Kindergarten:
Foundation for Life
A warm, nurturing, and homelike setting, a caring adult, and a rhythmic schedule provide a gentle and secure transition from home. The life of imagination and creativity is richly developed through meaningful activities, healthy play, as well as natural, handmade toys and materials.
As young children are open to all that surrounds them, special care is given to create a beautiful, unhurried, and protective environment and atmosphere while the adult, in attitudes, speech, and gestures, strives to be worthy of the children’s imitation.
By experiencing the living world through play and imagination, young children explore the possibility of life and create the world anew each day. Under the gentle guidance of the adult, a balanced is acheived between more active pursuits such as sailing, building houses, going on adventures and more receptive activities such as painting, drawing, listening to stories or watching puppet shows.
Striving to connect the child to the earth’s rhythms, natural beauty, and respect for all life, we aim to kindle a sense of wonder, reverence and gratitude in them.
Early childhood education is not intellectual learning which is meant for later, but laying a foundation of wholesome human qualities that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.
Grade School:
Discovery of the World and of Oneself
The day begins with the main lesson, concentrating on one subject for a 3 to 5 week period. This study is enlivened by related activities such as reciting, singing, recorder playing, or movement.
Skills, subjects, and concepts are introduced when they are suitable to the children’s developmental stages. An appropriate content and approach are implemented for each grade level. The uniqueness of the Waldorf curriculum lies primarily in how and when the children are taught, rather than in what is taught.
Waldorf education emphasizes creativity and reverence for nature and for human existence. We strive to awaken and ennoble capacities, rather than to merely impose intellectual content on the children. A comprehensive academic, artistic, and practical curriculum presented in a supportive atmosphere is meant to develop positive, well-rounded, and resourceful individuals in whom capacities have been created that can be developed in later life. Learning becomes much more than the acquisition of quantities of information. It becomes an engaging voyage of discovery of the world and of oneself, through which the outer world and inner self are encountered.
High School:
Equipped for Life
Just as the love of language and stimulation of imagination in the kindergarten are the building blocks for reading and intellectual learning later, imagination learning in the grade school leads to understanding and connecting to the world in the high school.
The focus at high school level rests on the consolidation of intellectual powers, the capacity for judgement, depth of feeling and the will to carry initiative into action.
The high school curriculum is designed to provide learning experiences that address the inner question of the adolescent, nurture the emerging ideals, andsatisfy the longing for meaning in the world and self. As students come to know the world, they come to know themselves. They are fostered to be serious about challenging themselves as well as serving others.