Ms. Tamar

Ms. Tamar (she/her)
Program Director & Lead Teacher

Ms. Tamar has 17 years of experience working with young children, and is a parent herself. She was a founding teacher at The Brooklyn Waldorf School where she led a nursery and mixed-aged afternoon program for 10 years. In 2017 she became the Lead Teacher at another Waldorf-inspired preschool in Brooklyn.

Now, Ms. Tamar is thrilled to have initiated her life-long dream of creating an Urban Forest School for young children—as Program Director and Lead Teacher of the Honeytree Forest School, which she founded in the summer of 2020. The school has already had a successful first year, moving into its second year. She has gathered a core team of teachers (representing a diverse spectrum of gender identity, ethnicity, cultural background and age) who she collaborates with and continues to mentor and guide. This is an important part of the wholistic vision of the school as one of the essential motivations for becoming Waldorf-accredited in the near future (which will define us as a Waldorf Teaching practicum school).

Ms. Tamar has a deep appreciation of the natural world and loves to share this sense of wonder with young children—through storytelling, puppetry, gardening and outdoor explorations. She also enjoys traveling and uses her adventures as fodder and inspiration for her stories.

As a child, her curiousity was fueled by her father’s study of various creatures in their natural habitat, the need for their continued protection, and our symbiotic relationship with the natural world. Her father later founded a Biodiversity Museum in Bishop Mills, Ontario to continue the study and preservation of diverse plant and animal life indigenous to North America, highlighting the imperative to become active stewards of mother earth. These experiences inspired Ms. Tamar’s desire to share this wonder and knowledge with young children though the pedagogy of Honetytree Forest school, via hands-on learning in nature.

She acknowledges that the forest is a wonderful place to learn self-responsibility and resourcefulness while creating and maintaining a campsite with friends. To experience the changing seasons and deep observations of animals in nature, coupled with imaginative play, is an ideal setting for the rich and further holistic development of a young child.

Her experience teaching young children in an urban environment led her to embrace the rhythmic warmth, artistry and holistic approach of Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf pedagogy, as it provides a palliative to urban living. Additionally, she benefited from the knowledge and experience which she gleaned through her child’s attendance at 2 Waldorf schools (New York City and Wisconsin).

Ms. Tamar received her Masters of Education and Certificate of Waldorf Education for Early Childhood Ed. at Sunbridge College in Chestnut Ridge, NY in 2008. She’s a self-taught fresco painter with a background in Fine Art and Art Restoration (specializing in fresco painting). She holds a BFA degree in Fine Art from The Cooper Union art school in New York City. She later studied extensively with a restoration architect in Umbria, Italy.

She continues to apply her creative sensibilities through cultivating and supporting a continued sense of wonder in the young child.