Child Led Curriculum
Children are motivated by what inspires them. Once inspired, the children are blank slates begging to soak up any knowledge that comes their way. They invite the teachers to use their teaching ability to excite them and continue to intrigue their interest. Using a wide variety of mediums for a diversity of learning styles; books, puzzles, science experiments, writing, art, songs, and dramatic play give the children an opportunity to broaden their understanding. Through careful observation, the teachers can allow the children’s interests to lead the curriculum fluidly ensuring an enriching environment.
Learning Through Art
Our art curriculum provides child centered activities that are developmentally appropriate to inspire in them the desire create for the rest of their lives. For very young children, making art is a sensory exploration activity. We encourage children to explore open-ended materials such as paint, crayons, finger paint, collage, printmaking, and clay. Children need time to practice and develop skills with materials. By focusing on process instead of products, we give our children the time and space to control the materials and the mediums presented. Squeezing “flubber”, dripping food coloring into water, or using hands, arms and feet to apply paint to paper don’t always result in a piece to hang on the wall, but in the process of creating something beautiful has happened. If adults can but step out of the way, children will teach themselves. Our child-centered art helps children develop their cognitive, social and motor abilities.
Learning Through Creation
We naturally ebb and flow throughout the seasons. Creation is always changing– it is birthing, growing, flourishing and then dying back just so it can live again. We create an environment that is earth based so attention is constantly brought back to creation as a learning process. God has surrounded us with beauty and given us the responsibility of caring for his creation, including the earth; so we want to recognize and thank him for that precious gift. We are out in the garden as much as possible where we learn from the changing elements. The children experience the joy of planting, harvesting, preserving, dehydrating, and making much of our food from scratch. Our goal at The Treehouse Nursery in being an “earth-based” program also comes out in our Circle Time songs and Story Time themes as they change with the seasons. These times help build a foundation for both knowledge of what is happening in the earth we are a part of and generates foundational language skills. The children’s verbal skills and oral retention is nurtured through the repetition of both our songs and oral story telling on a daily basis.
Learning Through Play
"If young children have been able to give up their whole beings to the world around them in their play, in later life they will be able to devote themselves with confidence and power to the service of the world." - Rudolf Steiner
Their capacity for creative thinking is developed through imaginative play and healthy physical activity. We help the children be in relationship with the world by exposing him or her to the entire realm of nature--not only sand and water play, but also outside play on windy and rainy days. Much care is taken to create an environment that is beautiful and rhythmic so the children can learn how to be creative within their safe space. We have many natural, tactile toys that are open-ended to spur the imagination on to create many uses for each object. By nurturing young children's thirst for discovery, it establishes a strong foundation for academic learning and a life-long interest in other people and in the world around them. The day is full of free-play where the children engage in creative play, making use of the wide variety of materials provided for them by their teachers. Children move fluently from individual to parallel to cooperative, small and large group play. Keenly aware of their environment, the entire class might one morning use the furniture to create vehicles like those outside the window; another morning or afternoon the children might dress themselves in scarves and create a pirate ship out of blankets. Older children enjoy acting out the story or puppet play presented daily by the teachers. When this hour comes to an end, everyone helps return all the materials to their places, cleaning and straightening as they work.
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