The Value of a Steiner-Inspired Playgroup

The Value of a Steiner-Inspired Playgroup
in our Modern World

By Kim Billington, BEd, Dip Early Childhood
(August 2004, kimandcaroline@hotmail.com.au)

From Steiner Schools in Australia
(www.steiner-australia.org)

The Steiner Playgroup has developed an internationally recognized program which is based on early childhood developmental stages of readiness, parent support and a strong environmentally sustainable foundation.

Early Childhood Development:

The materials in the play-space are selected to allow for imaginative play and a variety of natural tactile and sensory experiences, but especially without over-stimulation of the child's developing senses. With the prevalence of ADHD and other hyper-stimulation disorders, this method of carefully selecting experiences and equipment is a natural PREVENTATIVE and heath-building approach to today's SPECIAL NEEDS children.

Examples include NO battery-operated toys, or loud audio cassettes for music, but in their place, such things as simple wooden trucks which the child's imagination can create into whichever vehicle it wishes, or a box which may be a car or a table or another unique and fun toy. Like-wise a silk cloth may be a cape to wear, or a tablecloth or a butterfly's wings.

Also, only our living and natural human voices are used to sing or tell stories, which are repeated weekly to foster oral language acquisition and development. The use of the human voice and facial contact is especially beneficial for HEARING IMPAIRED children, enhanced further with the various actions and gestures used with songs, and hand-made puppets used to tell the stories.

Outdoor play is created to foster from the real-life imitative activity of human skills such as cooking in the sandpit with an array of pots, spoons, baking trays and so on. Many playgroups provide a dozen tricycles which can actually promote an imbalance in development of lower-limbs only. Such attention to potential one-sided development may seem unusual to older generations, yet research suggests that already by 5yrs of age, children are not as integrated in their bodily capacities as formerly.

Parent Support:

With the unnatural child-rearing practices of our western world, communities now must provide opportunities for isolated parents, who may never have cared for a toddler sibling themselves, to come together to learn positive parenting skills from others slightly more experienced or perhaps from trained parent educators. These others can show by example, with their own children in the group, the various ways to set limits, encourage social
skills and nurture and care for ourselves as parents in an oasis from the fast-paced adult-life of supermarkets and video-entertainment.

With 20 years of experience as a parent (of three) and 17 of those involved in parent-support playgroups and kindergartens, I can say that EVERY PARENT HAS SPECIAL NEEDS in their day to day role as caregivers. By coming together to a gentle group where lullabies and nursery rhymes are sung, crafts such as toy-making, knitting, sewing and cooking are practiced, the traditional skills of yester-year are kept alive in our culture, and such skills enhance the parents' self esteem. Both mothers and fathers knitting at a Steiner Playgroup is a common sight!

Environmentally Sustainable:

All activities and materials are chosen to support environmentally-friendly practice. For example:

Food:

Care is taken to bring organically or bio-dynamically produced fruits for morning-tea, and flours for bread-making etc. Thus, care for the childrens' developing bodies is taken. Scraps saved for chooks or compost for the vegetable garden are also 'pure'. The conscious elimination of pesticides from the environment is a desirable and beneficial endeavour.

Salted chips and lollies are certainly discouraged for both their un-friendly non-biodegradable wrappings, and their toll on childrens' negative social behaviours. Dietitians and pediatricians strongly recommend natural, healthy eating for all, but especially for SPECIAL NEEDS children with ADHD and other illnesses such as asthma and allergies. However, if groups do not work together on such important values, it is hard for parents to go against the consumer-trend of this type of product.

Materials:

Wooden chairs and tables are not only pleasing to the eye as objects of beauty, but are present as items made lovingly by the human hand, and come as gifts from Nature. They can fill the adult with wonder and gratitude
that is all around us in the natural world. Also, they die naturally when they have fulfilled their task. Many, many years hence, they may be re-cycled into wooden toys, or burnt in a fireplace, but always they are in harmony
with nature. Plastic chairs, on the other hand will not die such a noble death, but sit filling our Earth as toxic waste.

For this and other reasons all the toys and cloths are chosen, wherever possible to be made from natural fibres. They are usually hand-made, often by the adults in the community which provides a further opportunity for parents to contribute in real ways to the children and the future. This provision of opportunities for hand-skilled employment, both voluntary and paid is a positive and much needed contribution to our modern machine-made
and technologically biased world.

Early childhood is the perfect time to re-introduce the values of human endeavours through our careful choices. The fruits of technology will be there waiting for the teenagers of tomorrow, but it is today as the live, eat, sing and play that we can bring LIFE-GIVING forces to their developing bodies.