Grades 1-3
Children master the fundamental skills for learning in the early years. In first through third grade, they develop the foundations for work and social interaction through an artistic approach to all subjects that engages the child’s feelings and imagination.
Age Requirement:
Grade 1 age requirements: 6 yrs by Aug 31st
First Grade! Parents and children alike experience that an important threshold has been crossed when a child makes the giant step from the kindergarten into “the grades”. The importance and immensity of this transition are real. The child is leaving the cradle of the home and the kindergarten to explore the inner worlds of memory and imagination and the outer worlds of new friendships and relationships with class and subject teachers.
The first grade child has powerful new capacities of intellect available as a result of successfully growing into his physical body and senses during the first seven years of life. To begin with, the child’s memory is no longer dependent upon sight or a sound for recall. As a result, it now becomes free to serve the learning process. The entire first grade curriculum is presented in a way that will appeal to the child’s sense of wonder and developing capacity of inner imaginations.
The child is cultivating a special inner vision that allows him to reach beyond the given and create something uniquely his own. For example, in Language Arts, first graders are introduced to each letter of the alphabet through the rich language of fairy tales and stories in a concrete yet creative way. Letters become more than abstract symbols: they embody rich sounds and vivid pictures. Words and word families are then built from the letters so that soon the children are writing, and then reading, vocabulary far beyond what is printed in the usual children’s readers.
Similarly, the first grader will explore the qualities of numbers in mathematics, as well as all four processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. What does “one-ness” feel like and where is “one-ness” in the world? How is “two-ness” different? Through this approach the children develop a mathematical sense that lives and matures throughout elementary school.
In a similar fashion, science is approached through nature stories and observations, gardening and cooking.
The children begin their study of French through songs, poems, play acting and games so that they may live into the mood and gesture of each particular language.
Handwork is an indispensable part of the curriculum in first grade because of the relationship between finger movement, speech and thinking, as supported by modern brain research. Knitting helps to support the reading process as well because of the functional eye-hand coordination which is practiced by the students. Painting is a well-loved part of the day, as children explore the nature of color, and then the creation of form in beeswax modeling and crayon drawing.
Form drawing is practiced from the very first day of first grade as a means to help the children orient to reading and writing in the two dimensional world of the page.
A musical time reigns throughout first grade. The children sing during many subjects and they begin recorder playing in daily main lesson activities. The pentatonic scale of five notes is used because the notes can be played harmoniously in any order.
Movement through games, calisthenics and eurythmy help bring warmth, order and sequence to the limbs.
Reprinted with permission from the Detroit Waldorf School.
The second grade child is poised between the innocent, imaginative consciousness of early childhood and the more worldly consciousness of middle childhood. Wondering anew at the kindness, then cruelty of his friends, and at the honesty, then deceitfulness of his own nature, the eight year old child becomes aware of the greatness and the shortcomings of human beings.
What better time of life to introduce fables and, as a balance, the lives of saints and holy persons? In their language arts and history studies, the second graders will explore the landscape of their own and their friends’ personality traits: the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Traditional fables hold a rich source of wisdom about human nature and the world. There, human traits are exaggerated in the brave lion, the timorous mouse, the pokey turtle, the clever fox and so on. The children can see themselves and their classmates through the antics of the animal kingdom and learn valuable lessons about life. Then, through the lives of saints and holy people of many cultures, the children see how the human spirit can aspire to the loftiest deeds.
All basic academic skills continue to develop at a rapid pace. Writing and reading skills become more independent, and the children are excited at their ability to enter entire imaginative worlds of their own choosing. Students are at home in the world of numbers. Mathematics lessons include the sequence and patterns in numbers, continued work with the processes and the introduction of place value as an antecedent to carrying and borrowing. Laying the ground for future science blocks, the students will continue their experiential exploration of the world of nature through observation, and stories.
As with the first grade, the entire curriculum is integrated to present the world as a whole, not as disjointed and disconnected pieces. The students will continue to study French through learning poems, stories and acting out short dramas and Mandarin/Asian Studies is introduced. Likewise, all students will continue water color painting and their exploration of the moods of the colors; beeswax modeling and crayon drawing, as well as form drawing, for the element of form; and crocheting, as well as knitting, in practical arts.
Musical instruction continues as in first grade and includes singing as well as pentatonic recorder.
Physical education provides ample time and opportunity for the students to move their limbs in games, calisthenics and eurythmy. Reprinted with permission from the Detroit Waldorf School.
In Grade 3, through the themes of creation stories, house building and farming, the children are brought literally down to the earth in their education. The students themselves bring a special blend of capability and innocence, plus a powerful energy for work. Enthusiasm, from the Greek word meaning “infused with divine spirit”, is the quintessential third grade characteristic. The students are connected to all that surrounds them in the world, yet they will experience a profound change in their inner lives during “the nine year change”. The pre-eminent mode of learning up until this age is imitation, where the child primarily replicates what teachers do and say.
The child begins to experience a new emergence of self wherein he becomes more separate and distinct, more an individual. With this change, the child can be more objective and critical, but also experiences a period of separation and loneliness. The curriculum for the third grade is crafted to help the child stand as an individual on the earth, confident of his ability to become a valued member of the human community.
The stories of the Old Testament provide a metaphoric picture for the child of the separation from the parental home (Garden of Eden) and of the ability to make one’s way in the world through individual good deeds and the laws of the community (Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil). During these language arts blocks, students will be introduced to the parts of speech in grammar, spelling and cursive writing to facilitate their own independent writing skills.
On the practical side, the theme of house building and farming show the child how basic human needs are met on this earth through their social studies curriculum. The solidity of the foundation of a house, the firmness of the floor joints and the uprightness of the stud walls give the child a picture for his own development.
Likewise, the farming block creates a picture of the bounty of the earth and of the human responsibility to care for our collective home. Children will study how human shelters have been made by many cultures, and the Native American way of life is especially interesting for students at this age.
In the winter the children will build a model of a shelter. In the spring the children build a shelter on the school grounds. Spring is also the time that they start to prepare the earth for the garden they will be planting and tending over the summer and into the fall for harvest.
The study of measurement in the mathematics and science curriculum allows the children to discover how human beings orient themselves on the earth. The children will learn about the earliest attempts to mark the passage of time by watching the cycles of nature to the later inventions of the water clock and sundial, which they may construct as a class. How distance is related to the measurements in the human body ( e.g., the king’s foot being “a foot”) is a fascinating discovery for how the human being is truly the “measure for all things”.
Further topics in mathematics include carrying and borrowing, number patterns and word problems. Students will continue with French and German. They begin to learn to count as well as name the animals, the members of their family, the parts of their body, foods, colors, and many more things.
In music, the children will begin singing rounds and continue with the recorder. In fine and practical arts, the children will continue painting, crayon drawing, modeling with clay; knitting and crocheting. The final knitting project is a hat. Games and eurythmy are further explored in the physical education curriculum.
At the end of the year each child and their parent enters the shelter they built with their teacher to partake in a Native American ceremony that celebrates their ability to communicate-cursive writing, to feed themselves- farming and gardening, to provide themselves with a home- they build a shelter, and to provide clothing- they knit a hat. Reprinted with permission from the Detroit Waldorf School.
