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Playgroup and Kindergarten
During the first seven years children are physically forming and live very much in their imagination. This great capacity to enter into imaginative pictures and stories is a good place to begin the process of learning. Free, creative play is considered the best preparation for self-realising adult life.
The teacher endeavours to create an environment that gives children time to play and encourages them to exercise their imagination and learn to conjure up ideas from within themselves. Simple homely tasks and artistic activities to both do and see are balanced with story telling, singing games and generous play times. A rich supply of natural materials provides scope for imagination in play, which refined toys often deny.
Activities offered for the four to six year olds are based on the house and garden. These include sweeping, gardening, cooking, building cubbies, looking after animals, singing, listening to stories, helping to prepare the meal table, cutting fruit, painting, clay modelling and drawing. Children learn to enjoy building, using the natural materials in the room to make their own constructions and patterns. Practical experience helps the child develop confidence and capabilities.
Steiner education seeks to nurture the senses through water-colour painting and singing, beeswax and clay modelling. The teacher works consistently to provide rhythm and structure to the day, week, year and whole curriculum, to harmonise with the child's natural rhythms.
At this age, children are discovering how to relate socially with a peer group and take part in fundamental life tasks. Through meeting and playing creatively together, children learn vital interpersonal skills. The teacher plays an important role in enabling relationships between children to strengthen through play.
Young children develop primarily in their doing, learning through imitation and physical activity. The role of the teacher is to provide a model for the children and a secure space in which to discover the world. They are not yet ready for more formal classes. Thus, the teacher reserves the formal teaching of numbers and letters for the child's next developmental stage, signalled physically by the change of teeth, at about the age of seven.
Teaching Methods Class 1 - 6
One of the special features of Steiner education is that, when the new Class 1 is formed, the teacher commits him or herself to the care of those children for 6 years. The benefits of this commitment become obvious as the relationship between the teacher, the children and their families grows. The teacher and the children set out on the educational journey together, and the teacher is as involved in the creative learning process as the children.
A central part of this teacher's task is to intimately understand the needs of each child, and to nurture the development of a real spirit of sharing and community within the class. In a loving, structured environment, with the encouragement of their classmates and teachers, the children develop and appreciate their strengths and work at their difficulties. The social and moral learning that takes place in childhood is as important as the academic.
In the younger grades, all subjects are introduced through artistic mediums. This promotes abilities such as creative and flexible thinking, imagining ideas and problems from different perspectives and layering one thought upon another as part of a process of problem solving. Children can attain greater levels of achievement in all subjects through this method, than from dry lecturing and rote learning.
Mastery of oral communication is integral to all learning. Hearing, re-telling, acting and illustrating stories enriches the child's imaginative life and grasp of language. The ability to generate ideas, communicate them and bring them to fruition is essential to future success in adult life.
Reading and writing are taught from class 1. The child first learns to write using the shape of the letters to suggest meaning, ie. M for mountain, V for valley, W for waves. In addition, they may walk the shape on the floor in the classroom and draw pictures that include the shape. This allows a deeper connection with, and an understanding of the letters, rather than just memorising the abstract shapes. The children write words and read their own writing before working with printed literature.
An understanding of numbers is built on the basis of concrete, real-life tasks - such as dividing a cake to share, estimating, measuring and through counting aloud, chanting of tables, musical rhythms and skipping games. These learning experiences are real and meaningful. The children may also learn games such as chess, which enhance thinking and mathematical ability.
We aim throughout the classes to share the finest literature with the students, which is appropriate to their age. The stories told by the teacher change as the child develops, correlating the era of human history with the developmental stages of the child. For 6-7 year olds the teacher may draw mainly on folk and fairy tales, moving on at age 8 to fables and legends, to Old Testament stories at age 8-9. Norse stories and sagas are presented at age 10, Greek myths and legends at age 11 and the Roman period at age 12.
The Main Lesson
The Main Lesson is one of the basic elements of the Steiner curriculum. It involves the thorough working of the main subjects (such as geography, science, history, mathematics or literature), taught in main lesson blocks of about two hours per day, over several weeks. It is always conducted in the morning, when the children are fresh and is followed by a change of activity.
The topics are approached through a variety of means, including stories, painting, recitation, a physical group project or a game, until the children have made some connection to it with every part of themselves. It is then set aside to 'digest' and a further topic is taken up. This pattern is natural to children, as anyone who has observed the success of 'crazes' in a playground will know. The result is a thorough and satisfying assimilation of knowledge, thus maintaining the child's enthusiasm for learning.
There are no textbooks as such in the primary school years. All children have 'main lesson books', which are their workbooks that they create during the year. They essentially produce their own 'textbooks', which record their experiences and what they've learned. Upper grades use textbooks to supplement their main lesson work.
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