Kindergarten is a preschool for children ages 4 to 6. It's designed as an introduction to primary school and prepares children for the first grade.
Kindergarten comes from the German words Kinder ("children") and Garten ("garden"). A garden of children is a lovely and poetic image for a classroom full of antsy kids trying their hardest to master basic skills and ideas through creative and interactive lessons. But perhaps that is just how they were seen by the 19th-century German educator Friedrich Fröbel, who is credited with inventing kindergarten, his "method of developing intelligence in young children."