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The Class One Child
 The seventh year sees the commencement of ‘formal’ schooling in the Steiner Waldorf method. During the first seven years, the young child learns to be at home in the physical body, developing an orientation in space and acquiring the initial, fundamental developmental capacities of uprightness, speech and thought. The content of the child’s whole environment is the learning context; the child ‘imitates’ the people and the agencies that are in his/her environment. This imitating gesture serves to imprint on the child’s will the content and the quality of what is learnt. In the Kindergarten, experiential learning, discovery through creative play and intensive social interaction with peers and teacher constitute the main educational themes. Awareness of the complexities of the mother tongue and number is acquired through informal play and social interaction. This is not taught didactically.
Around the seventh year the child completes the process of forming the second dentition sufficiently for forces that have been concentrated on growth and physical upbuilding to become active in developing the facility for independent, representational, pictorial thinking. ‘Formal’ methods of teaching - in literacy, numeracy and other disciplines - are introduced.  The child is still in a mood of dreamy wholeness, more able to bring broad awareness than focused concentration to learning settings. Much learning is continued through activity and imitation through which the child receives an image, internalises it, recalls it, generalises it into a concept which can be applied e.g. the letter ‘R’ or times ‘x’. What was experienced practically, though not conceptually, in the pre-school years is raised to a feeling relationship through mental picturing. The child’s holistic experience of the world is nourished by archetypal pictures such as those reflected in fairy tales and well though out nature stories.
In this year the children make the important transition from the Kindergarten to school where they begin formal learning. The children are led by their teacher to a first experience of the forms, sounds and sequencing of letters and number symbols by using pictures, rhymes and stories. |
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- Form Drawing
- Introduction to Letters
- Introduction to Numbers
- Traditional Folk and Fairy Tales - Writing
- Introduction to the 4 Processes - Maths
- Autumn Tales - HSIE, Science, English
- Introduction to Lower Case Letters - English
- Four Processes - Maths
- Spring Stories - HSIE, Science, English
- Word Families - English
- Numeration (cardinals, ordinals, odds & evens) - Maths
- Play - Creative Arts, English
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