Our philosophy of educating young children is based on our collective belief that children are competent, provocative, resourceful, and intelligent young people eager to share themselves and experience their world. They posses an inherent curiosity and wonder about the unknown and are constantly seeking to deepen their knowledge and understanding of it. We value children's uniqueness and individual capabilities and, as such, aim to fully support their evolving development. Each child brings with him or her unique experiences and it from these that we hope to build meaningful learning endeavors.

We believe children construct knowledge within a social context, in collaboration with others. As such, our primary goal for Kindergarten is for children, teachers, and parents to work in partnership to develop ideas and topics that are meaningful and relevant to the children. Teachers create rich experiences to support the exploration, discovery, and extension of children's knowledge and theories as it is related to such topics, as well as to those spontaneous "teachable moments" that arise throughout the course of a day. These experiences are developed based on the understanding that children have many ways in which they express themselves and each of these needs to be fostered and respected. Through this partnership, with children, parents and teachers, our goal is to support the development of learning skills including resourcefulness, problem solving, critical thinking and autonomy. It is our belief that these are integral components of a successful and enjoyable journey of life-long learning.

In our kindergarten environment, we strive to create diverse, enriching, learning opportunities for our community of young learners. In our efforts to do so, we have established a flexible schedule, which includes a balance of large and small group experiences, teacher and child-initiated activities and opportunities for individualized instruction. Our environment has been created to encourage the development of autonomy among children while at the same time providing teacher support, assistance and guidance as they face new challenges in their learning endeavors. Interaction among children is encouraged and facilitated as we see this as critical to the construction of knowledge.

The availability of a variety of media in our classroom allows children to explore the many facets of learning and to integrate their experiences in ways that are truly meaningful. There are multiple opportunities for children to experiment with and extend early literacy and math skills, as well as to develop an appreciation and understanding of science and the arts. Revisitation of experiences is critical to the success of meaning making as well as to the learning process in general. Therefore, we allow a significant amount of time for the children to repeat and extend their involvement in activities. This includes encouraging the extension of activities at home and the reverse, bringing home activities to school. We appreciate the thoughts, talents and interests of parents and urge them to share them with us throughout our year together.

In our community, children will work towards becoming more autonomous an responsible in their learning endeavors. As children work with one another to solve problems, they will develop and strengthen critical thinking skills and become resourceful learners. In their efforts to resolve conflicts, children will utilize collaboration, negotiation, and compromise. By doing so, they will develop an appreciation of thoughts, opinions, and ideas of others. They will develop an appreciation of diversity and culture among themselves, which they will then be able to generalize to the community outside of our school. Children will support and encourage one another leading to the development of strong relationships and the establishment of a community in which children feel comfortable expressing themselves and taking risks. Children will develop an enthusiasm and excitement for learning that will remain with them on their life-long journey of learning.