Parents and teachers often ask “is this Waldorf?” This question always catches me by surprise and makes me wonder. Studying Waldorf early childhood reveals countless materials and activities that can all seem essential. These possibilities are certainly exciting, but they are also daunting. Although Waldorf early childhood pedagogy offers substantial freedom, there are essential principles that inform our work and can help you answer the question for yourself.
It seems that most people who come to Waldorf education are attracted to its beauty. The ethereal fairy dolls made of wool roving, the natural materials, and the whimsical décor imbue classrooms with a feeling of security, love, and wellness. These feelings, of course, are essential in Waldorf education, but teachers and parents can create an environment that has all the essentials of Waldorf early childhood without a prescribed set of toys, silks, and watercolor paints.
Susan Howard’s article Essentials of Waldorf Early Childhood Education presents suggestions that can help us answer the question “is this Waldorf?” She outlines nine essential principles of Waldorf early childhood:
- Love and warmth
- Care for the environment and nourishment for the senses
- Creative, artistic experience
- Meaningful adult activity as an example for the child’s imitation
- Free, imaginative play
- Protection for the forces of childhood
- Gratitude, reverence, and wonder
- Joy, humor, and happiness
- Adult caregivers on a path of inner development
Love and Warmth
Love and warmth emerges from strong relationships. Howard asks us as care-giving adults to build relationships with children, parents, and members of our community. Relationships help to build trust, security, and confidence. Of course, we all know that love, warmth, trust, security and confidence are essential for a healthy life.
Love and warmth lives in happy moments, but it must live in challenging moments, too. It is important to offer warmth and love even in moments of struggle, inappropriate behavior, and frustration. Children, observing this response to stress in their teachers, parents, and other caregivers, are more likely to repeat these more positive behaviors when challenging emotional situations arise in their own lives.
Care for the Environment
Creating a loving environment and offering nourishment for the senses allows children to feel confident and proud of their places. It is important to keep things simple and beautiful. Elements of nature and open-ended play things or items created by the children themselves give a steady and personalized feeling. In this realm, what is most important is the intention behind the materials and the environment. What is the use/purpose of this toy in the child’s environment? What experience can it offer them?
An orderly, dependable space creates the opportunity for children to be confident. When a child knows where things are, what is expected of them, and how to care for the things in their environment, a deep feeling of belonging blossoms. From this belonging, a sense of responsibility is born. Washing the dishes, drying the dishes, placing them back in the cupboard, and taking them out again creates a feeling of cohesion which builds confidence. When the child feels connected to the space, they are more likely to care for it and maintain it. This is especially enhanced when the adult’s inner attitude is the same.
A Waldorf environment also provides meaningful and real sensory experiences. Sensory materials can range anywhere from silks to soft materials to herbs from the garden. Children take in the world through their senses and are affected so strongly by all that they experience that way. They learn about the world largely through its smells, sounds, and tastes. Intentional sensory opportunities within a carefully planned and maintained environment provide the child with a healthy environment to learn and grow.
Creative, Artistic Expression
Another essential element of Waldorf early Childhood is the opportunity for creative, artistic expression. These are the beautiful aesthetics of Waldorf early childhood that draw so many in. The literal artistic opportunities including modeling, watercolor painting, drawing, poetry, and music. Yet Howard reminds us that an artistic posture should inform all activities in the classroom from play interactions to work activities like folding laundry. I like to use the image of putting the “horses” in the barn when telling a child to put away their boots. Adopting an artistic approach to even mundane tasks, no matter the caregiver's artistic skill, deepens the opportunities for children to learn.
Adult Activity Worthy of Imitation
The founder of Waldorf education, Rudolf Steiner, speaks of the importance of imitation in a child’s early life. Children learn through imitating what the adults in their environment do and say. This does not always manifest itself as a direct mirroring but more of a slow digestion over time. It is not only the outer actions of the adult that the child imitates but also the inner attitude. Adults must therefore model activities and behaviors that they want the children to adopt over time.
