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• Emotional and Social Development - this is the first focus and priority in this program.
• Self-care essentials, meaning learning a healthy sense of self and how to take care of our selves and others.
  
• Educational Development with a strong Waldorf influence.
• The program will offer various simple introductions in different languages: English, French, German & Dutch.

How Does the Preschool & Daycare Combo work?

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The preschool will provide academics and will specialize in the following:

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The preschool is a stepping stone to prepare children for the Kindergarten structure and academics. Because we have younger preschoolers with a shorter attention span mixed with older preschoolers, the younger ones will be encouraged to participate during the preschool program but will be given space to go off for free play if needed.  Activities will be adapted to the different ages.

What does the day look like?

Preschool exists of 2 hours of preschool, two times a day - 4 hours of preschool in total, versus 2-3 hours normal preschool hours.

In the morning after parents drop off their children, children will have free play, eat their breakfast or have downtime to slowly start the day, if needed. In the morning, the first two hours will allow for interactive activities where the youngest ones can participate in the program or at least be present during the program.  In the afternoon we will have our second stretch of the program, this will be filled with preschool academics (numbers - ABC - science - craft - focused play centers) that are more complex and need increased focusing skills. During this time, little ones will be napping.  

After 3:00 pm the schedule will fall back to daycare and after-school care. This will involve snack time, indoor play, going outside and downtime before going home. On the website, you will find a link to get a further visualization of the preschool and daycare schedule. The website will provide more details later on. 

1. Emotional and Social Development
   
   Why still include babies?
   
   Momentarily there is one younger child of 1.5 years old that will continue in the program. It will be assessed in the future how favorable this is. If this works well then I will continue this in the future.
   
   Perhaps you may have heard of the Roots of Empathy Program, a classroom program that claims to have a dramatic effect in reducing levels of aggression among school children, by raising social/emotional competence and increasing empathy. The idea of Roots of Empathy is very basic. Children will learn based on observation and interaction with a baby, how a baby grows and changes. They learn by observing several different emotions (sad, happy, hungry) conveyed by the baby that they may not recognize as easily in children their own age. They also learn how babies need to be cared for and nurtured. This would be naturally applied within this program.
   
   Over the years I enjoyed observing my younger day home children adore and look up to the bigger children (feeling ‘I am loved and nurtured’). Simultaneously the older children love to nurture and take care of the little ones; learning responsibility and leadership (feeling ‘I am big’). The ages in the middle are the inter-graders that transfer from being little to becoming big leaders (feeling ‘I want to be big’).  It is such a beautiful transformation to see children learn and care for each other. Would I do one specific age group, this would not transform. My experience of having different ages works perfectly.
   
   Older children love to help little ones eat, help bring them to bed and sing a lullaby. Teaching them to help little ones, instills compassion, empathy, understanding, love, care, responsibility, and leadership. But most of all this will help to build a good sense of self. It is a great advantage to have a good sense of self and know how to stand in the world. We should not underestimate how we can playfully instill these skills in our young children. It is said that personality traits are set as early as the age of three. Having some good sense of self and the world around them and already knowing some socials skills to manage their world around them, will give our children not only an advantage in the academic world (school) but also in the social world - our society.
   
   More on emotional and social development will be posted as the website progresses.
   
   Note: Although I have a background in Early Childhood Development, Occupational Therapy and significant experience with special needs children and children with behavioral problems,  unfortunately at this point, the program and the group setting does not allow for time and space to provide undivided individual attention to one child in this specific need.  
   
   
2. The first formal educational experience sets the stage for a lifetime of learning.
   
   Preschool is not only a time for learning social and emotional skills. Preschool is meant to prepare children for the kindergarten setting. For the most part, classroom time is devoted to learning letters, sounds, distinguishing shapes, colors and other such skills and is intended as a stepping stone to introduce children to structure and routine.
   
   Perhaps you may have also noticed lately in the media, that there is now more research out were professionals believe children are introduced too early into structured academic and competitive extra curriculum activities.  For this reason, I was drawn to the idea of integrating some of the Waldorf methods in this preschool program. The theme of Waldorf schooling is to educate the whole child; "head, heart, and hands". The curriculum is as broad as time will allow and balances academics subjects with artistic and practical activities to help create a genuine love of learning within each child.
   
   I believe in using multiple forms of intellectual development. Different children learn academically better with influences of sound, music, art, movement, hands-on, experimenting, seeing, hearing, feeling. You will find more about this later on my website.
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3. Self-care essentials
   
   ​What do I mean by self-care essentials? With this, I mean learning how to take good care of our self. Our body, our mind, our feelings. For example meditation - by learning playful breathing techniques, this helps us to feel calm and in turn, this helps us to identify when we feel sad, mad or happy and how we can let our feelings out in different ways.
   
   Further, we are learning about the food we are eating, why we are eating these foods and what the food is doing for our body? Why we do exercises and what kind of exercises we can do? That even though exercises may make our body feel tired it makes us feel good at the same time. 
   
   All together this will give our children a better understanding of what our body is feeling and what we can do to make our body and mind feel better.  We will practice this throughout the day but also in activities and themes. For example one of our themes is “my five senses” (as well as additional senses such as gut feelings and intuitive senses). Playful yoga and meditation will also be integrated for our little ones.  
   
   
4. Languages: Learning a language broadens kids' views of the world.
   
   Learning a language is a wonderful opportunity for kids to broaden their view of the world. Children’s full language development starts around the age of three and this is the time when they easily pick up multiple languages. It is not my intention to give them a full second language but merely to give them the understanding of multiple languages and cultures. Learning to speak, (read, write), listen and think in another way; to explore and appreciate a language and its culture.  Along with the languages, we will have themes of different cultures.