Lakewood Waldorf School Curriculum Overview
Our toddler and preschool programs are designed to honor and to build healthy relationships with children and their families. Early relationships form the foundation for feeling safe and secure in the world, developing a sense of belonging and self worth, for future learning and success, and quite simply happiness. We strive to provide a wide range of experiences to help support every child's unique development.
Arts and Crafts: The children learn to paint with high quality watercolors, draw with beeswax crayons, make paper, create lanterns, and do simple sewing projects.
Nurturing Arts: The children make bread, polish toys with beeswax, wash dishes and toys, garden, sweep and rake, grind oats, and help to prepare snack. These practical skills help to develop confidence and the will power needed to finish a task.
Language: The importance of language cannot be over stressed. As teachers, our speech needs to be grammatically correct, positive, encouraging, and ever changing and expanding so that the children learn new words, thoughts, and ways to express themselves.
.
Festivals and Celebrations: Festivals allow us to celebrate each other and the changing season At Sunflower we have celebrations throughout the year giving parents the opportunity to connect with each other, while creating a sense of community. Two major festivals are The Harvest Festival in the fall where we make apple cider in an old fashioned apple cider press, and the May Day Celebration where the children dance around a May Pole. Festivals add richness to our program.
Circle time: Circle time is a teacher led activity where children learn to follow the teacher’s lead in a group setting. Children learn songs, games, finger plays, and practice movements such as fast, slow, large, and small. Each child is greeted and welcomed into the day by the teacher.
Morning Walks: Our morning walks help enliven a sense of wonder and interest in the natural world, while helping to develop active, strong bodies. Every walk offers something new to discover, explore, and experience, in every season. In the summer we pretend to fish, in the winter we go sledding.
Stories: Our stories are carefully chosen and told from memory so that the story becomes alive in the imagination of the storyteller. Stories are also presented as puppet shows.
Play: Our program is play based. Through creative play children develop their imaginations, learn to share and take turns, learn to take responsibility for their actions, and are able to create their own games with their own rules.