Infant/ Toddler Environment
The classroom environment provides safe, nurturing, and healthy learning by providing materials and activities to promote spontaneous learning experiences throughout the day. The infant classroom consist of active play and warm cozy relaxing areas. The classroom is designed for the infants/toddlers to strengthen muscles, balance and coordination, develop cognitive skills, build positive relationships and use their senses to explore.
The toddler environment provides a safe secure learning space for exploration and curiosity. The classroom consists of a home, block, art, book, manipulative, music, science and sensory area.
Preschool Environment
Materials are on low open shelves so children can use them independently. Similar materials are grouped together to teach the children to sort and classify. These skills are important to understanding literacy and solving math problems. Picture and word labels are put on containers and shelves to aid as children begin to read symbols and print. The interest areas in the classroom consist of:
Home Area
The home area allows the children to engage in pretend play to encourage role playing. Two things that a small child knows are home and school. The children are allowed to experiment with items and situations that are recognizable to them and gain knowledge of new ones. This area encourages knowledge of the community, imagination, working together, problem solving, compromising, and enhancement of verbal skills.
Block Area
The block area aids in gaining knowledge of math concepts by working with blocks of different sizes and shapes. The children are given the opportunity to build structures and take on roles of people and community helpers. This encourages role playing, gaining knowledge of the world, self-expression, problem solving and creativity.
Art Area
The art area invites the children to express their emotions through creativity. While the children are utilizing the different tools to create they are developing fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. By providing open ended questions it allows the child to use their cognitive and problem solving skills to think of a subject, design and create. The art area encourages understanding of spatial relations, perspective, dimensions, critical thinking, and self- expression.
Book/ Literacy Area
Literacy is very important as a small child and as an adult. The book and literacy invites the children to explore their world through books, flash cards, and pictures to encourage reading and writing to increase vocabulary and comprehension skills. The literacy area encourages print awareness, love for books, creativity, imagination, thinking skills and early writing skills.
Music Area
The music area allows the children to express themselves through music. Children are abler to be physically active and help gain control of their bodies. By experimenting with different sounds and beats the children are able to enhance memory skills, language development, self-expression, coordination, and creativity.
Science/ Sensory
The science and sensory areas give the children the opportunity to explore and experiment with the natural world. Vocabulary is enhanced while engaging with the materials as the children guest, predict and observe. Children will problem solve, classify, compare, and measure as they experiment with the objects.
Manipulative/Math Area
The manipulative and math area offers the children the opportunity to understand basic math concepts as well as the development of fine motor skills. As the children are engaged in the materials they are improving hand-eye coordination and problem solving skills, as they count, sort and classify.
Technology/Computer Area
The computer area encourages the children to enhance social-emotional, cognitive, and creative representation skills. Each child has a log in and all material is based on goals for childrens individual needs.
Outdoor Area
The outdoor area has a variety of materials offered to the children daily for large motor.
The playground consist of:
· Wood Working
· Robotics
· Construction
· Creativity
· Gardening
· Large Motor