Children at this age have the innate desire to seek out knowledge and answers to the endless questions their natural curiosity constantly presents. Our goal is to provide children with an environment that stimulates their interests, and with teachers who take hold of those interests and use them to involve the children in every aspect of their learning.
Young Children are Active Learners
Curriculum planning focuses on action. Plans are tentative, and children modify them with their input and responses. To carry out this approach, teachers engage in an ongoing process of planning, analyzing, observing, and evaluating the children's activities, ideas, needs and interests.
Activity Planning
Curriculum is personalized for the children in the classroom, not handed down from a corporate office where they can know nothing about your child except their age. Curriculum planning for each of our classrooms is based on:
understanding of developmentally appropriate objectives;
sensitivity to children's personal experiences and interests;
knowing that children learn through first-hand observation, play, and direct experience; and
careful observation of all their communication-both verbal and non-verbal and their interaction with their environment, other children, and teachers.
Documentation
We value documentation as a central element of our program for one main reason: making children's learning visible to the children and the parents. Our Discovery Reports are emailed to parents daily with photos and comments from that morning so that you can closely follow your child's learning experience and communicate with your teachers about their learning.
When children revisit and reflect on their experiences and ideas, they deepen and expand their understandings. They come to see themselves as thinkers, builders, and artists. With our documentation, we become keepers of the community history that informs and shapes who we are "children and adults" together.
