Why Waldorf Kindergarten

Waldorf kindergarten is an extension of the family experience, an intermediate for the child between home and formal schooling. The goal is to provide a warm, calm, secure, aesthetic environment where imagination and creativity of the child will flourish.

The quality of the environment of a Waldorf kindergarten is an integral part of its goal for the children. The feeling of warmth and security are created using only natural materials: Wood, cotton, wool in the construction of equipment and toys. Curtains sends a warm glow into the room. In this warm environment are placed toys that children can use to imitate and transform the activities that belong to everyday adult life. In one corner stands a wooden scale and baskets for children to pretend they are grocery, a pile of wood is ready to be built into a playhouse, a boat or a train, a rocking horse invite the child to become a rider, homemade dolls lie in wooden cradles, surrounded by wooden frames and cloth the children can use to create a pretend family and playhouse.

Pinecone and flowers are artistically scattered; beautiful watercolors adorn the walls. The effect of this beautiful arrangement of decorations and toys is a feeling of entering a "children's garden, where you can breathe, relax and play after the impulses of one's heart.

The 3 R's are reverence, repetition and rhythm. Structured group activities consist of finger plays, singing, reciting poems, and doing body movement known as eurythmy. The fairy tales are told to children on consecutive days up to two weeks, show culminated in history as a puppet being offered to children as a teacher or as a play with costumes acted out by children with the teacher to tell. Arts and crafts consist of watercolor with the three primary colors to give a proper understanding of the nature of color, modeling with beeswax, drawing with beeswax crayons, finger knitting, and baking.

It has been noticed that fantasy play for children participating in the Waldorf kindergarten changes. Their fantasies are often to be the characters from the tales told to them each week.The children will be more respect for each other, move with more confidence and grace, and are much more open in their creative self-expression. This kind of growth, this form of expression of imagination and creativity through free play, art, drama, music, oral recitation, and dance is crucial to our time.

The importance of child's play

One of the major changes in public education in the last fifteen years has been the transformation of the kindergarten room from a "children's garden" full of toys and game-like activity in a pre-first class, full of work sheets and learning stations. There has been an assumption that all this is appropriate for the age of five, and will help them in their academic work and in its growth and development in general. More and more, that this assumption is now being challenged.

In his book, The hurried Child David Elkin, child psychologist and professor at Tufts University, discusses the problem by stressing that he takes in children who come to him for treatment. He points out that in the great race to bring children into academic work, we stopped to ask if children are inwardly ready for such a concentrated, intellectually oriented work.

There is a growing research that supports the position of Waldorf schools that children should remain in play-oriented kindergarten until the age of six. The clearest example of such research, which has come to our attention is a large study conducted in Germany comparing 100 public school classes for five year olds. Fifty of them had only play in their program, and the other 50 had academics and play together. The children entered first grade, when they were six, and the study surveyed their progress until they were ten. The first year there was not much difference to be seen. By the time children were ten, but those who had been allowed to play when they were five surpassed their schoolmates in all measured area.

One can imagine how surprising these results were to state educators. They felt that the results so crucial that within months they had converted all the academic programs back in the game programs. They have also recognized the benefits of mixed-age kindergartens where through play that children help each other grow and learn.

What is living in the five-year, making plays an important part of their growth and development?To answer this question, one must look at the progression of play throughout early childhood up to six years. For two years old, is playing to do what adults do. Fantasy is not yet, and if you offer a two-year-old a cake made of sand, he is very likely to eat it. By the time children turn three, this is not the case anymore, because they are generally full of fantasy and imagination.

This is a time of great flexibility in their game. They are inspired by everything that comes into their hands, and a single object will change its meaning for them several times during a single play session. For the parent, it can be a frustrating stage, the child generally leaves a stream of toys behind him as he moves around. It is quite hopeless to tell him to take away one thing when he is finished. His game is always in the process of change and becoming.

In the four-year, looks more constancy in favor. They will build a house and live in it much longer than the three-year-olds. But the inspiration for the house seems very out what catches their eye at the moment. This is no longer the case with five-year-olds.

