Early Childhood Education

Imagine a school where children are free to be children; to unfold in their own time; to move, play, create, explore, wonder, and learn with their whole being. A place where the world is beautiful and good, and calls out to be discovered and embraced. 
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Check out our Early Childhood Virtual Tour below:

Thinking of joining our Early Childhood community? Here’s what we’re all about:

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​Love and Warmth
Love and warmth between teachers and children creates a safe and joyful space for learning and growing. Our EC faculty has decades of collective experience understanding child development, deeply observing children’s needs, and creating spaces for everyone to feel safe and comfortable. Teachers model for the children how to care for and respect themselves, each other, and their environments. Through imitation, children learn to become compassionate stewards of the world around them. 

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​Nurturing Creativity
Our programs provide ample time for play in outdoor and indoor spaces, with natural, open-ended toys. These experiences help develop children’s imagination, problem solving, and creativity. Through oral storytelling, puppet plays, movement, and songs and verses from around the world, your child’s sense of wonder and emerging memory are engaged. A lifelong love of language, a deep cultural and social awareness, and a connection with daily, weekly, and seasonal rhythms are nurtured. As children march and stomp and jump through rhythmic verses and activities a strong foundation for future academic learning is developed.

Togetherness
We all work together in our Early Childhood programs, baking bread, setting the table for snack or lunch, raking leaves, repairing toys, and tidying up. All of our Early Childhood programming includes nourishing homemade snacks and meals shared around a communal table. The scene is set for your child to be part of a healthy social community and to learn, through opportunities for sharing and cooperation, to be their best self with others. We create a space where children are part of the “WE.” Our focus is on the group, rather than the individual experience, so children feel safe to unfold, explore, and try new things. 
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We also nurture the creation of intentional adult communities through shared parent experiences in the Parent and Child programs and parent and family events in the Morning Garden Preschool and Kindergarten classes.

​​Parent and Child Programs

Our home-like room is filled with natural, open-ended toys to encourage our children in their play. Our beautiful yard provides opportunities for running, digging in the sand or snow, pushing wheelbarrows or pulling sleds, and playing in our little play-house. Through this experience of play, the children have opportunities to learn about themselves and the world; to learn to share and to be together in a group. The relaxed and gentle rhythm unfolds throughout the morning, providing a sense of security, connectedness and peacefulness -- an oasis of unhurried calm in the busy lives of young families. ​

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​Our Parent and Child programs offer a warm and comfortable space for parents and caregivers to bring their small children for a morning of play, singing and storytime.  As adults we make connections with each other to form a supportive community,  sharing the joys and challenges of life with toddlers and infants, and having the chance, perhaps, to learn something new. 

​Morning Garden Preschool

The Morning Garden Preschool program is a gentle start for children three to four years
of age. Our program is intended to be a child’s first independent school experience.
The Mulberry Waldorf School Preschool program is licensed under the Child Care
​and Early Years Act.
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A great deal of importance is given to free, imaginative play. Our beautiful classroom is a warm and homelike space, free of loud colours and clutter and where toys are simple and made of natural materials to encourage a child’s full sense of imagination to develop. Children this age have a natural reverence for nature. Outdoors, they busy themselves with seasonal tasks during free play in the form of raking, gardening, building with wood, splashing in puddles, or playing in the sandpit. There is also time for wonder. It is through play, exploration of the natural world around them, and helping work that children develop capacities for the future: creativity and imagination, problem-solving skills, a sense of wonder, respect and cooperation, and resilience.

Gentle ‘home and garden’ puppet stories, imitation of seasonal songs, finger games, and action rhymes, and joyful explorations of painting, drawing, and simple crafting are part of the creative, integrated artistic experience that help children develop independent self-expression, memory, fine and gross motor skills, and focused attention. ​

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morning_garden_nursery_parent_handbook_-_revised_february_2022.pdf

Kindergarten

The Kindergarten day follows a rhythm of breathing out (child-directed activity) and breathing in (teacher-directed activity), through play, story, movement, and focused activities. Students spend two to three years in our mixed age Kindergarten, so there is always a group of experienced children ready to help guide our new students into the flow and expectations of our program.
Each day, Kindergarten children spend two to three hours outdoors playing and working in a variety of weather in our naturalised yard. Outdoor play may include neighbourhood walks, trips to the park, or visits to local natural areas. 
After lunch, with tired limbs and full bellies, children have time to rest quietly in a cozy space. Some children sleep, but this is not an expectation.

In the afternoon, children immerse themselves in indoor play and artistic and domestic work. Along with painting, drawing, and beeswax modelling, Kindergarten offers an introduction to handwork and woodwork through creating simple, useful things by finger knitting, sewing, sanding, and hand drilling.

Our curriculum stories are chosen with care to meet the unique social, emotional and developmental needs of the class. We strive to bring cultural images that are both familiar and new to our class community. Stories become longer and more complex; they are brought first orally and then with puppetry and/or pretending. Through our song and movement circles and transition songs and verses, we work to develop children’s stamina for longer periods of activity and focus. We provide ever-increasing challenges for gross and fine motor skills. 
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Math, Language Arts, French, and Science are integrated into all of our activities--for example, word and sound play, sorting, counting, sharing, reverent attention to nature, and working with the chemistry of bread dough--children learn through observing phenomena, not by being given facts and explanations. Our favourite expression in Kindergarten is, “I wonder…”