Mission Statement
We believe that all children are perfectly designed, each with a unique temperament, nurturance, learning style, passions, talents and opportunities for growth. We provide a program geared to make the transition from home to school a happy and successful one. We feel that every child is unique, in terms of life experiences, developmental readiness, and culture. We believe it is important to provide a safe and nurturing environment, which promotes independence, social-emotional, language, communication, cognitive, health and physical development. We view children as capable, competent, co-contributor’s and acknowledge them as active participants in their own learning. Our program is based on a combination of child initiated learning, adult enriched learning, child interests, the local community and intentional teaching. We aim to provide an effective early childhood environment that fosters creative expression, social and emotional interaction, child-adult communication, child-child communication, physical expression, risk-taking, and personal independence. We believe the attitude a child develops towards learning may help or hinder their ability to learn in the future. We cannot MAKE a child learn, but we believe we can make them WANT to learn.
Philosophy
Early childhood learning happens through play. At Pre-K-Kidz LLC we believe that play is essential and should be fun, exciting, spontaneous, hands-on, comforting and challenging. We aim to provide opportunities for children to discover, explore, create, investigate, solve problems and express ideas with others. Our teachers encourage and support children to find and explore their own interests. Our hope as educators is to instill a love of learning in our students, as we share our own passion for learning with them. Our staff is educated, compassionate, experienced, and dedicated individuals who are excited about working with children. Our role as teachers is to give children the tools with which to cultivate their own gardens of knowledge. To accomplish this goal, we keep our child to staff ratio small and are able to teach to the needs of each child so that all learners can feel capable and successful.
Curriculum Overview
Although it may seem like we are just having fun all the time, the curriculum we have designed is packed with education elements. Our classroom is designed to promote pre-reading skills, phonemic awareness, letter and sound recognition; basic math concepts; hands on science exploration through emergent curriculum. Our emergent based approach allows children to learn through hands-on experiences in a real life setting, creating relevant and influential education experiences. Children learn through exploration and play, our curriculum is designed to encourage those natural abilities in an organized way. Our curriculum includes; Natural Science, Math, Social/Emotional, Creative Dramatics, ELA, Music/Movement, Art and Community. Our interest areas include Blocks/Engineering, Science, Sensory Awareness, Dramatic Play, Literacy/Puzzles, Free Art and Outdoor Play. These areas change with the curriculum every month and provide children opportunities for social emotional growth through problem solving, communication, self help skills, community/cultural awareness and cooperative play. Our teacher directed curriculum includes fingerplays, calendar, weather, current events, read aloud, music and movement, topics and discussion. We incorporate a personal hygiene curriculum to include handwashing, toileting, healthy foods and nutrition, dental hygiene, basic body parts and a quiet time to allow bodies to rest and grow. Daily exercise is extremely important at Pre-K-Kidz LLC. Children have at least 1.5 hours of outdoor time everyday. (weather permitted) We also incorporate yoga, music and movement, parachute, bikes, and nature walks.