Our Classrooms
Our Early Childhood classrooms hum with children hard at work building towers, traveling through forests in royal robes, setting tables for tea and for feasts, riding trucks through standstill traffic on the LIE, and dramatically demonstrating the way that squirrels prepare themselves for winter. Yet, amidst the apparent chaos, there abides an underlying order. The soft voice of a teacher singing as she begins to place wooden blocks or silken scarves or simple cotton dolls back to their resting places seamlessly redirects the children to the unified activity readying the room for sharing the bread and butter some of them have made during their morning’s work.
These classrooms are truly gardens for growing children—places that nourish within them the confidence, joyful inquisitiveness and sustaining discipline that will support them throughout the rest of their lives.
Parents who visit the Waldorf School of Garden City notice both the simplicity and the deep attention to detail that permeates our program. Our classrooms are artistically crafted, our rich materials carefully selected, and the experiences our children are engaged with are authentic. Our approach is based on our understanding that all the senses of the young child are very impressionable and everything that surrounds a child has a direct although sometimes extremely subtle impact. Very careful consideration is, therefore, given to the detail of the quality of all aspects of the environment to ensure that it is beautiful and gentle on the eye, ear and all the senses. The physical space is designed to be home-like and as free from exterior distraction as possible. Each child has his/her own cubby with their name above it and somewhere to leave a change of shoes and their outdoor clothes and wet weather gear.
