Waldorf View of Child Development from Ages 0-6
Waldorf School Preschoolers and Kindergarteners Learn by Imitiation
Mar 10, 2009
A child's first seven years of life involve some monumental developmental milestones:
- Building the physical body: teeth, bones, muscles, brain, internal organs, and nervous system.
- Learning to think, talk, walk, and coordinate actions such as drawing with a crayon, sweeping a broom, riding a tricycle, or cutting with a knife.
- Using the senses to learn the world’s basic rules: hot and cold, up and down, wet and dry, and so on.
- Developing the will, a Waldorf term for the inborn drive to try things out, to start projects, and see them through to completion.
The Waldorf curriculum aims to support the very young child in meeting these challenges by providing a homelike classroom with plenty of opportunities to play, run, jump, climb, and learn by doing. Conspicuously absent from the curriculum are reading, writing, and arithmetic. Formal academic subjects are not taught in Waldorf classrooms until age seven, and abstract concepts are minimized until children are even older.
Imitation, a Young Child’s Natural Mode of Learning
Very young children soak up everything they experience, from the speech patterns they hear, to the way their parents walk, and the values and attitudes of the adults and other children around them.
According to Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of the Waldorf movement, “two ‘magic’ words indicate how children enter into relationship with their environment. These words are imitation and example… The child who lives in… an atmosphere of love and warmth and who has around him really good examples for his imitation, is living in his right element.” (“The Education of the Child in Light of Spiritual Science,” 1907, Rudolf Steiner Archive).
Waldorf preschool and kindergarten teachers strive to give the children in their classes a healthy example to imitate. The teacher sings together with the class, paints with the class, bakes and makes soup with the class, hikes with the class, and models how to behave when conflicts and upsets come up.
Age Seven Brings a Change of Learning Style
Waldorf educators believe that the purely imitative phase of learning starts to fade at about age seven, when a child begins losing baby teeth and the permanent teeth come in. The arrival of permanent teeth is an outward sign that the major inner work of constructing the body is largely finished. Modern science has found that age seven is also an important milestone in brain development. The sheathing of the nerves in a fatty coat of myelin is completed at about that age.
No Academic Work Until the Imitative Cycle is Complete
Delaying academics until age 7 is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Waldorf early childhood curriculum in countries like the United States, where many children are memorizing flashcards and doing worksheets at ages as young as 3. While many children do learn to read and write at very early ages, Waldorf educators believe that diverting a young child’s energy from physical development before the cycle is complete weakens the will and can damage a child’s natural love of learning.
Waldorf teachers believe that a child who gets the chance to fully explore the physical world during the first seven years of life stands the best possible chance for success and happiness in the next phase of development, when academic work begins and the curriculum focuses on reaching the child through the emotions.
Learn more about the Waldorf school curriculum:
