Soupstone Kindergarten

About Soupstone

The Soupstone Kindergarten is now open at

71 Clonliffe Road, Drumcondra, Dublin 3.

A New Walfdorf Project in Dublin City Centre

Mini Marathon

Well done to Aileen, Karin and Anja for running the 2010 mini Marathon in aid of Soupstone and raising much-needed funds in the process. Thank you from the rest of us!
Remember, it's not too late to help out. Just click the donate button on this page to drop a much-needed few bob into the Soupstone hat.

Soupstone is a new, alternative Kindergarten project in Dublin city centre.

We are a community run, non-profit Kindergarten run by parents who have come together to offer a new and different kind of kindergarten on the north side of Dublin. We are influenced by the Steiner Waldorf approach to child care and child development. We are very lucky to have Karin as our very experienced, full-time Kindergarten Manager.

We are able to accept children from age 2 ½ to 6 years old. Most of the children are in the age range of 3-5 years old.

We are open five days a week, Monday to Friday, 9:15am to 12:45pm.

The new term starts Wednesday, 1^st September, 2010.

Soupstone is a place where children can be children, without being pressured into “early learning” for later academic work and careers and without pressure to consume in a world of brands, plastic toys and television. Instead, children’s own developmental pace is respected, and a space of wonder and magic, suitable to their age, is created.

Each day has a simple rhythm focussed on practical activities like baking, painting, story-telling or gardening, and each child develops their own relationship to this. Instead of an endless stream of new tasks, children learn to work with the same material, or listen to the same story, and enrich their experience of simplicity. In this way, children come to develop their own personality more, learn to appreciate their own experience and meet each other with kindness.

Why Soupstone matters

We feel that a real childhood is an important part of being human, which should be available for everyone:

We have committed ourselves to accessibility and making this possibility available to everyone, in a city where education is increasingly divided between rich and poor.
We are creating a space which emphasises gender-neutrality and the common features of being children, in a world where pink clothes for girls and military toys for boys are everywhere.
We are a multi-cultural, linguistically diverse group of people in very different family situations brought together by our desire to give our children the chance to have real childhoods, rather than being pushed towards the world of work and consumption.

As parents, we speak different languages, come from different countries and follow different religions and none. Soupstone aims to celebrate this cultural diversity, rather than making our children feel that being “different” is somehow wrong.

Mailing List

Email us or subscribe to our

Yahoo group to join our mailing

list for further Soupstone updates.

A key theme of the project is social diversity and accessibility for different kinds of families and family types, supporting people in their individual life situations and choices and their conscious parenting. Soupstone aims to be gender-neutral and to encourage children to experience themselves first and foremost as children, rather than in terms of their sex.

The people involved in the project are in very different economic situations. We have committed ourselves to doing everything we can to make the project accessible to everyone who joins in. Soupstone aims to take money differences out of the classroom, and allow the children to experience equality and companionship.

Doing it ourselves

Soupstone is a self-organised project run by a group of parents and teachers for our own children.

As a parent-run, non-profit startup, we don’t have any funding from the state; we aren’t backed by investments or by a church. We are completely self-funded, charging different rates for parents in different situations and doing everything we can to raise funds for the project.

Everyone involved has different needs and constraints, but we all try to contribute whatever we can personally, be that time, money, energy or administrative help. Parents are very much involved in Waldorf kindergartens – we have literally built Soupstone ourselves!

Information

We offer a sliding scale of fees. For enquiries, please email us at soupstonekg@gmail.com or ring Karin on 085-7158552