The Waldorf Primary curriculum builds up through the years and the teachers offer challenges and opportunities that harness the growing curiosity and conceptual thinking of the children in a positive and healthy way.
While the children need to increasingly understand the nature of how things work, there is still a yearning for story and artistic expression. Maintaining this helps sustain the children inwardly and brings heart warmth to the inner tumult that is being experienced.
The curriculum of the final year of Primary school guides them in their conversation with what lives out in the world: through scientific observation and discovery in physics and chemistry; through a nascent understanding that history is shaped by human beings, that there is a past that can be thought about and understood and a future that can be sensed and felt. It provides opportunities for the children to develop their capacity to hear their inner speech and hidden words.
In the study of the natural world, the curriculum moves from the plant world and the mineral world to the world of the seas’ depths and the heavens’ heights. We look beyond our borders to the rest of the world to understand the connection between peoples and their environments.
We follow the experiences and routes of the explorers and navigators of old. We learn about the new discoveries of the Renaissance: the telescope, scientific thinking, perspective drawing, the emergence of individual thinking and consciousness as long-held views of faith come under scrutiny. We learn to uncover not just the beauty but the form construction of geometric shapes. We journey inwards into the workings of the body and the poetry of the soul.
The Primary School curriculum was extracted from various Waldorf Resources