About Our Program

Country Day Little School seeks to protect the magic and wonder of childhood through a Waldorf- inspired educational approach that nurtures the young child’s healthy physical, social- emotional and cognitive development. We support our parents on their journey through parenthood, offering educational opportunities and attentive guidance. We cultivate a community of families who are actively engaged in sustaining our school culture and contributing to our educational program in service of the children.

A Waldorf Preschool

Country Day Little School provides a Waldorf preschool program for children ages 2 - 6 in a homelike environment with a strong focus on nature and practical life. Children can attend 3 or 5 days a week for a half- or full-day. We have a low child to teacher ratio, and our dedicated staff is well-educated, warm and caring, with long experience in early childhood education.

Waldorf schools seek to educate the whole person through attending to the learning of the "head, heart and hands,” we work with the thinking, the feeling and the doing of the child. For the preschooler, the "head" is given to imagination and the “heart” is fully engaged in loving relationship and reverent imitation of both teachers and other children. The “hands,” indeed, at such a young age, the whole physical body, is the threshold through which learning and meaning takes root within the child.

In our warm, caring and homelike environment, our students engage in activities that meet them at their stage of development. These activities, from ring to tidy-away time, from work in the garden to painting, address the social, emotional, physical and cognitive growth of the child. Our students learn and grow in a manner that meets their developmental needs and capacities, awakening them to the learning and doing in life, and ennobling their character.

At Country Day, learning takes place through play, structured activities, daily rhythms and imitation, rather than the introduction of academic subjects. Pre-school aged children absorb learn so much through exploring their physical environment in both structured and unstructured activities, and through imitation they take in their teachers’ and classmates’ activities and attitudes. The teachers’ purposeful activity in the gardens and classroom is imitated by the children, who display a similar purposefulness in both their work and their play.

Work and Play at School

Because of the importance of the environment for the growing child, we place great emphasis on maintaining a beautiful and child-friendly classroom space and garden. Our tools and toys are made of natural materials that engage the children in sense experiences that they can relate to the world around them. Our playthings are simple enough that the child’s own imagination is awakened to use them in many different ways. Exercising creative play in the preschool years has been proven to help the child develop not only socially and in fine and gross motor skills, but also emotionally and cognitively. Play encourages important neurological processes that will build social/emotional capacities and support future cognitive endeavors.

Each day includes about an hour for each outside and inside play. Out in the garden the children explore their senses and fine and gross motor capacities. They play in the sandboxes and garden beds, they climb, run, and jump, they push carts, care for the garden and engage in dynamic imaginative play. Inside the children build structures, tell stories, and play characters and scenarios. The classroom is full of playthings that challenge and inspire the children’s imaginations, allowing for a truly rich play experience. During both inside and outside play, the children may use play materials in any reasonable way they wish and they relax into their play, largely uninterrupted by adult concerns or distractions.

While supervising play, the teachers are engaged in useful, practical tasks that maintain the classroom or garden, or prepare for activities of the day or upcoming festivals. The children are nurtured and educated by the purposeful adult models around them. At times they choose to drift out of play and join the teachers in the chores, finding opportunity for growth in many tasks from peeling vegetables, to folding laundry, to raking leaves or washing toys. Teachers may also use these chore activities as natural opportunities for a child’s emotional, physical or cognitive needs to be met and so bring them out of play and into work.

Social Environment

Throughout the day the children are encourage to be kind to one another, cooperation and sharing are encouraged over competition; concern for others is stressed. We strive to create a structured atmosphere that is supportive of each child as an individual. In this way we give our students the environmental and relational security they need in preschool in order to maintain the emotional and social stability that is needed in order for learning and growing to take place.

Daily Activities

The school day is woven together by a rhythm of expansion and contraction that allows the children to experience exertion and rest, large and fine motor activity, group exercise and inner processing, etc. This rhythm, repeated each day, provides stability and nourishes the child’s well- being. Our students can settle into activities and transitions alike, knowing through experience that what comes next will serve them and provide for their needs. In additional to our healthful and educational daily work, our days and seasons bring structured activities that foster the child’s cognitive and physical development through language, music, movement, and the visual and sculptural arts.

Some of these daily activities are as follows:

• During ring the children play social games together, engaging in gross and fine motor movement, and learning songs and poems that mark the passing seasons and bring clarity to their sense of language and observation of the world around them.
• At story-time, stories are told, rather than read. Engaging in oral stories has been shown to be a valuable activity that provides foundational cognitive capacities that will serve the child well in later years of academic pursuit. As well it is such good practice for sitting stilly and quietly! To say nothing of the joy and opportunity for ethical and emotional development that the children find in our fairy tales, nature stories and puppet shows.
• During lunch-time the children eat prodigiously. Our seasonal, healthy, organic, lunches are long and filling, and allow the children to explore new foods, practice social graces and build relationship with each other and the teachers. Gardening vegetables, caring for our laying hens, and cooking from scratch in the classroom, help the children to become engaged and interested in food as a farm to table phenomenon.
• Coming right after lunch, nap-time at Country Day ranges from one to two hours, depending on the age of the child. Many parents find that once their children have a nap as part of their daily rhythm, they are happier, less stressed, and healthier on the whole... some children even go to bed earlier than during their pre-nap days!
• At afternoon snack the children come together for a small meal and moments of quiet connection before heading off toward home.

During their years at Country Day, students will find further opportunities for growth and learning through weekly and seasonal or festival activities such as watercolor painting, baking, cooking, gardening, crafting, modeling, drawing, and more.

The last and one of the most important areas of growth for our children is in self-care and environmental care. Children are given caring, loving support during all self-care times. Changing clothes, toileting and washing hands can be a rich opportunity to build a child’s self-esteem and initiative. Allowing and encouraging each child to gain mastery of such basic daily tasks at their own pace is an important focus for our teachers. This attention is given to the children as they learn to clean up after themselves and care for their environment during tidy-away time, when ordering their cubbies or making their beds, etc. Such little tasks offer wonderful opportunities for learning when given the necessary time and guidance from caring adults.

Country Day children, lovingly guided through their first steps of learning, gain strong foundational skills and capacities, a genuine love of lifelong learning and a sense of initiative and creativity. We hope to help each of our students take their continued steps on life’s path in health, and with kindness and joy.

One of the gifts we bring to our families is to encourage our school community to protect and nurture the unhurried growth of the young child. We have found that providing the predictable and secure home environment that all children need is a challenge for many. There is no question that being a parent is one of life’s most important and joyful tasks, but the struggle we live with is how to maintain it as our highest priority on a daily basis.

At school we find ourselves with similar questions, how do we provide for the needs of our busy families while truly serving our students? It is a difficult task at a time when many children are so often the ones who are compromised for the needs of the family. Out of our commitment to the students, our teachers have worked with families in creating rich and successful home-lives, often extending their support beyond the classroom.

Encouraging our parents in the joyful efforts of parenting was so beneficial to our school community that in 1996 we expanded our services to include family management consulting – working with families with children from infancy through the teenage years. This aspect of our work is very rewarding and truly needed in the busy lives of our families.

In consulting sessions we work with parents in many areas including: scheduling, prioritizing the children’s needs while making time for the parents, enhancing the stay-at-home experience so children can have a richer home-life before pre-school, finding time in “no time”, creating bed- time rhythms, family dinner, and family life with adolescents.