Using the children’s instinct for imitation allows us as adults to affect children on a deeper level than simply explaining how to do something. Putting devotion, care, and focus into everyday activities like baking, cooking, cleaning, and gardening gives the child something real and beneficial to imitate. Children are naturally drawn to this work and incorporate “baking” or “sweeping” into their play. By practicing adult work in their self-directed play, children prepare themselves for the real tasks of life. Explicit explanation is therefore not always necessary since children will naturally imitate complex activities with a fair amount of accuracy.
Free, Imaginative Play
The next essential that Howard discusses is free, imaginative play—the primary work of childhood. Through imaginative play, children process and understand what it is to be alive. The play must be diverse and plentiful, both indoors and outdoors. The adults can create a space that offers freedom surrounded by form and boundaries by carefully selecting materials and holding clear expectations for behavior.
Children process information through self-directed play, which can only flourish in a safe, steady, and predictable environment that offers opportunities to create and explore with open ended materials. It is one thing to offer a child a firetruck. They will then play “firetruck” or maybe “town”, but the possibilities are finite. If you offer that same child a set of blocks, they can create anything, from a cell phone to a lollipop. For children, play is serious.
The Protection of Childhood Forces
Next on Howard’s list is the protection of childhood forces. This is an element that can be tricky to understand at first. It is becoming common in our culture to constantly ask children questions and offer them direct instruction about everything. Of course, verbal instruction is important to teaching children, especially in the case of safety, but an overemphasis on questioning and answering can create excessive stress for the young child.
Yet if we create an environment around the children with clear expectations, procedures, rhythms, and a slow pace, they can thrive without constant reminders about the rules. This consistency allows the children to stay in their dreamy consciousness. If they aren’t worried about what will happen next, the children can float from one activity to the next and enjoy all the joys it brings.
Howard also reminds us that we can protect children from worrying about the bigger issues that they will reckon with when they become adults. In Kindergarten and before the age of 7, the world should be presented as wholly good. We make this true through the way we treat others, the way we answer questions, and the way we create an atmosphere that is consistent and trustworthy. There will be plenty of time for them to learn about the realities of the world and face its trials. Early childhood is a time for wonder, and the children’s natural forces thrive when allowed to wonder and imagine.
Gratitude, Reverence, and Wonder
Gratitude and reverence, in addition to wonder, are essential to child development and Waldorf education. Simple activities created by the adult, like saying a verse before eating snack, lighting a candle from Father Sun’s light, thanking the plants for our food, watching in awe as seeds begin to sprout, model reverence, gratitude, and wonder. When we as the caregivers feel truly grateful, a seed is planted in the child. This seed will sprout and grow as they age and have experiences in life that bring forth the fruits of this cultivation. This is how gratitude grows. We help to foster the feeling of appreciation, reverence, and awe in the children by feeling it ourselves.
Joy, Humor, and Happiness
Gratitude, reverence, and wonder are quiet feelings, balanced by outward expressions of joy, humor, and happiness. Young children are full of such delight and joy in their everyday experiences that caregivers should sometimes follow their lead. When we remember the pure joy of discovery, we offer the children chances to feel a nice expansion and loosening in their environment. All the other essentials were the main ingredients of the recipe: the carrots, and onions, and celery, and broth. I find humor, joy, and happiness to be the delightful seasoning that makes a meal satisfying and leaves us wanting more.Caregivers on a Path of Personal Development
The final essential on the list is woven through all the others. We as the adults in the lives of children have an important responsibility. We must always strive to be the best versions of ourselves. If we model this earnest striving, they too will strive. Bettering ourselves involves getting to know our own sympathies, antipathies, and tendencies and working with them to improve the lives of others.
Is It Waldorf?
So, when we ask the question “is this Waldorf?” when considering the care of the young child, we might rather consider asking “is this the best example of being human that I can offer for the child to imitate?" and "will this enable the child to grow to be the best version of themselves in their physical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives?" If the answer is “yes” then you might be able to consider it “Waldorf.”
