Our Kindergarten is not a place apart from life, but a living part of it. We trust in each child’s natural rhythm of unfolding, and in the power of a community that honours curiosity, respect, and relationship as the roots of all learning.

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Here, in this garden for children, learning grows like everything else does — from soil and sunlight and time. The Kindergarten is a place where curiosity leads, where stories are told under trees, and where friendship is learned in the rhythm of play. The forest, the fields, and the open sky are our classrooms; wonder is our teacher.

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In the Kindergarten, the work is often invisible to the eye. Beneath the laughter, mud pies and story circles, children are learning how to be in relationship — with themselves, with one another, with the land. They are learning how to name feelings, how to take turns, how to ask for help and how to offer it. They are finding out what it means to belong to a group while still being fully themselves.

Between six and nine, children begin to map their worlds — both outer and inner. They notice patterns, build connections, and begin to understand relationships of cause and effect. Play and story continue to anchor learning, now enriched by emerging literacy, numeracy, and the first stirrings of abstract thought.

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Socially and emotionally, this is a time of mapping too: discovering friendship, fairness, and difference; learning how to work together, to disagree and repair, to take responsibility. The environment — fields, forests, workshops, and shared spaces — becomes a living classroom where these lessons unfold through experience.

The Mapping Phase is where the child’s sense of place deepens: in the landscape, in the group, and within themselves. It is where the wide world begins to take shape — and the stories they tell about it become the first lines on their own unfolding map.

The World-Building Phase marks a shift into greater complexity — both in thought and in relationship. Between nine and thirteen, children begin to explore identity, belonging, and responsibility through the lens of creation. They test ideas and social roles inside intricate worlds of their own making, where imagination and reason collaborate as equals.

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These worlds are laboratories of thought — places where children collect, combine, and reconfigure information from every corner of their experience. Research, negotiation, and problem-solving weave together in organic ways as they construct living systems of meaning. Knowledge from many domains — stories, nature observation, physics, mythology, architecture, mathematics, ethics — becomes raw material for building coherent yet fluid realities.

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The World-Building Phase is where thought becomes alive — where creativity and analysis merge, and where the mind learns to stretch, revise, and dream in equal measure.

The Self-Mastery Phase begins around thirteen, when the horizon of the future comes into view and young people start to sense themselves as agents within it. The task of this time is not simply to learn new skills, but to learn how to navigate the complexity of selfhood — emotionally, socially, intellectually, and ethically.

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This phase often looks chaotic or unconsidered from the outside. Much of the work is interior: forming values, testing boundaries, discerning what is authentic and what is borrowed. Facilitators and mentors shift toward a stance of companionship and standby support, trusting that each young person is capable of charting their own next steps. What matters most is that each one learns to hold their own compass — to recognise the signals of integrity, curiosity, and care that guide them from within.

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The Self-Mastery Phase is where the long arc of the journey begins to take form. It is a time of discomfort, depth, and astonishing growth — when young people learn that mastery is not control, but the ongoing art of knowing and choosing themselves.