The Class Teacher years are the time for educating the "feeling intelligence."
When children are ready to leave kindergarten and enter Class 1, they are eager to explore the whole world of experience for the second time.

Before, they identified with it and imitated it; now, at a more conscious level, they are ready to know it again, by means of the imagination--that extraordinary power of human cognition--that allows us to "see" a picture, "hear" a story, and "divine" meanings within appearances. 

During these school years, the educator's task is to transform all that the child needs to know about the world into the language of the imagination, a language that is as accurate and as responsible to reality as intellectual analysis is in the adult. The wealth of an earlier, less intellectual age--folk tales, legends, and mythologies, which speak truth in parables and pictures--becomes the teacher's inexhaustible treasure house.

When seen through the lens of the imagination, nature, the world of numbers, mathematics, geometrical form, and the practical work of the world are food and drink to the soul of the child. The four arithmetical operations can, for instance, be introduced as characters in a drama to be acted out with temperamental gusto by Class 1 children.

"Whatever speaks to the imagination and is truly felt, stirs and activates the feelings, and is remembered and learned."
Rudolf Steiner

Castlecrag Infants Campus