Kindergarten is a form of education for young children which serves as a transition from home to the commencement of more formal schooling. Children are taught to develop basic skills through creative play. In most countries kindergarten is part of the preschool system.
Children usually attend kindergarten any time between the ages of two and seven years. In parts of the United States, Canada and Australia kindergarten is the word used to describe the first year of compulsory education.
In British English, nursery or playgroup is the usual term for preschool education, and kindergarten is rarely used, except in the context of special approaches to education, such as Steiner Waldorf education.
Friedrich Fröbel opened the first kindergarten on 28 June 1840 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Gutenberg invention of movable type. Fröbel created the name and the term Kindergarten for the Play and Activity Institute. The first kindergarten in the United States was founded in Watertown, in 1856.
It was based on Fröbelite principles that she had learned about in Europe. Margarethe Schurz initially taught five children in her home in Watertown, Wisconsin. Her success drove her to offer her education to other children as well.
While Schurz first kindergarten was German language, she also advocated the establishment of English language kindergartens. She is credited with converting Elizabeth Peabody to the Fröbel philosophy at a meeting in Boston in 1859.
Later that year, Peabody founded the first English language kindergarten in America in Boston, following Schurz model. The first free kindergarten in America was founded in 1870 by Conrad Poppenhusen, a German industrialist and philanthropist who settled in College Point, where he established the Poppenhusen Institute, still in existence today.
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