Frederich Froebel was a German educator perhaps best known for inventing kindergarten. One of his exercises, now called Froebel Gifts, is an ideal way to provide structured play and learning for kindergarten and other young learners that leads to a greater understanding of math, science, geometry, physics, and many other ideas and subjects found throughout the natural world.

In teacher-guided sessions, children explore the nature of objects, how they move, and how they fit together. Masterful teachers are key to guiding children in these exercises well. We are fortunate at Calvary to have a high level of expertise in our junior kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Jessica McRae.

McRae has received training in Charlotte Mason and Froebels through Ambleside Schools International (ASI), as well as through additional conference training in Boston. She is now considered a master teacher using Froebels within a Charlotte Mason methodology and has been privileged to provide Froebels instruction for teachers from various schools across the country at Ambleside’s Summer Institute.

Calvary Schools is supported in the implementation of a Charlotte Mason education through our partnership with Ambleside Schools International. While ASI supports our school in many ways, one important resource is through various curricular and instructional training opportunities. Ambleside is continuously researching different books, curriculum, and processes in order to ensure that we are providing the best Charlotte Mason education possible. Froebels was implemented early on in all Ambleside schools as an important aspect of how we instruct students in math and science in kindergarten and early childhood classrooms.

For young children, Charlotte Mason also emphasized other important ideas such as a set work for a set time and that children should have times of structured play that provide many learning opportunities, both outdoors and inside the classroom.

Mason believed it is important that we do not over educate young children. Instead, children should be given many opportunities to learn through the normal structure of daily life. In her book, Home Education, Mason states, “It would be well if we all persons in authority, parents and all who act for parents, could make up our minds that there is no sort of knowledge to be got in these early years so valuable to children as that which they get for themselves of the world they live in.”

We invite you to experience a living education at Calvary Schools through subjects such as Froebels in our Junior Kindergarten and Kindergarten classes.