Preschool Program

Our program for learning is based on a developmentally appropriate environment that  allows children to be confident and successful learners.  We facilitate learning through
these concepts:
* Developmentally Appropriate Practice

* Child Initiated Learning Centers

* Whole and Small Group Activities

* Emergent Curriculum

Our curriculum offers a variety of learning opportunities where children can make self-directed and guided choices. We use a whole child approach to learning which includes:

Social/Emotional Development:   friendship building, self-help skills, managing and expressing feelings, following rules and routines, explore sense of self, family, and friends.

Physical Development: creative movement,running, jumping, balancing, coloring, cutting, writing, playdough,manipulatives, puzzles, Legos.

Language Development:  songs, stories, music, fingerplays, nursery rhymes,  books, magazines, classroom labels, charts, writing center, introduction to writing upper and lower case letters, following routines, retelling of stories/events, playing games

Cognitive Development: counting, one to one correspondence, number recognition, shapes, colors, measuring, patterning, sequencing, graphing, sensory table, gardening, recycling

Creative Development: music, creative movement,dramatic play, instruments, open ended art activities.

Multi-age or Mixed-age Groupings

Multi-age education is not a new concept. In fact, it’s the way children learned hundreds of years ago. Today, the multi-age grouping model has sparked an interest among early childhood educators.

When our culture was agrarian, children learned in small one or two room schoolhouses with children of various ages from their community. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s, when nations became industrialized, did education turn to grouping children chronologically. Families and children left the rural life of farms and moved to the factory life of over-crowded cities.This lifestyle brought children of the same ages together leading the way to
the graded classrooms of today.

Whether it’s an elementary classroom, preschool, or child care center, graded classrooms teach on the assumption that all children should learn the same concepts at the same time and at the same rate.  This can lead to frustration for the child and teacher alike. The realization that childrens’ uneven developmental patterns and differing rates of progress are ill-matched to the rigid grade-level system has left teachers searching for a better way to meet the needs of all students. More and more schools areimplementing multiage programs because of the current educational practicesembedded in the multiage model that address these issues.[1]

Benefits of multi-age grouping programs:

• Mixed-age grouping resembles family and neighborhood grouping, which throughout human history have informally provided much of children’s socialization and
  education. Many young children now spend relatively little time in either
  family or neighborhood settings and consequently are deprived of this kind of
  learning.
• Social development can be enhanced by experiences available in a mixed-age grouping.Leadership and prosocial behaviors have been observed to increase.
• Current concepts of cognitive development imply that children whose knowledge or
  abilities are similar but not identical stimulate each other’s thinking and
  cognitive growth.
• Research on peer tutoring and cooperative learning indicates that interaction between less able and more able children, e.g., “novices and experts,” benefits all
  individuals both academically and socially.
• Mixed-age grouping relaxes the rigid, lock-step curriculum with its age-graded
  expectations of children[2].

In conclusion, multi- age classrooms promote positive social behaviors in a relaxed learning environment where children learn and develop at their own pace.

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