Grades
The Waldorf curriculum achieves an integrated balance between the sciences, the humanities, and the arts, as it leads the child through the basic branches of knowledge.
"It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives."
A unique aspect of Waldorf education is that the class teacher stays with the class for multiple years. The teacher sets an example of someone who is always learning. The class teacher is responsible for the main lessons, and through them, introduces the entire panorama of the elementary school curriculum.
The breadth of the Waldorf curriculum is possible only through the main lesson system. The main lesson is a long class period at the beginning of each day focusing on one subject area for three to four weeks at a time. The continuity helps to strengthen the students’ interest. Once their interest and enthusiasm is aroused it becomes easier to treat a subject in greater depth and cover the subject area using all modalities of learning.
During main lesson the students create their own books in which they write and express in pictures the essential content and three-dimensional experience of the subject matter.
Main lesson topics covered in each grade
Great care is taken in laying a thorough foundation for writing, reading, and arithmetic. Letters are learned in the first grade as they originated: first as pictures, then as abstracted signs, then as written symbols. The picture of the Mighty Mountain, as told in a fairy tale, becomes the “M” shape and finally the letter “M.” The first adventures in reading come from what the students have written in their own main lesson books. The numbers and the four basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) are also introduced through imaginative stories.