Angela’s Seeds

In practical life, children practice daily life skills by preparing snacks, caring for animals and plants, setting the table, cutting vegetables for Soup Friday, kneading and baking bread, washing/cleaning dishes, and getting dressed independently. Children also practice Grace and Courtesy as they come to understand and appreciate social interactions by being polite, saying please and thank you, patience, listening, and peacefully resolving conflicts. The practical life curriculum promotes independence, supports social/emotional development and helps develop fine and gross motor skills.

Using an exploratory approach to learning, children utilize hands on activities to learn about place values, identify numerals and their quantity, subtraction, addition, multiplication, and division. They explore patterns in the classroom and out in nature. Because children are exploring concepts through tactile exploration, they are not focused on memorizing mathematical facts but rather, like a mathematician, come to gain a firm understanding of the meaning behind patterns and the way numbers interact.

Through activities like sound games and learning rhymes, children come to acquire vocabulary and develop skills needed for writing and reading. Prior to learning how to read, children learn the sounds associated to with letters, how to recognize the sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of words, and how to form words and how to write. Children use hands on materials to help them learn letter sounds, how to combine sounds, building words, write sentences, and use a pencil. Through the full combination of these skills, they prepared to learn to read when ready.

Sensorial development is refined through the exploration of materials and natural surrounds each day. Children explore the world through their senses and develop a keen sense of understanding of their surroundings with the capacity to describe their experiences – rough, smooth, prickly, soft – through touch. Sensorial learning helps children classify their surroundings and create a sense of order. It lays the foundation for understanding how to classify, sort, and discriminate skills used in mathematics.

Children learn about cultural traditions and their community through an integrated curriculum of science, geography, art, history, and music. They have the opportunity to explore difference, challenge anti-black prejudices finding beauty in light and dark, and develop a deep sense of respect for all people and living things. Space is provided to engage in handwork, like knitting, sewing, and embroidering as a means of expression and as a means to honor the traditions of our ancestors.