Our Transitional-Kindergarten (T-K) is for children who are 5 years old or turning 5 by 10/31.

In addition to being a part of the daily and weekly rhythm of the whole Folk School, TK/K children are with our Kindergarten teacher 5 days a week for social, emotional and academic learning.  Outside of TK/K time, they are with older children for outside play, activities, snack, and lunch.

Our sensory rich environment is carefully crafted to facilitate imaginative play, story time, artistic activities, tactile exploration, and outdoor experiential learning.  Warmth and wonder are created using natural materials such as wool, silk, wood, stones and shells and open ended toys help to further fuel the children’s imagination and open their minds to infinite possibilities.

Every aspect of our TK/K curriculum is created to inspire imagination, fuel creativity, encourage freedom of thought and expression and promote creative problem solving.  It is our goal that in this nurturing and creative atmosphere our TK/K children will gain the confidence and discipline, as well as practical, artistic and social skills necessary for success in the challenging academic world of school that lies ahead.

TK/K Daily Rhythm

There is a comforting rhythm and flow to the day that is based on the natural rhythms of the children and not on a series of activities dictated by a strict schedule...​
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A day in TK/K may include bread baking, chopping vegetables for stone soup, drawing, collaborating with friends, painting, sewing, project time, building, reading books in our cozy corner, helping friends build a fort, feeding and grooming the farm animals, singing, exploring the creek, filling bird feeders, role playing, song and movement games, stories and puppet plays and so much more.

Predictable rhythms of the day, week and year provide security and confidence and establish a sense of time, sequence and predictability that are deeply nurturing to the children.

Free Play develops the child’s imagination and creativity, this forms the foundation for reading comprehension and learning abstract concepts.  Through play children engage in compromises and negotiations, “trying on” different roles that help teach flexibility, adaptability and creativity.  The amount and richness of children’s play has been directly linked to future executive functioning and the ability to self-regulate, which is absolutely essential to future success in life.

Exploration and Project Based Learning allow the children to follow their emergent interests and to create projects and art work based on their explorations.

Tidy-Up and setting up for snack engage the child’s brain in pre-mathematical concepts such as ordering, sorting and one-to-one correspondence.

Practical Activities such as sewing, knitting, gardening, other hand crafts, and feeding and caring for the animals are artfully modeled by the teachers with intention and joy, this fosters collaboration, empathy and mindfulness. In baking math skills are learned as we measure, use fractions (diving the apple into 8 pieces etc.) and count.

Circle Time with rhythmic movement and song helps build coordination, body awareness, and develops gross and fine motor skills.  Singing and reciting increases vocabulary, language development, lengthens attention span, and develops memory.

Story Time artfully created stories told from the heart and presented visually through handmade table puppets, develop listening comprehension, imagination and strengthens the capacity for memory and empathy.

Social and Emotional Development is embodied through creative play and collaborative projects. Empathy, social inclusion, sharing and kindness are modeled and practiced in all that we do.

Like other Waldorf-inspired schools....
...we encourage the love of language through story-telling, puppet shows, songs, and verses.  Hearing and speaking are an essential part of literacy development in the early years.  We focus on the rhythm and the sounds of the spoken sentences and words.  The children recite verses and retell stories and act them out.  They bring the stories to life through crafts and pictures.  Pictures become words, and the children begin to copy and write.  Written words are further broken down into letters and phonological sounds in first grade using fairy tales.  Thus the letters and their sounds become part of the story and are illustrated in a creative, connective, pictorial way. The letters are experienced and searched out in nature and through movement and various tactile tools and reinforced in more stories, movement and art.  The children learn to read what they have written, creating their own stories to share with the world. It is an emotional and creative approach of teaching the whole child; head, hands and heart that is embodied in the Waldorf method.
 

Math is something to be experienced, not worksheets to be completed.  The children dive into the quality of numbers through stories, art and life, once again using the whole child approach.  Gnomes and squirrels help us to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.  We build towers with groups of blocks and sing skip-counting songs while jumping rope in preparation to memorizing multiplication tables. Movement with numbers is very important. We count stitches and rows while knitting (a great precursor to coding!) 

The importance of age appropriate learning is emphasised and the child's academic capacities are strengthened by educating the whole child with activities and lessons that inspire the head, heart and hands.