Where Childhood Flourishes.

Learning through Play, Wonder, and Endless Possibilities.

Our Early Childhood program takes place in an outdoor forest school model, embracing the beauty and benefits of nature. Our outdoor classrooms offer a consistent daily rhythm that helps children feel secure and at ease. In this natural setting, play is not just play; it’s a vital part of learning that nurtures a sense of wonder and opens doors to endless possibilities. This approach enriches them internally and lays a solid groundwork for their academic achievements ahead. In addition to an abundance of imaginative free play, our days are filled with a variety of engaging activities such as watercolor painting, sewing, beeswax modeling, tea time, cooking, singing, storytelling puppetry, and participating in movement circles—all conducted in the inspiring backdrop of the outdoors. These delightful experiences are key in honing both fine and gross motor abilities, enhancing listening, focus, and language skills, and teaching children the art of collaboration within a group setting. Being in nature further encourages creativity, resilience, and a deep connection with the environment, offering unparalleled opportunities for growth and development.

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At Sunrise, we believe that childhood is not something to rush through. Our mixed-age Kindergarten program is intentionally designed to protect these precious early years, giving children the time and space to move, imagine, create, explore, and grow within the rhythms of the natural world.

Rooted in Steiner-inspired early childhood education and held within our outdoor forest school setting, the Kindergarten day unfolds with a gentle, predictable rhythm. Mornings include circle time filled with seasonal songs, verses, movement, and rich language, along with storytelling brought to life through handmade puppetry. Children are surrounded by beauty, imagination, and meaningful experiences rather than hurried toward formal academics before they are developmentally ready.

And perhaps most importantly, there is plenty of time to play.

Long stretches of open-ended, creative play on our forested playground are an essential part of the Kindergarten experience. Children build, climb, dig, balance, invent worlds, solve problems, navigate friendships, and learn to trust their own ideas. We view this kind of play not as a break from learning, but as some of the most important work of early childhood.

Throughout the week, our Kindergartners also participate in Gardening, Movement, and Art & Handwork classes. These experiences are woven naturally into the rhythm of the week, allowing children to work with their hands and bodies while developing coordination, confidence, creativity, practical skills, and a meaningful relationship with the earth.

Artistic experiences may include watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, fiber arts, seasonal crafts, and other developmentally appropriate handwork. Gardening invites children into the living rhythms of the land, while Movement gives them opportunities to strengthen the physical capacities that form an important foundation for later academic learning.

A Two- to Three-Year Kindergarten Journey

Within a Steiner-inspired model, Kindergarten is often a two-year journey. Rather than centering the early years around worksheets, desk work, or formal academic instruction, we focus on building the developmental foundations from which future learning can flourish: strong bodies, capable hands, rich language, imagination, emotional security, social awareness, attention, curiosity, and a genuine love of learning.

*Children under five are welcome with a parent or caregiver present. Please reach out to learn more about how this works in practice.

At Sunrise, Kindergarten is a place to belong before it is a place to perform—a place where childhood is honored, imagination is protected, and children are given the time, movement, beauty, nature, and loving relationships they need to grow into themselves.

The Kindergarten Day

Our full Kindergarten day begins with drop-off between 8:40–9:20 AM and concludes with pick-up between 2:30–3:00 PM.

The day includes the morning Kindergarten rhythm, outdoor play and exploration, specialty classes, and lunchtime together. Families send a nourishing lunch from home.

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Lower Elementary Grades

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The Grade Three/Four year is a time of growing independence, capability, and connection to the practical world. Children at this stage are increasingly interested in understanding how things work, where things come form, and what it means to become a capable and contributing member of their community.

Because our mixed-age classes are shaped around the children actually within them—not simply the number assigned to a grade—this year’s Grade Three/Four curriculum is anchored primarily in the developmental themes of Grade Three, while thoughtfully weaving in elements of the Grade Four curriculum throughout the year.

This allows us to meet the developmental needs of the group as a whole while continuing to challenge and support each child according to their individual readiness.

Finding Our Place in the World

Around eight and nine years old, children often begin experiencing the world differently. Their awareness of themselves as individuals deepens, and with it can come new questions about belonging, capability, responsibility, and their relationship to the world around them.

The Grade Three curriculum meets this growing awareness by turning toward practical life and the ways human beings live and work upon the earth.

