Kindergarten
Rhythm
The Kindergarten Curriculum is focused on the seasons of the year and the festivals which illuminate them. From this framework, a program is developed which allows the child to live into an environment where rhythm, repetition, and ritual become the foundation for healthy imitation. In the classroom, the environment is designed to enhance the child’s natural creative forces, which will later transform into the faculty of true thinking. The Kindergarten parallels a home environment and is a celebration of life designed to instill reverence, awe, and a sense for beauty. A healthy daily and weekly rhythm is an important part of school life.
Free Play
This is perhaps the most important time of the day, a time when children enter into creative relationships and have the opportunity to join together in their own imitation of life. A child’s work is his/her play.
Circle Time
Songs, games, and finger plays which reflect the current season of the year are brought together in a rhythmic way. Rhymes and games from the rich heritage of human folklore are also used with pentatonic music and songs.
Creativity
Painting
Watercolor painting is done once a week. We seek to give the child an experience of color using the wet-on-wet watercolor technique.
Baking
Once a week, the children bake the kindergarten daily snack. We sing and bake bread or perhaps something appropriate for the season: cinnamon rolls, gingerbread, muffins, “mice” or “dragons”!
Beeswax
Beeswax encourages warm, formative forces to extend into the modeling fingers as the child warms and softens and then models with this natural substance.
Handwork
Crafts are always beautiful and functional. The children may sew, work with wood, dip candles, or finger crochet.
DREAMING
Fairy Tales
The stories used are drawn from a variety of cultures and are stories which depict common human confrontations encountered as man strives for a true experience of life. Children receive the fairy tale in story form, by play-acting, or through a marionette play.
