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Primary Education (Ages 6-11)

The curriculum is designed as a spiraling path of learning, where subjects are revisited at deeper levels as the child matures, ensuring a solid and ever-expanding foundation of knowledge.

The Rhythm of the Day

Morning begins with movement and rhythmic activities such as recitation, singing, or playing the recorder followed by a review of the previous day’s work.

The Main Lesson Block: A Deep Dive into Learning

Our core Waldorf curriculum is taught by main lesson and supported by afternoon specialist subjects and both are aligned in content and in methodology with the students’ development as they grow.
With the teacher’s guidance, they create their own beautiful and unique books which reflect their learning.
Academic subjects such as math, science, reading, and writing are introduced in two hours, main classes through blocks that inspire curiosity and imagination. These blocks, which lasts three weeks, are designed in the curriculum and shaped by the teacher, through tales, stories based on culture, traditions, poetry, painting, drawing and are used to lead students in, learning beyond the memorization.

Afternoon Specialist Subjects: Integrating Knowledge

Afternoon specialist subjects are held in English, reinforces main lessons from an interdisciplinary perspective, and emphasises the connections between subjects or blocks of knowledge. The specialist classes are focused in:
  • Permaculture and Forest School
  • Watercolor painting
  • Movement
  • Music
  • Crafts
  • English
  • French
  • Choir


Our pedagogical approach draws heavily on the ideas and practice of Rudolf Steiner, however is adapted to the needs of our children, our community and modern learning environments.

Education must work with the macro and the micro, the individual and the community promoting rhythmic exchange between them.

In the first years of a child’s life, where everything is good and full of meaning, everything that he experiences acts formatively in the processes of growth and maturation, especially in movement and coordination, language development and integration of the sensory perception. The teacher is the one who provides coherence and meaning to the child’s learning environment. In the primary stage, the teacher presents and represents the world. The infant mind at this stage is essentially imaginative and pictorial.

Taking as a base the anthroposophical idea of the world proposed by Steiner, it is important to offer the possibility of the spiritual development of the individual. Our approach to education starts from the premise that each human being is made up of head, heart, hands, and also seeks spiritual knowledge.

“Through the body we belong to the outside world and we perceive it; in the soul we build our own inner world; and thanks to the spirit a third world is revealed to us that is superior to the other two”.

So, if something is true, it is not true only for me at that moment, but it has universal validity. Mindfulness is only present in the human mind when it raises its focus of attention beyond awareness of bodily states or emotional content.

Like Waldorf (Steiner) education:

  • we give equal importance to mind, body and soul in educational processes
  • we take a more graduated approach to literacy than mainstream schools, where instruction and learning begins orally, and writing and reading takes place more slowly, taking a more central position as the child grows older.
  • we place importance on stories as intuitive and imaginative understandings of the relationship of human beings to the spiritual world and to the forces of nature.


Unlike Waldorf education:

  • we move faster in literacy learning and we do introduce writing and reading in year 1, if children are ready
  • we introduce a second language from year 1
  • while we include traditional Waldorf subjects, we teach science and geography through permaculture ethics and forest school pedagogies.

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Interdisciplinary learning

At Arbol Madre we work on learning from an interdisciplinary perspective, because it emphasises the connections between disciplines or ‘subjects’ (mathematics, science, history, language, arts), instead of limiting learning to a content area in a parcelled way. It is via this approach that the most complex knowledge can be appreciated in different contexts. When teaching and learning are organised around topics, problems, or issues, students seek knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines to provide an expanded and more complex understanding of the topics they are studying.


Holistic, personalised dual immersion language learning

At Arbol Madre students learn Spanish and English in a balanced way and will become bilingual and biliterate in both languages by the end of primary education. In order to do so, we practise a process called “two-way” or “dual language immersion”. In this method students are immersed in both languages, Spanish and English, each for approximately 50% of the school day. This approach follows naturally in our school, as in the wider community of Orgiva children are typically exposed to both languages in their daily lives. In addition, for those children arriving from our Casa de Ninos this also follows a natural, comfortable progression.