Educating children in Grades 1-8: awakening through imagination and feeling.
As children reach school age, they are developmentally ready for real instruction. Waldorf schools recognize that imagination, the feeling-filled vehicle by which school-age children learn most effectively, is also a path of cognition which gives birth to both critical and creative thinking over time. Teachers revered as loving authorities by the children present a vigorous academic program as an exciting and fulfilling adventure of story, picture, and verbal image from which the concepts of knowledge are distilled. Students create their own books in which they record what they have learned in the two-hour daily main lesson, a concentrated period of study on a particular subject for several weeks running.
As the students mature, so too do the lessons, becoming more challenging and complex in both content and presentation. Two foreign languages, arts, choral and instrumental music, speech and recitation, physical activity, outdoor activities, practical activities, and excursions form the natural companions to, and logical extension of, the lesson content, while the seasonal rhythms of festivals and celebrations frame, in reverence and joy, the progression of the school year’s lessons and events.
The result: well-grounded, culturally literate, competent, creative students who are curious about their world and eager to explore its wonders.
"Although it is highly necessary, in view of the nature of our modern civilization, that a man should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this way, he will in later life develop the intellectuality needed in the world today."
Rudolf Steiner
