its art and science, its music, and its handcrafts, developing a curiosity and interest in other cultures. 

The curriculum uses a block schedule in which one subject is taught daily in a morning main lesson. This main lesson is two hours long and a block runs for three to five weeks. This style of block teaching allows the teacher to approach the subject creatively and intensively from different viewpoints and with varied methods and materials. For example, eighth graders study human physiology and model a human head, hand, or foot in clay. Fourth graders study the Norse sagas and draw the interlocking forms of Norse art. Fifth graders study Ancient Greece and participate in an Olympiad with other area schools. In all grades, students hand-write and illustrate their own text books. 

Every grade school class takes on a yearly production to perform for the school community. These rehearsals and performances give students an exhilarating opportunity to portray characters, build props, design sets, memorize lines, and collaborate together with a shared storytelling vision. The class play also gives a teacher many chances to build the social strength in the class. They are aids to the class teacher in developing skill and capacity in students, strengthening the sense of interdependence in the whole class, and brightening the creativity of the class through drama.⠀

The continuity of the grade school teacher remaining with their class through all eight grades is a common practice within Waldorf education and gives the teacher a deep understanding of each student’s strengths and challenges, and supports the development of a special bond and lasting relationships in each class.

The supporting subject classes – Japanese, Handwork, Movement, Music, Aikido, Woodwork, Environmental Education, and others – are taught by specialty subject teachers.