Our Approach
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Our play-based and project focused preschool, pre-kindergarten and transitional kindergarten learning environments offer each student their own emergent path to learning. The focus on the whole child starts with helping each individual student build the social emotional foundations that they will need both in and out of the classroom environment. We also offer our families flexible scheduling, understanding that focusing on the whole child also means accommodating each family's unique needs.
Kindness & Collaboration
Throughout our school, we focus on principles of kindness, respect and cooperation. In our younger classrooms, teachers develop curriculum that supports caring behaviors (such as taking care of baby dolls, planting seeds, or cleaning up messes). As children grow older they are encouraged to take care of our school by participating in jobs, fixing broken objects, and using materials in appropriate ways.
Instead of rules, our school community has developed kindness principles for framing our interactions with the world.
“We take care of ourselves. We take care of each other We take care of our materials and the school community.”
EMERGENT CURRICULUM
An emergent curriculum means deriving the areas of study in the classroom from careful observation of the children. As teachers, our job is to observe children as they play and to engage in meaningful conversations with them to find out where their interests lie and what their abilities are. Our curriculum is then tailored to help the children explore these play themes in depth, to help them create meaning out of their play, and to offer guidance and support which will enable a child to go beyond his or her current abilities.