Farming and gardening hold an important place in this year’s studies. Through stories, observation, practical work, and academic exploration, children encounter the journey of food from soil to table, the rhythms of planting and harvesting, traditional and contemporary farming practices, and the relationship between human communities and the land that sustains them.

These experiences naturally weave together science, mathematics, history, language arts, and practical work. Measurement has meaning when something is actually being planted, built, cooked, or created. Writing has purpose when there is an experience worth recording. Science begins with close observation of the living world.

Learning becomes connected.

Stories of Humanity

Stories continue to provide an important foundation for learning in Grade Three/Four.

Children encounter origin stories, traditional stories, cultural legends, and mythology that invite them to explore how people throughout time have sought to understand the world and their place within it.

Growing Academic Capacity

Alongside these rich thematic studies, children continue developing strong foundations in literacy and mathematics.

Reading moves toward greater fluency, independence, and comprehension. Writing becomes increasingly detailed and organized as children work with narration, composition, grammar, spelling, handwriting, and creative expression. Students begin taking greater ownership of their written work while continuing to draw inspiration from stories, experiences, nature, and the subjects they are studying.

Mathematics builds upon fluency with the four operations and increasingly complex computation. Students work with place value, multiplication, division, measurement, time, money, mathematical patterns, and practical problem-solving, with new concepts introduced according to readiness.

As Grade Four material enters the curriculum, students may also begin exploring fractions and increasingly complex multiplication and division, always with an emphasis on developing genuine mathematical understanding rather than simply memorizing procedures.

Within our mixed-age classroom, children do not need to be doing identical work in order to be learning together. Academic instruction can be differentiated so that students encounter appropriate challenge and support while remaining part of a shared classroom experience.

Humans & Animals

Toward the end of the year, our studies will move into a beloved element of the Grade Four curriculum: Humans & Animals.

Children will explore the remarkable diversity of the animal world, studying physical characteristics, behaviors, habitats, movement, and adaptation. Through careful observation, discussion, drawing, writing, and comparison, they will begin considering the many specialized ways animals are beautifully suited to their environments.

Learning Through Head, Heart & Hands

Throughout the Grade Three/Four year, artistic, physical, nature-based, and practical work remains inseparable from academic learning.

Gardening, Movement, Art & Handwork, Baking, Herbalism, and other hands-on experiences give children opportunities to develop real skills while strengthening concentration, coordination, creativity, perseverance, and confidence.

At this age, there is something especially powerful about discovering: I can do this.

This year’s Grade Three/Four curriculum is intentionally grounded in the developmental richness of Grade Three while beginning to reach toward Grade Four. It offers children a year rooted in the earth and practical life while gradually widening their gaze toward the larger natural and human world.

At Sunrise, we want children to leave this year knowing more than they did when they entered it—but also feeling more capable, more curious, more connected, and more confident in their ability to meet the world.

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Grade Five/Six marks an exciting expansion in the educational journey. Students at this age are increasingly ready to look beyond their immediate surroundings and encounter the world on a larger scale — across landscapes, civilizations, scientific phenomena, mathematical relationships, and human history.

This year’s mixed-age curriculum is guided primarily by the developmental themes of Grade Six, while continuing to strengthen and build upon important Grade Five skills. As always, our teachers work with the children actually in front of them, providing appropriate challenge and support within a shared classroom experience.

The result is a year that asks students to become increasingly independent and precise in their thinking while preserving the curiosity, creativity, movement, nature, and hands-on experiences that remain central to learning at Sunrise.

From Ancient Greece to Rome

Having journeyed through the ancient civilizations and Ancient Greece, students continue their study of human history with Ancient Rome.

Rome offers a fascinating transition for children at this developmental stage. Students encounter a civilization shaped by laws, engineering, government, military organization, expansion, conflict, and an increasingly structured society.

Through stories, biographies, historical accounts, maps, artwork, writing, and discussion, students explore the development of the Roman Republic and Empire and meet some of the individuals and events that shaped its history.

History becomes an opportunity not simply to remember what happened, but increasingly to ask why.

Why do civilizations rise and fall? How do geography and resources influence societies? What makes a leader? How do laws shape communities? What happens when cultures encounter one another? Whose perspective is represented in the stories we inherit?

As students mature, these questions invite increasingly thoughtful conversations about human choices, consequences, power, responsibility, and our shared history.

