École Rudolf Steiner de Montréal

Children's Garden

The Children’s garden covers pre-K and kindergarten (ages 4 and 5). The morning program includes various arts and crafts activities that alternate with periods of free play so that children may develop their tactile, intellectual, creative and coordination skills as well as their social ones.

A time for imitation and play

A visit to the Children’s garden often creates an immediate and intuitive link between the school and the parents. “How I wish I had attended such a school!” The room is warm, colourful, neat and reflective of the beauty and variety that nature offers. It is a place where children can fully feed their imagination while feeling reassured and protected.

Playing is the core of the work accomplished in the Children’s garden. Through their imaginative play children develop creative thinking, the ability to solve problems and social skills.

Simple and natural objects such as pieces of wood, shells, stones, fabrics, and beeswax encourage children to invent their own games and original stories. In a perfect balance between free play and directed activities, the teacher rhythmically (week by week and each day) engages children in bread making, drawing, watercolour painting, sculpting, manual labour and eurhythmics (art movement).

Outings and outdoor games follow the seasons. Each day the children gather in a circle to celebrate, sing and dance the season. The songs and nursery rhymes awaken in them a sense of language and music. Story telling time cultivates the imagination of the children and strengthens their ability to listen and concentrate.

Preparing snacks together and cleaning up the room after each play period encourages cooperation and a sense of responsibilities. Natural tendencies are thus strengthened to prepare for academic learning such as math and reading.

These daily activities, punctuated by the rhythm of seasonal celebrations, develop in children a wealth of basic experiments. Imitating the meaningful gestures of adults help them to develop self-confidence. Everything must be done to enable the child to practice this imitation; hence the emphasis on free play through which children can develop initiative and deeply assimilate sense impressions.

Furthermore, by nurturing the inherent imitative nature of the child, the teacher will lead his/her class into artistic activities that will become endless sources of inspiration for free play.

Imagination

Concerening the imagination, Albert Einstein said, "When I observe myself and observe my thinking pattern, it seems very clear to me that I care much more about my imagination than my ability to think abstractly."

J.C. Pearce, author of The Magical Child further adds that imagination and fantasy are fundamental for the development of the child. In this book he tells the story of a child bombarded with scientific information from a very young age. At five, he could express himself in an amazing way. By seven he had a breakdown. J.C. Pearce’s remedy: "Saturate him with the surreal and unlikely, read him fairy tales and fantasy stories.” Within a few months of this regimen, the child was able to recover both health and “joie de vivre.”

In our children’s garden, there are few objects and lots of imagination. Everything is simple, diverse, and nothing is ever completed. Children play with shells, stones, wool, and pieces of wood. Through these objects that get transformed to suit their imagination, they fully develop their power to transform simple things into real-world objects, reflecting the world they live in.