Waldorf kindergarten is a two-year experience that starts when the child will be five for the majority of the school year. (This could mean your child is still in homeschool kindergarten when public school would place them in first grade).

When my daughter was approaching her first kindergarten year, I only had an inkling of what was involved in a Waldorf education. Even though commenters all over Facebook assured parents that they didn’t need a kindergarten curriculum, I knew that wasn’t the case for me.

I wasn’t going to naturally break into a song about Autumn trees while on a spontaneous walk through nature in the middle of the morning. I wasn’t going to pull out my stash of dyed wool roving and on a whim say why don’t we make pumpkins today? I needed a plan. So I bought a Waldorf kindergarten curriculum.

The curriculum itself is wonderful and covers almost all aspects you would find in a Waldorf school, from watercolor painting to beeswax modeling to handwork. In the autumn when we started, I enthusiastically told the stories to my daughter and led her through circle time (songs and verses with movement). We followed all the suggested activities for each week.

In the winter, I found it a little harder to keep up with, mostly because of family illnesses, but also because most of the handwork was too difficult for my newly turned five-year-old.

When the spring portion started, I lost all interest. The stories weren’t seasonal, which I had loved about the previous seasons, and I felt like I didn’t connect with the activities anymore. I switched to a different curriculum I had gotten for free, and we finished the school year. However, that other curriculum didn’t completely fit what I wanted to do, either.

In early summer, I started mulling over how I could create my own curriculum, something that would fit us better. I didn’t make an effort to work on it, but, here and there, my mind started to put together a solution. One night at 11 pm, it suddenly all came together, and I brainstormed on paper and plotted out an entire Autumn of activities.

I loved it, and I knew it would work. I knew it would work because it had come from my inspiration and vision.

In this series of blog posts, I want to walk you through what I did so you can custom design a Waldorf kindergarten curriculum for your family. I want you to be excited each week as you and your child bake, paint, model, and handcraft exactly what makes sense to you.

You’ll need to take some time to brainstorm and research, but a lot of it will come easily as you think about what you enjoy in each season.