Early Childhood Programs
Awakening
a sense of wonder
A richness of direct experience, beautiful surroundings, oral story-telling, puppetry, and the natural world inspire interest - the first pre-requisite for effective education.
Strengthening the will
Living the rhythms of the day, the week and the seasons, children develop the faculties that will become persistence, drive, and follow-through in adult life.
Building healthy bodies
Running, jumping, swinging, digging - children benefit from plenty of outdoor time with fresh air and movement.
Developing social skills
An experienced teacher presents safe opportunities for children to gain social understanding, learn cooperation and develop friendships.
Encouraging the imagination
Knights, princesses, farmers, divers, animals, fire-fighters - our children can be anything! We encourage imaginative play. The faculty of imagination - the ability to form mental images for oneself from words or thoughts - is the basis not just of creativity but of all abstract thought.
Rites of passage
Tasks and activities are designed to be age-appropriate, and children who attend for more than one year experience being the "younger" and then the "older" in the mixed-age kindergarten. As children mature and develop increased coordination and longer attention spans, they may participate in extended circle work (including plays); more challenging woodworking, sewing and other handcraft projects; and they are also called to be caring older "brothers and sisters" to the younger students with special jobs such as pouring the tea at snack time.
Protecting from premature academic pressure
These days, it is common for parents to feel pressured to enroll their children are earlier and earlier ages into institutional schooling. Then, it is common for the schools to push children into certain academic work before they are truly ready. Children in the Waldorf preschool and kindergarten are provided with the most homelike environment possible, and they are carefully protected from the experience of having "failed" before they were ever ready to begin formal schooling. The Waldorf system differs from other conventional and independent systems of education not so much in terms of content, but very much in terms of the timing and sequence for the introduction of subject matter. We intentionally wait upon formal introduction of writing, reading, and written arithmetic until the early elementary grades.
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