Professional Training and Certification

Completing the LifeWays Early Childhood and Human Development Training can open new opportunities, professional and personal, in the fields of early childhood, parent education and after-school care. Our one-year, part-time curriculum includes over 200 onsite hours, with independent study and personal mentoring between sessions. It can prepare you to open or transform your own in-home program, classroom or early childhood center. Many parents also enroll for inspiration in the living arts. Trainings are currently available in California, Colorado, Maine, New York, Texas and Wisconsin, with other locations in development.

Our students graduate with a renewed sense of purpose and joie de vivre in their daily lives. Strengthened by an amazing view of the developing human being, a lifted experience of personal growth, guidance in establishing successful programs, and a sense of being grounded in practical, artistic, and nurturing skills, they tell us over and over again that this training was a life changing experience for them.

The curriculum is divided into four categories – Human Growth and Development; Child, Family and Community; Program Curriculum; and Living Arts – and includes, among other things, classes on the following:

• In-depth child development from birth to six, with an introduction to other ages and phases of life through biographical studies based on the insights of Rudolf Steiner
• Introduction to numerous developmental theorists such as Vygotsky, Piaget, Bowlby, Dewey, Erikson, Froebl, Pikler and others
• A variety of handwork skills
• Puppetry and storytelling
• Painting
• Music and speech training
• Introduction to gardening and cooking
• Movement and posture exercises
• Working with the Living Arts (domestic actvity, nurturing care, social awareness and creative arts)
• Practical skills for inspired living
• Celebrations and festivals
• Nurturing skills for infants, toddlers and all of early childhood
• Exercises for personal development, inner practice, and adult relationships, including a class on diversity
• Home health care practices to support healthy children and adults
• Tools of the Trade - introductory classes on the nuts and bolts of establishing child care centers and home programs, as well as parent-child and parent-infant programs

Click here for a look at the Core Content.

The training is nothing short of extraordinary! What a gift to children and their parents and caregivers that the wisdom of the nurturing and domestic arts is being revived. You are a master at blending deep knowledge of child development with the practical skills of parenting and nurturing, balancing it all with wisdom, sensitivity and humor! It's nothing short of genius that you have created the vision and the actual framework to put it all together into a year-long program. Wow! - Theresa Catlin, 2002 LifeWays Graduate