Pre-Kindergarten girl with teacher soft toys

Early Childhood Philosophy

“Play is the gateway to metaphor, to scientific insight and to invention. Choose a school that will encourage children to open this gate before expecting them to perform advanced mental operations.” Jane Healy, Ph.D. Your Child’s Growing Mind

 

The years before children reach age seven are an important time for development and for laying the crucial foundation for future academic learning. For children ages three-and-a-half to seven, City of Lake Waldorf Schools Early Childhood programs offer a warm, nurturing environment for this phase of imitation and discovery. Our scheduling options for youngest children allow for an easier transition from home life to school.

Creative free play, both indoors and outdoors, is a cornerstone of learning. Play is the direct line of ascent to adult imagination, creativity, and problem solving. The whole basis for creative thinking and imagination evolves from free-form child’s play.

But that is not all. In order to grow into their bodies, children must be left free to move. Running, skipping, jumping rope and balancing allow children to develop the physical coordination and control needed to perform the more complicated and sophisticated movements involved in reading and writing. Modeling with beeswax, coloring, painting and handwork all help children develop fine motor skills. Current brain research has proven that these kinds of early movement are crucial to later brain function in the adult.

Circle and story time provide the more structured parts of the day. Poems, songs, nature stories, classical folk literature, and recitation give children the opportunity to develop rich vocabulary and practice phonics, the foundations for reading. Listening skills and memory are developed, as well as the ability to focus and to bring about attention. Now the children can begin to form inner pictures of the spoken word, the basis for comprehension and making meaning out of the world. After practicing comprehension out of oral story, children become ready to make meaning out of symbolic, written language.

Detailed information on the morning schedule is included on the Pre-K/Kindergarten page.