Lower School: Grades 1 to 5
Fostering curiosity and a love of learning. These are the years when a class becomes a community, when letters and numbers arrive through story and image, and when children discover that hard things are worth doing.
The journey, grade by grade
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Grade 1
The joyful start of formal schooling, where children meet letters and numbers through story and image, and a class becomes a community.
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Grade 2
Fables and legends bring human qualities to life, while arithmetic and literacy grow through movement, rhythm, and rhyme.
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Grade 3
The practical year. Children study how people build, farm, and live, work with time, money, and measurement. The year culminates with an overnight trip to a working farm.
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Grade 4
A new independence. Students explore Norse myths and the geography of their own region, and bring fractions to life in precise, beautiful geometric drawings.
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Grade 5
The ancient world, from Egypt and India to Greece, comes alive, and fifth graders join the Greek Olympiad, a pentathlon shared with other Waldorf schools.
A class teacher typically stays with the same children for multiple years as they move up through the grades. Picture what that means for one family: the teacher who taught your child to form letters in first grade is the same one who watches them conquer long division in fourth, who knows exactly which story will reach them on a hard day, and who greets you at parent evenings knowing your child's whole arc, not just this year's chapter.
With years to know each child personally, a teacher understands their strengths and challenges deeply, and can meet each one right where they are. It is one of the most powerful, and most distinctive, features of a Waldorf education.
Most of our class teachers are certified through accredited Waldorf teacher training institutes, two years of study beyond a bachelor's degree, and they keep training every year, modeling for their students what a lifelong learner looks like.
One teacher, many years
Waldorf students become voracious readers. We do not force formal reading instruction too early. Instead, through storytelling, performance, and the artistic drawing of letters and words, children build a genuine hunger for language. Reading emerges in its own time and grows into a lifelong love of books.
If you are curious about Waldorf and reading, ask us anything on a tour; this is a question we welcome, and our middle schoolers' bookshelves are the answer we like best.
Readers for life
Contact our Enrollment Director, Stacey Alston at enrollment@waldorfatlanta.org for more information about the Lower School Program at The Waldorf School of Atlanta.