Anna Talleur

Fifth & Sixth Grades Lead Teacher

I am the daughter of two visual artists. I grew up thinking that all adults spent their time creating beauty and harmony of colors and shapes and was surprised (and perhaps still am) that many adults do other things.

When I was ten years old I moved with my mother to Italy, where I was placed in fifth grade in the local Italian public school. Although I spoke no Italian when I first got there, within weeks I understood, then spoke, then read, and finally wrote the language fluently. I completed school in Italy in the public school system.                 

I promised to attend the University of Kansas for a year, I got married to my husband Massimo, had three babies who changed my whole world and have been my inspiring muses ever since, received a Bachelor’s Degree in Classical Languages and Classical Antiquities and a Master’s Degree in Classical Languages and I have not left Kansas yet. I unschooled my three children, taught Italian at K.U., and moved to a farm where my husband and I taught ourselves animal husbandry, gardening, canning and cheese-making.

My fourth child came to us in 2010, amidst the fog of teen-aged angst and college applications of the prior three children, and changed the course of our lives again. It was Zoe who brought me to Prairie Moon, and thanks to her experience here I have fallen in love with this school, the people who gravitate towards it and the promise of renewal it bears with it.

I completed three years of Waldorf training at the Scuola Waldorf Silvana Corazza di Sagrado in Trieste, Italy and have now transferred to Sunbridge Institute to complete training as a Waldorf Elementary teacher. The four years I have worked with children at Prairie Moon have been perhaps the greatest and most valuable learning experience of my life and I have enjoyed every moment. I am eager to guide my students through the eighth grade and then set them free to become just the humans that are needed in the world in these times: strong, true, imbued with grace, and full of hope.