Lighthouse Academy – International School Phuket with Waldorf-Inspired Education

For our primary and secondary students, Lighthouse International School Phuket uses the Cambridge textbooks, examinations and standardized testing. We also use a Waldorf Inspired Education model to ensure students are not only healthy academically, but also physically, emotionally and spiritually. The Cambridge international curriculum sets a global standard for education and is recognized by universities and employers worldwide. Our curriculum is flexible, challenging and inspiring. It is also culturally sensitive yet international in approach. Cambridge students develop an informed curiosity and a lasting passion for learning. They also gain the essential skills they need for success at university and in their future careers.

Middle Childhood – Develop the heart through imagination

Between the ages of seven and 12, children learn best through lessons that touch their feelings and enliven their creative forces. The Waldorf lower school curriculum is alive with fairy tales and fables, mythological sagas, and stirring biographies of historical figures. Waldorf elementary (or “class”) teachers integrate storytelling, drama, rhythmic movement, visual arts, and music into their daily work, weaving a tapestry of experience that brings each subject to life in the child’s thinking, feeling, and willing. Entrusted with the essential task of accompanying their students on a several-year journey, Waldorf grades 1-8 teachers have a role analogous to that of effective parent, guiding the children’s formal academic learning while awakening their moral development and increasing their awareness of their place in the world.

The Cambridge Pathway – from primary through to pre-university

Cambridge Pathway students have the chance to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to achieve at school, university and beyond.

The four stages lead seamlessly from primary to secondary and pre-university years. Each stage builds on the learners’ development from the previous one, but can also be offered separately. Similarly, each syllabus adopts a ‘spiral’ approach, building on previous learning to help advance students’ study. Our curriculum reflects the latest thinking in each subject area, drawn from expert international research and consultation with schools.

The Benefits of Waldorf Education

Children enjoy an unhurried childhood.

Visit a Waldorf school and watch the students at play. You’ll see children who delight in being allowed to live in the moment, who are free to explore nature and to go where their wide-eyed sense of wonder and imagination takes them. In our frenetic world, where pushing children to “hurry up or fall behind” has become the norm, Waldorf Education takes the point of view that childhood is something to be savoured. By being free to develop according to their own natural rhythms, Waldorf-educated children enjoy full and rich childhoods, gaining the experiences they need to become healthy, self-actualized individuals.

Learning is hands-on and age-appropriate.

You won’t find young children hovering around a computer in a Waldorf school classroom or missing a walk in the woods or a trip to the farm in order to sit and cram for a standardized test. In Waldorf Education, learning is an experiential activity. It’s not a matter of doing without certain experiences, it’s a matter of introducing children to each experience at the right time in their development. When it’s time to teach the merits, uses, and hows of technology, Waldorf school teachers do so. And the knowledge, self-awareness, and problem-solving skills children develop through years of hands-on inquiry are of far greater value to them as learners and as human beings than anything they could have picked up by sitting at a screen.

Students learn how to take an active role in their own education.

From discovering the alphabet in the first grade to discovering anatomy, algebra, and U.S. history in the eighth grade, and all the way up through their high school studies, Waldorf students take part in the learning process by creating their own textbooks—beautifully-drawn journals containing stories, essays, poems, maps, illustrations, lab descriptions, and math equations. Rather than relying on pre-digested material presented to them in conventional textbooks, the act of creating their “main lesson” books allows children to absorb the lessons their teachers bring them and to make learning their own.

Waldorf schools produce well-rounded individuals.

Waldorf educators strive to bring out what lives in each student but are careful not to over-emphasize one trait or skill over another. All students study math and science and learn foreign languages; they all play an instrument and sing in the chorus; they all learn handwork and take movement classes and perform in the class play. The goal of Waldorf Education is to expose children to a wide range of experiences and to develop within them many interests and capabilities. This, in turn, leads to well-balanced young people with high levels of confidence in their ability to apply skills developed in one area to another and the knowledge that they can master anything.

Waldorf-educated individuals have a lifelong passion for learning.

At a Waldorf school Phuket, education is not measured by competition and test scores but is viewed as a life-long journey. And an educational approach that appropriately responds to a child’s natural interest in the world cannot help but result in an intrinsic desire to find out more.

Waldorf schools are sometimes erroneously seen as “art schools” because of the depth of the fine, practical, and performing arts curriculum you’ll find here, woven in an interdisciplinary fashion among all the subjects. Interestingly, however, it’s actually the sciences that become a career choice for many Waldorf school alumni—an interest developed through years of exploration, invention, and discovery.

The Central Role of a Waldorf Teacher

While Waldorf Education places children at the heart of its pedagogy, Waldorf schools depend on the teacher as a fulcrum for the educational process. The individual who chooses to teach in a Waldorf school brings his or her full self to the development of others, providing mentoring, development, and affection that sustain the students for life.

“If someone wants to make a difference in the world, I can’t think of anything more relevant for our times than becoming a Waldorf teacher.”