Early Childhood Stage
The Early childhood stage is crucial for the child to develop its physicality. Fine internal organ growth as well as neurological processes that have to be established need this period for ripening. Any formal learning during this stage of development is bound to deplete the energies of the child from ‘body building’ (building health).
It is an established fact that the myelination of the brain is a prerequisite for any work demanding intellectual participation. This is activated by natural movements of the child during the early phase of growth. The more we allow for such movements in growing children, through play and informal ways of socializing and learning, the more contributive we are towards establishing fine neurological processes.
Our Kindergarten (2.5-7)
The Abhaya kindergarten acts as a bridge between a child’s life at home and his later years in the grade school.
If you visit our kindergarten, you will notice that it looks a little different from other traditional kindergartens you’ve seen. The toys in the classroom are simple and made from natural materials – knitted or hand-sewn dolls, wooden blocks and planks, long play cloths made of cotton or silk, a set of copper or ceramic cups and bowls. Nothing, in fact, that would look out of place in a traditional household. There are no worksheets, posters, or calendars hanging on the walls. No books, no computers.
Our kindergarten is designed to respond to the developmental needs of two age groups
The 2and half to 4+ year old children-the kindergarten is often called nursery group.
The 4+ and 6+year-old children- kindergarten group
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 drawing day, Tuesday is painting day, Wednesday is handwork day, and so on – adapting the daily schedule to the changing seasons and festivals of the year. The annual cycles of the seasons like Summer, Monsoon, Winter etc and festivals like Diwali, Eid, Christmas etc are celebrated with stories, songs, and artistic activities.
- 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, cooking, painting, gardening, finger knitting and other basic life skill activities. Teacher cooks and bakes the snacks or food right in the classroom. The children help by cutting the vegetables (with safe butter knives) , washing and cleaning , kneading the dough, rolling the balls and making chapattis.
- 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 the colors. They model with beeswax and draw with wax crayons.
- Singing, movement, and storytelling in groups. During daily circle time, the children sing, do finger plays, recite poems, and do movements that are symmetrical in nature. 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- 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 wood can become a car one minute, and a house the next. Often children will act out the fairy tales they hear during story time