Curriculum & Philosophy
We strongly believe in the power of play and the critical role of empowering and engaging children at their own level. While we pull inspiration from a variety of schools of thought (Waldorf, Montessori, Reggio) we do not rigidly follow any one set of educational principles. We believe in engaging in play with children and allow them to be their own directors of play. We believe in modeling, especially when it comes to navigating the social emotional skills that are core to the preschool experience. We pride ourselves on ensuring that children feel listened to and believe that this helps with children being able to express their feelings in a variety of settings.
We make plenty of space for self guided and open ended play and we also believe in the value of presenting children with engaging topics and activities. This is why we present a weekly thematic curriculum that covers a variety of topics. Some of our favorite themes have been Space Week, Neighborhood Week, Art & Artists Week, and Picnic Week.
Each week we integrate new materials and toys related to the theme into our activity tables, circle time, and art or cooking projects. Our themes give us the opportunity to practice gross and fine motor skills, flex our social emotional muscles, work on executive functioning and practice our self help skills in fresh ways. Children are never forced to engage in activities but are rather invited to participate in a craft, a baking project, a game or an activity based on these themes. If you would like to view a sample curriculum of camping week you can click here :)
Another key facet of our beliefs is celebrating diversity, no matter which thematic concept we are currently working on. We do our best to be practitioners of cultural humility and are committed to ensuring that we ourselves are constantly learning how to be better stewards of diversity. We strive to continually assess the books and items we have in our classroom to ensure that we have books and toys that are representative of the families in our communities. We will always look for ways to discuss and celebrate diversity throughout the year and are always open to feedback from our parent community on how we can better accomplish this goal.
Preschool versus Daycare - Our Intention Model
We make great efforts to advertise and promote that we are a half-day preschool and this is done with great intention. Childcare is such an important need and we really appreciate the landscape of full day schools and daycares in our area that offer extended hours to allow working parents to have access to childcare. We have always imagined Lilyposa to be a child centric “third space” for children that allows them time to flex their social emotional muscles and start learning the basics of navigating social spaces with peers while getting some familiarity with the “academic” world. We created our schedule knowing that three hours of jam packed activities is A LOT for children ages 2-5 and we know that kids usually leave us tired not only from our activities but from all the navigation that happens when sharing a space with ten other 2-5 year olds. We are short but we are “intense” and we love that kids can have a full life of play dates, hanging out at home in their jammies, or taking some time to rest and watch Bluey outside of their busy school days. We know that this model doesn’t work for everyone but appreciate that there are quite a few families who have struggled to find our model elsewhere. We regularly receive inquiries asking if we would consider a full day model but for the above and many other reasons we remain committed to the vision of what we created
Our Pre-K Year
Our thoughts around the “Pre-K” year, as with our half day model, are really intentional. Our older kids are an important part of our mixed age cohort and we recognize every child and the journey that they are on and we support them in the areas where they might need a little more help going into elementary school.
Since we are such a small group we are able to work with each kid on developmentally and age appropriate goals to make sure that we are preparing them for their next school journey. We have seen the benefit of our older kiddos taking on leadership positions "helping" out their younger friends and "teaching" them what they know. This is something special that generally only happens in mixed aged groups. We see time and time again that this relationship is very much reciprocal and our older children benefit from the mixed age group as much as our younger children. Being able to navigate being around and working with a child who is younger and might not have the skills that they have not only helps our older students with confidence, it helps them flex their muscles with patience and frustration tolerance.
Another benefit of having small groups is being able to do some extra practice with our older friends on phonics and writing practice. We of course integrate all these things into each day for all of our students. We use different materials for art to practice and strengthen hand grip, we do letter and phonics practice during circle time, play games with reading and math functions, and countless other things that we consider when creating our lesson plan. We often present additional challenges during the day that are outside of our daily lesson plan. Letter practice on boards, more complex reading challenges, and responsibilities like cleaning or helping lead a game. We say all of this while making it clear that we make sure that the older “Pre-K” kiddos do not lose their sense of play. We wish that kindergarten integrated more play and do not want kids to lose this very vital learning tool a year earlier than they already do.
With all this being said- we didn’t create our curriculum in a silo and our standards align (and frankly often exceed) to what PPS has outlined as expectations for Kindergarten readiness. If you are interested you can view two resources that we found helpful in explaining these:
PPS ABCs of Kindergarten (page 9 has bullet points of Kindergarten readiness)
A PDX Parent Article that further delves into Kindergarten (and reading) readiness
