Celebrating Academic Excellence

We offer a unique educational experience that is unlike any other public school in this area. We seek to cultivate each student’s individual gifts, to encourage independent thinking and imagination, and to foster a love of learning. Within the Mountain Oak School classroom, teachers masterfully blend academic and artistic disciplines so that the whole child is involved in every aspect of learning. This integration of mind, body and heart allows each child’s intellect to unfold at its own pace and to reach its full potential.

The founding members spent several years working together to create this Waldorf-methods school. We continue to create and define this school for the Prescott community. We celebrate academic excellence, cultivate artistic expression, and help our students develop life long practical skills. We strive to bring forth a Waldorf-methods curriculum that engenders joy and academic excellence.

As a public charter school, we meet Arizona State Standards and testing requirements, and comply with health and safety regulations and educational laws applicable to Arizona Charter Schools. Mountain Oak Charter School is a state-funded charter school, and as such is open to ALL students.

To provide a Waldorf-inspired age appropriate education for the whole child that emphasizes intellectual development through the imaginative, artistic, and moral growth of its students. We encourage students to be life-long learners and independent thinkers, as well as self-motivated, creative and responsible individuals who will develop the skills needed to direct their own lives and to serve the greater community to which they belong.

The Mountain Oak School community is devoted to the potential that all children carry within them. We are contributing to the future of our children, our culture, and our world through Waldorf Education:

• Developing academic and practical life skills through the arts and sciences.
• Empowering children to discover their gifts, enjoy a full and enduring childhood, and to pursue lifelong learning throughout their life.
• Encouraging an appreciation for wonder, for beauty, and for truth.
• Awakening the children's sense of self and helping them find confidence within their world.
• Working together as a community of teachers and parents to create a healthy social life.

The vision of Mountain Oak School is to be a school that strategically, effectively, and in partnership with the community, provides a fully-integrated, Waldorf-inspired public charter school education that reflects our core values and the values and diversity of the community.

At the heart of this approach is the recognition that teaching must be presented to children in a way that fills them with wonder, reverence and enthusiasm. We believe that teaching children to care for and respect the earth encourages global responsibility and promotes environmentally conscious living. The celebration of seasonal festivals is an integral part of this as children joyously experience the earth’s natural cycles. Throughout early childhood, reducing or eliminating exposure to electronic media and encouraging a cooperative rather than a competitive milieu, the inherent creative and intellectual abilities will naturally unfold.

The vision of Mountain Oak School is to be a place that strategically, effectively, and in partnership with the community, provides a fully-integrated, Waldorf-inspired public charter school education that reflects our core values and the values and diversity of the community.

We believe that teaching children to care for and respect the earth encourages global responsibility and promotes environmentally conscious living. The celebration of seasonal festivals is an integral part of this as children joyously experience the earth’s natural cycles. By reducing or eliminating exposure to electronic media and encouraging a cooperative rather than a competitive milieu, a child’s inherent creative and intellectual abilities will naturally unfold. At the heart of this approach is the recognition that teaching must be presented to children in a way which fills them with wonder, reverence and enthusiasm.

At Mountain Oak School we dedicate ourselves to teaching a Waldorf-inspired curriculum so that we may help to inspire each of our students:

• To have a creative and curious mind.
• To cultivate a non-competitive, physically and emotionally safe learning environment that encourages community involvement.
• To develop a life-long love of learning by sparking the children’s imagination and developing their capacity for independent thinking.
• To maintain a warm heart and a strong sense of morality.
• To nurture their own unique gifts.
• To become balanced, vigorous, life affirming, and compassionate beings.
• To have respect for all living things and a sensitive cultural awareness.

At Mountain Oak School our parents, teachers and staff are committed:

• To protecting the innocence and integrity of childhood.
• To supporting the educational philosophy at home to enhance the child's learning experience at school.
• To cultivating a healthy community of teachers, families, and friends in which to educate children.

How do we carry out our vision?

