About Caitlyn

Caitlyn’s goal as an educator is to guide children through their most formative years with reverence, artistry, and love. She considers it an honor to do this work, and to serve families who are seeking a hopeful and wholesome path through this rapidly changing world of ours. Caitlyn holds a master’s degree in education and is trained in both Waldorf and Montessori early childhood education, with an emphasis on the spoken word, singing, and nature-based teaching. Her Montessori training was acquired through the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), and her Waldorf training was acquired through LifeWays North America, which educates early childhood caregivers to provide holistic play-based and relationship-based care in a home setting, guided by the work of Rudolf Steiner.

Over the past nine years she has worked in a variety of school settings and with a wide range of ages, from infant to adolescent, and also with adults in the context of parent-child classes and parent workshops. Building on a literature degree and a lifelong love of poetry, she works from the belief that artful language is a powerful vehicle for the spirit, facilitating our connection to one another and to our natural environment. She enjoys writing poetry, stories, and songs for children, adapting folktales and fairy tales, setting poetry to music, and, most of all, celebrating the gift of life through singing with others. Her approach to education and family care has been strongly influenced by her study of permaculture design and human ecology, as well as her experience working in Zen Buddhist and Franciscan schools.

In addition to her work with children, Caitlyn is a certified spiritual director who specializes in companioning the “spiritual but not religious” on their inner journeys. She believes in supporting the natural spirituality of young children from a non-religious (or multi-religious) perspective and she is currently pursuing ordination as an interfaith minister in order to better serve children and families of all faiths, including non-religious belief systems. She believes strongly in the power of everyday ceremony and seasonal festival to create meaning in our lives and to draw people together.