The Elementary School encompasses Grades 1 through 8. During these fundamental years, the child’s intellectual curiosity is met with an imaginative, artistic, and stimulating curriculum that grows and expands each year as the children develop and mature their thinking capacities.
Our rich curriculum allows students to emerge into the subjects, build strong relationships with their classmates and teachers, and most importantly, connect to themselves and to the world around them. The elementary years at the Rudolf Steiner School are rooted in the ideal to honor and preserve the needs of childhood. Movement, recess, and outdoor play are considered essential elements of the elementary curriculum. In Grades 1 through 8 we have recess in the park, rain or shine.
Each day begins with Main Lesson, a ninety-minute period in which a given academic subject such as math, botany, science, history, or geography is studied over a 3-4 week block period. Through artistic, descriptive, and dramatic presentations the lessons come alive. Each student creates their own hand written and illustrated Main Lesson book. These reflect what they have learned using words, pictures, charts, and diagrams.
After the Main Lesson, students go to Central Park for Morning Recess. This time outdoors gives our students a chance to breathe out from their morning studies, allowing them to return to the remaining lessons energized and refreshed.
Following recess, students return to school for a day filled with a variety of Grade appropriate Special Subject Lessons: World Languages (German and Spanish), Handwork, Singing and Recorder, Painting, Eurythmy, Games, Integrative Sensory Motor Instruction, Physical Education, Woodworking, Instrumental Music, Drawing, and Metalwork.
