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Curriculum for 3 - 5 year olds


As we design the environment and curriculum for young children, one of our primary intents is to retrieve the lost treasures of village life. At the same time, we offer the best learning materials conceived by the hearts and minds of child development pioneers.

Rudolf Steiner's assertion rings true. He says that out of gratitude grows love, and from love, responsibility. We keep this emphasis in mind as we plan our stories, finger plays, songs, movement activities, and other extensions of our learning units. As we design our environment, we ground our plans in the four tetrahedrons of the World Core Curriculum.

There is much to consider. We want to insure that we nurture the sense of fantasy that is the basis for creativity and innovation. We do this primarily through stories and the pretend center.

At the daily circle, the teacher becomes a storyteller focusing on one of the Four Harmonies. To evoke a responsive chord from the child, these story lessons correlate with the seasons that he experiences first hand. The tales that support the unit are designed to open heart-to-heart communication between the children, the earth, and everything that clings to, moves, walks, or swims in her bosom. The stories take the children on their first journeys into the Cosmos or bring cultures on the other side of the world into the classroom.

Every year the little ones join the whole school in focusing on a particular culture. They experience the foods, arts, handicrafts, music, traditional costumes, housing, and folklore of the focus country. We explain that although few people around the world dress in native costumes now, their grandparents wore these beautiful clothes. The stories' worthiness rests on their ability to stimulate the imagination, trigger gratitude for the wonders of nature, and evoke appreciation of the variety of cultures on Earth.

We wish artistic sensitivities to keep pace with imagination stimulation and knowledge growth. Therefore, the teachers practice to become adept at producing simple crayon drawings as they tell the unit stories. The children watch with fascination, offer suggestions, and begin to grasp artistic techniques as they listen to the story.

In the pretend centers, we draw on the wisdom of Rudolf Steiner as we create appropriate wombs for the young life. We include simple designs and natural materials that leave much to the child's imagination. As we scan for dolls and stuffed animals for the children to tenderly care for, we seek dolls with few features and those representative of different races. We include finely detailed animals-stuffed and plastic. We also provide tufts of cotton or fleece that can become any animal the child can imagine. Construction materials for buildings, roads, and enclosures include manmade prisms and cylinders along with sanded pieces of tree limbs of irregular shapes. There are wooden chairs that can be overturned to form compartments of trains, cars, and boats. We observe the relish with which a child will fill in the particulars of his constructions via his imagination.

Also in the pretend center are articles that are only suggestions of costumes. Beautiful silk scarves, large felt rectangles, and large t-shirts allow the child's imagination to fill in the details. Silk scarves become beautiful dresses, T-shirts become animal bodies, and felt rectangles transform into coats or capes. With scrupulous attention to aesthetics, the materials are arranged neatly and attractively in various shapes and sizes of baskets. On the shelves, the scarves, felt rectangles, and T-shirts are folded in stacks of harmonious and compelling colors.

Appreciating the fundamental need of music, chants, and movement for the young child's development, the experienced teacher continually adds to her repertoire to enhance beloved stories. The teacher sings to and with the children to awaken their consciousness to the beauty of our world and to help them transition from one activity to the next. Young children love imitating the movements of animals and cooperating as a group to follow the motions of a story chant. These are meant to be fun, but are also to awaken love for earth's creatures. Involving the whole body is a pleasurable way for the young child to imprint the virtues that sustain humankind.

Neatly arranged on the shelves around the room are beautiful wooden learning materials. The lovely sensorial materials designed by Montessori and others attract the children to manipulate and sensorially experience the laws of physics and mathematical relationships. These should be kept in good repair with the paint touched up and missing pieces replaced. The child's respect for his environment begins with the careful handling of the cubes, rectangular prisms, triangular prisms, and cylinders he uses for building. The teachers exemplify reverent care of the materials with demonstrations that model how to carry them, build with them in specified areas, handle them without banging or chipping, and put them neatly away.

Because of the great variety of possibilities for construction that they offer, we also include the best plastic materials. However, we realize that a classroom of just plastic lacks the soul, beauty, and warmth of environments that include mostly natural materials.

The children love the work of grown-ups, so we include what Montessori called "the practical life exercises" for activities like pouring, sorting, washing, cutting, peeling, spooning, and sweeping. The exercises are arranged on trays or special tables in attractive orderly ensembles. The little ones love tools such as hammers, screwdrivers and pliers. A tree stump outside is perfect for hammering nails. Inside, a board with holes drilled in it, screws and screwdrivers handy, invite challenging work. Tongs, eyedroppers, ear syringes, basters, funnels, and cream pitchers set up on trays with colored water beckon the children to squeeze and pour.

The teacher alternately arranges a sifter with cornmeal, an eggbeater with soapy water, or a tub with beans, cups, and measuring spoons. A large seashell with soap, scrub brush and towels attractively arranged on a table invites the little ones to clean and scrub the shell to their hearts' content. Availability of the materials and seeing their use precisely modeled by adults is an irresistible magnet to children who want to develop precision and powers of concentration through work. They even gladly sweep up spills when a child-sized mop, broom, and dustpan are available.

Phonics games with tiny objects, whole-language lessons with rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and alliterations work together to create child-friendly games and exercises that prepare the child to read. In the first auditory lessons, the teachers use a small bowl or a box of tiny objects that start with a particular sound. For instance, the "b" drawer would include diminutive objects that attract young children like a bear, a bell, a baby, a bottle, a bat, and a basket. The whole language lessons stimulate the imagination with stories that have large print, picture clues, rhyme, rhythm, and repetition. The children become familiar with the large print in the same natural way that they first learned the spoken language. A further enhancement of the curriculum is to use alliterations, in which the shape of the letter lends itself to a shape or personality. For instance the letter "f" can be a fish or Fins the Fish. For the little ones, the second is better because of the opportunity to have the fish come to life as a personality.

Plentiful play in the bosom of the earth surrounded by native plants, gardens, insects, birds, and bird song supports reverence for nature as it develops the powers of concentration, the hallmark of intelligence. The first experiences for the mathematical mind come from counting natural objects such as stones, sticks, and shells. Experience with the regular and irregular shapes found in nature from spheroids, to the Fibonacci sequence in branches, to the spiral formation of snail shells roughs in familiarity with geometric shapes. The experience with throwing, dropping, pouring, swinging, and pushing, pulling, and climbing encode an unconscious familiarity with the laws of physics.

The little ones love to participate in planting flowers and seeds in the gardens. The children also need daily opportunities to play in dirt, sand, water, and mud with rocks and small sticks available. These natural elements afford them endless hours of absorbed play, and become temporary homes, corrals, and passageways for available bugs. Examples of their elders' tender consideration of the insects becomes equally of concern to the children. They will loudly protest any careless mishandling of the tiny creatures.