They will often enter the classroom and tell you exactly what they want to build. They carry an image of itself, but they still need the physical materials to transfer the image in game. This image can now last for weeks at a time, and thus will have a five-year-olds in a kindergarten building boats and "hide outs" Day after day for a month or more.

Around six years, another change has come. It is one of the changes that we see as a sign of commitment to first class. Now the child's image is so strong that toys or props are almost unnecessary. A Waldorf teacher described her own transition to this phase as follows. As a small child, she loved to play with little toys and wanted to create scenes on a large window seat and play for hours.

One day when she turned six, she set a scene, as usual, but then closed his eyes and played it all in her mind. We've seen six year olds in our kindergarten classes go through the same transition when they build their houses, but ceases to take some toys into them. They are now able to create everything they need in their mind's eye, so to speak. It is quite a contrast to four and five year olds who take as much as they can in their houses, leaving barely enough room to move.

When such a stage is reached, we feel the child is ready to study the academic subjects that require an ability to hold an image of a letter or number, and call it up at will. Such a feat of memory is simply not possible for the younger child. He can compensate by developing a little support to jog his memory, but it is not the same as having a genuine commitment to the activity.

When we intervene in this process of development by starting the children in their academic subjects too soon, the imagination does not seem to develop fully. A degree of dryness can step into the intellectual process, and academic training becomes less interesting as time goes on. What may initially appear to be a win disappear quickly, and as the German study has shown, can become a liability.

At first, we separated the kindergarteners from the younger children, but after two years, we have mixed ages, mostly fours and fives, a couple three years age, and were satisfied with the results.

They brought their young children moving into the game situations, they brought their old single direction, and the two complemented each other very well. We also found that each age group came to the stories and activities in very different ways, and each group took from the experience, just what they need for their development.

In addition, we have worked hard to develop a curriculum in line with pre-school child's dreamy, playful approach to life. For example, all children paint with watercolor paints once a week. They work only with the three primary colors, and the youngest children are content to experience the pure colors in their most liquid form. The four and five year olds are fascinated by the discovery that complementary colors can be created by mixing two colors, and the five-and six-year-old discovers that the fluidity of the color of the wet paper can be controlled and forms and images begin to emerge. Fingers also learn to translate imagination into form as the children model with beeswax, create tissue paper transparencies, sew with needle and thread, or engage in other activities that match their age.

Baking, whether it is kneading dough, rolling and cutting cookies, or to cut fruit for pies, also offers opportunities for awakening intelligence of the child to penetrate into the fingers. The manual dexterity and eye-hand coordination, as a result of all these activities is crucial for later academic work, but the toddler is all games.

It is also very important that the language arts skills to be developed during the kindergarten year, and our curriculum is very rich in this area. During story time, develop children's ability to listen and when they get older you see how active they are listening, for which five and six year olds, they'll often go home and repeat the entire story they have heard their families. During circle time, like they learn songs and verses, combined with appropriate gestures and movements. I recently had the opportunity to share a fall crop circle with a group of non-Waldorf preschool educators. They were surprised that a group of three and four year olds to participate in such a wide range of songs and verse, but our class me in making this small circle play again and again in autumn.

Through all these activities, we prepare children for the academic work they will encounter in the first class of the [continue in our school], go to public school or other private or religious schools. We have been in contact with our "graduates" and we have been pleased to learn how well they have done. They generally experience a transition period of a month or two when they enter first grade, but at Christmastime, the children have mastered the same academic material as their peers and operate at their level.

It is interesting to note that all published studies looking at the issue of early scholars shows disadvantages for the children who begin academic work in six years. We have not yet found a study that reveals a long-term advantage for those who start early. More and more books have been published about the problems children encounter when rushed into academic work before they really already taken place. This can be a very confusing time for parents who see their five-year-olds want to learn letters and numbers, and assume that their child is ready for academic work, before a genuine form of academic readiness has actually taken place. Moreover, we should fight with a great social pressure from neighbors, friends and family about why you do not want to rush a child.

Parents should feel free to discuss this issue of school readiness in their child's teacher. It is one of the most crucial issues that affect the lives of young children today.

What are the needs of five year olds?

by Joan Almond, chairman of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America