Mountain Oak School philosophy is based upon these priciples:

• Learning to think, learning to care and learning to create.
• A classical and innovative education.
• A strong sense of community.
• A high degree of parental participation.                   
• A close, long-term relationship with teachers.
• Cooperative learning among peers.
• A strong focus on respect, responsibility and compassion.
• Fostering each child’s full potential.
• Nurturing the imagination in the early years in order to build a foundation for abstract thinking.
• Challenging the child’s intellect in the middle years and through 8th grade.
• Emphasizing the child’s relationship to the natural world.
• Promoting the child's respect for the environment and humankind.
• Awakening a student's genuine enthusiasm, an interest in the WORLD, (a love of learning) and sense of purpose in life.
• Creativity, happiness, critical–thinking and self reliance.
• An educational approach encouraging balance.
• Every child as a unique spiritual being who brings gifts, as well as challenges.
• Passion being essential in preparing graduates for important roles in life.
• A sense of belonging and contribution.
• Integrating imagination and the arts with academics, infusing the spirit of learning with meaning and integrity.
• A curriculum not driven by standardized testing.
• Promoting cooperation over competition; and imaginative play over media exposure.
• An educational environment that does not use technology in the classroom.
• Arts, music and movement integrated into the entire curriculum.
• An educational program that teaches a foreign language starting in first grade.

COMMUNITY - Mountain Oak School views itself as a Waldorf-inspired community. As such we learn from each other, and collaborate to make a positive impact on the world around us and on future generations.

“The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art – it must speak to the child’s experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind.”  -Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)

CHILDREN - Mountain Oak School holds the value of teaching children in a developmentally appropriate way: an artful, imaginative way that leads them to wholeness, which is defined as intellect balanced with heart wisdom, served by a vigorous will. Healthy childhood creates a profound connection to the natural world and humanity. Healthy children have a capacity for courage and an ability to take on the world in a compassionate, creative way.

CREATIVITY  - Mountain Oak School values and actively fosters all creative expression. We strive to educate children to become adults who think creatively and thus are able to see novel solutions to issues faced by the global community.  We strive to educate children to value beauty. We empower children to shape their own lives.

COMMUNICATION - We strive to focus on communication that respects the rights of others and accepts the diverse viewpoints of a community. We believe in honest, open, and compassionate listening and speaking.

INTEGRITY - Integrity is defined as our ability as individuals and as a Waldorf-inspired school community to implement and live the four core values outlined above. The values of community, children, creativity, and communication are all strands which are interwoven and interconnected to constitute the whole. Integrity in these values is created in our hearts, formed by our minds and put forth to the world through our actions.

Waldorf schools originated in Europe in 1919. The curriculum for all Waldorf and Waldorf-Methods schools is based on a developmentally appropriate curriculum that integrates the arts and music with academic subjects. This unique approach touches and develops the feeling life of the child while enhancing the development of effort and will to participate. It enlivens the thinking capacities necessary for strong academic challenges in the world today.

In both Waldorf private and public-sector schools, the early elementary grades are intentionally designed to protect and nurture childhood and to foster wonder and imagination. The carefully developed environment combining beauty with structure is purposely designed to gradually awaken the thinking capacity of each individual child. We seek to educate the whole human being so that he or she may carry the lively and joyous qualities of childhood into adult life. Early academic lessons unfold in an artistic, active and joyful manner. Simultaneously, the social skills of living harmoniously within a class and a school community are fostered. Many opportunities to use the body skillfully and with intent are structured into the daily life of the academic classes. In the middle and upper elementary years, these elements translate into vigorous academic skills for creatively sustained and original thinking capacities.

Waldorf education seeks to foster and develop a creative, educated, and healthful interest in life. People who develop skills of sensitivity and fortitude in childhood have the ability to contribute positively to all aspects of adult life as responsible individuals.

The first Waldorf-Methods public school opened in 1991 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Many parents and educators who knew the Waldorf curriculum as nurturing and healthy for children began opening charter schools across the country, knowing the methods of Waldorf education would be welcomed as an innovative and inspiring solution to current public-education challenges. The first Arizona Waldorf-Methods school opened in Flagstaff in 1995. MOS is now one of five Waldorf-Methods public schools in the state of Arizona. Not all aspects of the curriculum can be implemented in the same manner as in the private sector. Adaptations have been instituted by each charter school according to the needs and structure of the school staff and administration to meet the needs of each school community.