Hummingbird
Nursery School
Our philosophy:
We believe that in the nursery school years, children learn primarily through play, free movement and their innate ability to imitate all that surrounds them. The teacher strives to offer an environment that allows the child to unfold his or her potential in a healthy and unhurried manner. This allows the child to learn and become truly social through empathetic guidance and supportive rhythms.
Classes are facilitated by an experienced Waldorf teacher held in a home away from home environment, filled with beauty and warmth. Hand-made toys and natural play materials are used as they nourish the young child's developing senses and provide stimulus for creative play.
Our Hummingbird Nursery School Values:
- Loving interest in and acceptance of each child.
- Creating opportunities for self-initiated play with simple play materials as the essential activity for young children.
- This is the young child’s work and makes it possible for them to digest and understand their experiences.
- Awareness that young children learn through imitation, through the experience of diverse sensory impressions, and through movement. Their natural inclination is to actively explore their physical and social environment. The surroundings offer limits, structure and protection, as well as the possibility to take risks and meet challenges.
- A focus on real rather than virtual experiences to support the child in forming a healthy relationship to the world.
- Artistic activities such as storytelling, singing, drawing and painting, rhythmic games, and modeling that foster the healthy development of imagination and creativity.
- Meaningful practical work such as cooking, baking, gardening, handwork and domestic activity that provide opportunities to develop unfolding human capacities. Here the emphasis is on the processes of life rather than on learning outcomes.
- Predictable rhythms through the day, week and year that provide security and a sense of the interrelationships and wholeness of life. Birthdays and Seasonal holidays are joyful celebrated.
“The task of the early childhood teacher is to adapt the practical activities of daily life so that they are suitable for the child’s imitation through play. The activities of children in the classroom must be derived from life itself rather than being ‘thought out’ by the intellectualized culture of adults. In the classroom, the most important thing is to give children the opportunity to directly imitate life itself.”
- Rudolf Steiner from “The Child’s Changing Consciousness”
Welcome to the Hummingbird Nursery School!
Class size is limited
to 6 children
ages 18 months
to 4 years old