“The program focuses on the overall well-being of the child while encouraging free exploration and an imaginative mind...”

— YUAN FANG, PARENT

Our Early Childhood program is designed to nurture the body, mind, and soul of the young child. Children enter the world with a natural sense of wonder, adventure, and desire for harmony. Our faculty honors these innate qualities by providing an environment that fosters warmth, clarity, rhythm, and joy.

Waldorf Early Childhood classes allow children to learn through experience: to understand nourishment by rolling dough, develop fine motor skills by molding beeswax, observe lifecycles by planting seeds and bulbs, and appreciate nature by playing outdoors in all seasons, through sunshine, rain, sleet, or snow. The foundations of language are brought through nursery rhymes and storytelling, and the concepts of math are encountered through rhythmic games and the science of baking.

Each day includes a long period of active play, communal clean-up, crafts activities using natural materials, rest, and rituals surrounding mealtimes. Culturally diverse stories or puppet shows weave through the week, and celebrations ranging from birthdays to global holidays bring an air of excitement and worldliness to the classroom. In the nursery and kindergartens, teachers work to carefully draw out the emerging capacities of each child in order to ready them for grade school.

ADMISSIONS GUIDE
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NURSERY

Our warm and creative environment nurtures each child in their first phase of school life.

Children are given the confidence, independence, and security to smoothly transition from home to the larger social world around them with the support of their experienced teachers. A typical day includes play, circle activities, storytelling, puppet shows, and practicing everyday skills such as helping to prepare snack. Children experience joyful movement and play in Central Park daily.

Full-day program includes hot lunch and afternoon nap.

KINDERGARTEN

Our Mixed-Age Kindergarten Program is carefully designed to encourage a healthy rhythm of active and quieter pursuits.

Our teachers cultivate the children’s imagination, sense of wonder, and ability for sustained attention. A typical morning includes free play, cleanup, greeting and circle, artistic activity such as bread baking or watercolor painting, storytelling, rest, and snack preparation.

Daily outdoor activities in Central Park provide ample opportunity for joy and movement, and bring balance to the day and strength to the child.

Full-day program includes hot lunch, rest, and additional time for outdoor play.

FOREST KINDERGARTEN

Our NEW Forest Kindergarten Program is carefully designed to spend most time outdoors, to benefit from the therapeutic advantages of experiential, and nature-based education.

Nurturing a connection to the Natural World is found to be critical to children’s well-being, healthy development and academic achievement. Spending many hours outdoors playing, gaining a sense of balance and moving in the world, gives the child a healthy preparation for the next stage in their life.

We combine our outdoors’ rhythm with daily indoor activities.

Full-day program includes hot lunch, rest, and additional time for play and craft activities. 

Rudolf Steiner School offers a human-centered education. Our Waldorf curriculum reflects the developmental stages of childhood and serves the capacities and talents of each growing child. The school gives special emphasis to sensory experience and physical movement, to an alliance between artistic and intellectual activity, and to the ethical dimension of every subject. Our graduates are inventive thinkers and resilient idealists who cultivate an appreciative regard for a world that they seek to improve.

Half-Day Program:

Mon-Fri, 8:10/8:30am-12pm

Full-Day Program:

Mon-Fri, 8:10/8:30am-3pm

This program provides care for nursery and kindergarten students after school in the Nursery classroom. The afternoon includes preparing and sharing a simple snack, play and story time, and occasional walks to the park. The program meets Monday through Friday from 3:00 – 5:30 PM, except for half days, school holidays, and unplanned school closings (e.g., snow days).

MORE INFO
In our Nursery and Kindergarten programs, children are free to be children, and are given the gift of time for exploration through play. They partake in, and initiate, activities that awaken their imagination and develop fine and gross motor skills, which will later grow into emotional and academic capacities.
Our Nursery and Kindergarten students develop a deep love for, and understanding of, nature from an early age as students explore Central Park in free play and guided activities, rain or shine. Children become acquainted with and aware of their environment as well as their relation to it in an experiential manner. They discover the world around them through their physical senses and through their innate sense of wonder. Rich sensory experiences help to develop capacities for scientific observation and thinking. Exposure to and direct experience of the natural world gently nurture and preserve the child’s inborn reverence for life in all forms.
The Forest Kindergarten is a special opportunity for children to spend an extensive period of time outdoors, in all seasons, moving their bodies, developing their senses, delighting in nature, and building resilience. Spending long periods of time in nature is a rare opportunity in New York City, but with Central Park right across the street we are able to offer the benefits of outdoor immersion while enjoying warm meals and a cozy midday rest indoors.

Nurturing a connection to the Natural World is found to be critical to children’s well-being, healthy development and academic achievement. In the Forest Kindergarten we focus on allowing the child to be fully in their body during the years when it matters the most. A child who has spent many hours outdoors playing, gaining a sense of balance and how they move in the world, learning where their body ends and the world begins, and feeling the vivaciousness of living at one with Mother Earth is a child who is healthy and well-prepared for the next stage in their life.

INQUIRY
Circle time, eurythmy, and traditional circle games offer daily opportunities for moving with a group, and collectively entering into how gnomes walk, or bears trundle, or birds fly.
In the early childhood years, practical arts are embedded in the daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms of the year. The experience of the whole process, rather than the finished product, is the reason thatpractical arts are incorporated into the day. Fingerknitting, sewing, embroidering, wet-felting, and wood working permit the child to explore a variety of materials (eg. wool, yarn, fabric, wood, water). The children also learn to use tools.
Waldorf Education supports social and emotional development. Children cultivate strong and positive relationships at an early age. Ample time for free and self-directed play promotes problem solving, speech development, active social interactions, and emotional well-being.
Rudolf Steiner School offers families recommended guidelines for student interaction with technology and media based on current research in child development. A screen-free childhood from birth to approximately seven years old is strongly encouraged. We recognize the essential developmental need for rich sensory experience, motor skill development, and imaginative play, all of which are impeded by exposure to digital media.
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The heart of the Waldorf philosophy is the belief that education is an artistic process. Whether the subject is arithmetic or history or physics, the presentation must live – it must speak to the child’s experience. To educate the whole child, the heart and will must be engaged, as well as the mind.

EARLY LITERACY & NUMERACY
Songs and nursery rhymes cultivate intimacy with language and the world of words. Listening to stories, watching marionette shows, and participating in dramatic play strengthen the power of memory and imagination.
Counting games and rhythmic activities build a foundation for arithmetic and number skills. Painting and crafts help the children develop small motor skills, coordination, and the ability to concentrate. Vigorous play develops their large motor skills.
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OUR TEACHERS

Our experienced and nurturing early childhood faculty will support your children every step of the way.

MEET OUR FACULTY

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Visit our application page to start the process.

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Rudolf Steiner School follows the Waldorf model of education. Our Nursery and Kindergarten programs meet every child at their stage of development.