The Waldorf kindergarten acts as a bridge between a child's life at home and the later, more academic years in school.
If you visit a Waldorf kindergarten, you may notice that it looks a little different from other kindergartens you've seen. There are no worksheets, posters, or calendars hanging on the walls. No books, no computers. The toys in the classroom are simple and made from natural materials – knitted or hand-sewn dolls, pinecones and driftwood for blocks, long play cloths made of cotton or silk, a set of copper or bronze cups and bowls. Nothing, in fact, that would look out of place in a medieval household.
What’s going on here?
What You Will Find in a Waldorf Kindergarten
A Waldorf kindergarten is designed to respond to the developmental needs of 5- and 6-year-old children. (Children in Waldorf schools typically attend kindergarten for two years and enter first grade at age 7.) The key elements in the program are:
Regular daily rhythms. Predictability and repetition are profoundly soothing to children. For this reason, life in the Waldorf kindergarten follows a predictable rhythm – Monday is always baking day, Tuesday is painting day, Wednesday is soup day, and so on – adapting the daily schedule to the changing seasons and festivals of the year. The annual cycles of the seasons and holidays like Halloween and Christmas are celebrated with stories, songs, and art.
Learning through practical activities. Young children before the age of seven learn primarily by trying things out, using their bodies, and imitating the adults around them. The Waldorf kindergarten responds to these drives by focusing on practical activities, such as baking, painting, gardening, and finger knitting. Teachers cook the daily snack right in the classroom. The children help by milling the oats for oatmeal, cutting carrots for vegetable soup, and grinding and kneading dough on bread day.
Art. Art is a vital part of the Waldorf curriculum from the very beginning. In kindergarten, the children paint with water colors in the three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, to learn the basic relationships between colors. They model with beeswax and draw with beeswax crayons.
Singing, movement, and storytelling in groups. During daily circle time, the children sing, do finger plays, recite poems, and do a Waldorf style of movement called eurhythmy. The teacher also tells the children fairy tales – always telling them, never reading from a book. The same story is repeated every day for as long as two weeks so the children can absorb the images deeply. At the end of the story cycle, the fairy tale is performed as a puppet show or a play with children acting out the parts and the teacher narrating the story.
Free play, both indoors and outdoors. According to David Elkind, author of The Power of Play [Da Capo Press, 2006], imaginative play is the catalyst for social, physical, emotional, and moral development in young children. Play based on the children’s own spontaneous ideas is one of the Waldorf kindergarten’s primary activities. The simple, open-ended toys in the classroom lend themselves to that kind of play. A piece of driftwood can become a car one minute, and a house the next. Often children will act out the fairy tales they hear during story time.
What You Won't Find in a Waldorf Kindergarten
No plastic. Everything in the classroom is made of natural materials – wood, stone, metal, cotton, silk, and wool.
No electronics. Waldorf educators believe that computers have no place in the three-dimensional, sensory, and open-ended classroom appropriate for the young child.
No reading, writing, or arithmetic. No drills, worksheets, or homework. Teaching of academic subjects doesn’t start in Waldorf schools until first grade at age 7. Reading at home isn’t discouraged – and some children do begin to read – but it is not taught in the classroom. There are two reasons for this. One is that many children at 5 or 6 haven’t developed the fine motor tracking or intellectual focus needed to be successful readers. And even among those who have, Waldorf educators believe that early academics take the child’s energy away from his or her real developmental task, which is learning through play.
Waldorf kindergartens help children build basic skills such as sequencing, sensory integration, eye-hand coordination tracking, and enjoying the beauty of the spoken word, so they will be fully ready when they enter the academic phase of school life.
Research provides considerable support for not rushing to introduce academics. A study of 100 kindergartens in Germany found that children in “academic” kindergartens where they learned reading and arithmetic actually performed worse in later grades than children in play-based programs. Finland, where school doesn’t begin until age seven, routinely leads the world in literacy, math, and science scores.
The copyright of the article Guide to Waldorf Education in Kindergarten in Primary School Curriculum is owned by Christine Mann. Permission to republish Guide to Waldorf Education in Kindergarten in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
