A day filled with play, song and creative arts.

Each morning, children and parents are welcomed by the teachers in the garden. Free play in the yard is an ‘out breathing’ for the children. They make choices about where and with whom they play. Cedar stumps and wooden boards become houses, trains, boats, and obstacle courses. Other children play chase or rake leaves and make nests in the piles. The sand pile provides many opportunities for construction and investigation. We walk to the park each week where the children love to climb, swing and slide.

 

Story Time

Story time is when the children’s imaginations are nourished by an oral story told by the teacher. The ability to hear language and to create inner pictures is an important foundational literacy skill that is nurtured in the Waldorf Kindergarten. Once the children have heard the story repeated, they experience it as a puppet play or by helping to ‘pretend’ the tale.  The child takes in the story and language deeply.

 

Healthy Snacks

A healthy homemade snack comes next. The table is set, children have and washed their hands in preparation. We sit in our seats, take our neighbours’ hands and sing a song of thanks for our food. “Earth who gave to us this food, sun who made it ripe and good….” Our snacks include delicious and nutritious foods such as, oats with cinnamon, brown basmati rice with tamari sauce, vegetable soup (which the children help to prepare), and homemade bread that the children have kneaded. There is also fruit contributed by parents, to accompany the snack.

 

Creative Play

Once the dishes are cleared from the snack table, the children engage in a period of creative play, a time of ‘out-breathing’. Toys include stumps, boards, wood blocks, baskets with knitted animals, handmade baby dolls, felt puppets, rocks, etc. Wooden play stands can be made into a stage for a puppet show, a ship, or a house corner. A crown turns a child into a king or a queen and a caped child becomes a farmer, shepherd or a knight.  The trampoline, rocker board and wobble board challenge the children’s motor skills

 

Free Time and Artistic Activities

During playtime, daily artistic activities are offered. These include painting, making soup or bread, drawing, a seasonal craft, or beeswax modeling. Structure is brought into the free play time of children likely to move in to grade one the next year through work on small projects that develop coordination and cooperative social skills. Children have made sewing pouches, stilts, crowns, gnome homes and standing puppets.

 

Circle Time for Songs, Games and Stories

After free play, all children and teachers share in class clean up, followed by a circle. Our morning circle, ten minutes at the start of the year expanding to 15-20 minutes by the end, is an ‘in-breathing’ phase, includes songs and verses with both fine and gross motor gestures, nursery rhymes, dances, finger plays and games. Through circle games and songs, puppetry and story telling, the children learn to listen attentively, cultivate a sense of language, and sharpen their memory to strengthen the foundation for academic readiness.

 

“We dance with the flowers, we sing with the sun. The warmth in our hearts, we bring everyone. Goodbye.”          And so the morning has ended.