Ecole Waldorf, Les moins de sept ans, Grunelius.

Rudolf Steiner had invited Elisabeth von Grunelius to become the kindergarten teacher; she was a delicate young woman whom he had known since 1914, when she had come to Dornach at the age of nineteen to work on the wooden sculptures of the first Goetheanum. Born in Kolbsheim in Alsace, she had graduated from the Comenius kindergarten teacher training seminar in Bonn in 1914 with the desire to study psychology. After eighteen months, she left Dornach to spend a year working in a kindergarten, a day-care centre and in the social welfare system in Berlin, where she obtained a diploma in youth work from the Pestalozzi Fröbel Seminar. This enabled her to obtain the Pestalozzi Fröbel Seminar's youth leader diploma and to become a trainer of trainees. When she returned to her hometown after the war, which had become French in the meantime, she received a request from Rudolf Steiner. She answered his call but only worked for a short time as a substitute teacher at the school. In the second school year, Elisabeth von Grunelius supports Leonie von Mirbach in her lessons; the first hour of the main lesson is taught by von Mirbach, the second by von Grunelius. When the class of 52 pupils in the first grade was divided in the third school year, von Grunelius took over half of it, but only for one year. Since the establishment of a kindergarten was still not in sight, she went to Dornach to study eurythmy and painting. It was not until 1924 that, thanks to the energetic efforts of Herbert Hahn, the farthest corner of the sports field was made available for a kindergarten hut, which was built in 1926. Elisabeth von Grunelius developed the Uhlandshöhe kindergarten, founded the international Waldorf kindergarten movement and, without the direct guidance and close support of Rudolf Steiner, inventively and independently laid the foundations of Waldorf education for the first seven years of life. She ran the kindergarten until it was closed by the Nazis in 1938. In 1940 she moved to the United States where she founded the country's first Waldorf kindergarten in Kimberton in 1941; another followed in Long Island in 1948. Her classic Waldorf Early Childhood and the Waldorf School Plan was published in 1950. It was published in several editions and languages. In 1954 she returned to Europe, founded a Waldorf kindergarten in Paris and lived as a consultant in Dornach from 1970 to 1988. She died in Schopfheim in 1989 at the advanced age of 94, as the last member of the original teaching college.