Geography & A Wider World

This year’s studies begin with United States Geography, inviting students to develop a richer understanding of the diverse landscapes, regions, waterways, ecosystems, and human communities of the country they call home.

Rather than approaching geography as the memorization of names on a map, students are encouraged to understand the relationships between land, water, climate, plants, animals, resources, and human life.

Maps become stories of place.

Students develop their mapping skills while exploring mountains, rivers, plains, deserts, coastlines, watersheds, and regional characteristics. Geography also provides natural opportunities to consider the many peoples, histories, and cultures connected to these lands and the ways human communities have been shaped by—and have shaped—the environments in which they live.

Our forest school setting gives students an especially tangible starting point for this work. The larger geographical world can continually be connected back to what children can observe firsthand: soil and water, weather and seasons, plant communities, landforms, direction, distance, and our own relationship with place.

Mathematics & The Beauty of Geometry

Mathematical work continues to strengthen the skills and concepts developed through Grade Five while expanding toward the greater precision and complexity of Grade Six mathematics.

Students continue practicing the four operations, fractions, decimals, measurement, factors and multiples, problem-solving, and increasingly complex computation, with instruction differentiated according to readiness.

A particularly beautiful addition this year is the introduction of formal geometry.

Students move from experiencing geometric forms primarily through artistic exploration toward constructing them with increasing accuracy using tools such as the compass and straightedge. Circles, angles, triangles, polygons, bisectors, and other geometric relationships become objects of careful observation and construction.

Geometry beautifully embodies something we value deeply at Sunrise: precision and beauty do not have to be opposites.

A geometric construction requires patience, careful measurement, attention, and mathematical reasoning—and at the same time can become a work of remarkable beauty. Students experience mathematics not only as something to calculate, but as a language of pattern, proportion, relationship, and form.

Science Through Observation

As students move into the upper elementary years, their study of the natural world also becomes increasingly systematic.

The careful observation cultivated through years of nature study provides a foundation for more formal scientific thinking. Students are asked to notice closely, describe accurately, compare what they observe, recognize patterns, record their findings, and begin drawing conclusions from direct experience.

Depending upon the year’s curriculum, scientific studies may draw from the plant kingdom, geology and mineralogy, astronomy, physics, and the natural phenomena surrounding us.

Whenever possible, students encounter phenomena before explanations. They observe, experiment, draw, write, discuss, and question before moving toward concepts and definitions.

This approach encourages students not simply to accept that something is true, but to become curious about how we know.

Growing Academic Independence

By Grade Five/Six, students are increasingly expected to take ownership of their learning.

Reading becomes a tool for gathering information as well as entering literature and story. Writing grows in complexity through compositions, summaries, reports, creative writing, grammar, spelling, and responses to the subjects being studied. Students practice organizing their ideas, revising their work, communicating clearly, and supporting their thinking with greater detail.

Main lesson books continue to bring academic and artistic work together as students create thoughtful records of their studies through writing, illustration, diagrams, maps, and other forms of representation.

Expectations grow alongside the children—not toward perfection, but toward care, craftsmanship, responsibility, and pride in one’s work.

Learning Through Head, Heart & Hands

Even as academic work becomes more rigorous, we do not believe older children suddenly stop needing to move, create, work with their hands, or spend meaningful time outdoors.

Quite the opposite.

Gardening, Movement, Art & Handwork, Baking, Herbalism, and other practical experiences continue to complement academic studies and give students opportunities to develop skills that cannot be learned from a textbook alone.

Working with one’s hands requires planning, patience, adaptability, and perseverance. Movement develops strength, coordination, awareness, and confidence. Working with plants and food creates tangible relationships between knowledge and everyday life. Artistic work asks students to observe carefully and make intentional choices.

These experiences become increasingly sophisticated as the children do.

Stepping Toward Adolescence

Grade Five/Six sits at an important threshold. Childhood is still very much present, while the first glimpses of adolescence are beginning to emerge.

Students are developing stronger individual perspectives. They notice inconsistencies. They ask harder questions. Peer relationships become more complex, and fairness, belonging, identity, responsibility, and independence can take on new significance.

Our role is not to hurry children through this transition, but to meet it with steadiness. The curriculum offers increasing structure, intellectual challenge, meaningful responsibility, physical work, creativity, and opportunities for students to contribute to their community. Within this environment, children can practice becoming more independent while remaining deeply connected to trusted adults, one another, and the natural world.