Grizzly Bears
The most important skills learned in pre-school are about building relationships, following direction and self expression.
Ages
4-5 years
Class Size
Up to 20, 1:10 teacher-to-child ratio
In our Grizzly Bear classroom, we strive to provide a safe, happy, stimulating, caring and fun environment in which your child will develop physically, mentally, socially and emotionally.
Our balanced approach to early childhood education brings together elements of The Creative Curriculum® play-based philosophy and features multi-sensory lessons in the areas of literacy, math and letter formation.
By incorporating exploration of the indoor and outdoor environments, and exposure to a variety of materials, we ensure that the children have opportunities to engage in discovery play and targeted learning activities.
At Little Beginnings, we create a strong foundation from year to year as we help move your child towards social, emotional and pre-academic Kindergarten Readiness. Through multi-sensory activities, engaging materials and responsiveness to children’s interests, we support them in becoming enthusiastic lifelong learners.
We utilize a child-driven, play-based approach to teach age-appropriate curriculum. This means that we utilize the children’s interests to design lesson plans; consequently, no two years look the same for a particular age group. Teachers plan activities and investigations based on the children’s interest and passion as the year progresses. For example, one year the Grizzly Bears class took an interest in being teachers. The class launched a new unit within the schedule each day to allow each child a rotation to become the teacher for the day. As the teacher, the students honed their leadership skills by deciding on an activity and implementing it for their peers. The children’s ideas included reading stories to their peers (reading/language skills), creating games (problem solving, emotional intelligence), dancing and “big body play” (motor development). They even reveled in utilizing their big-kid voices to give directions and help friends to listen and follow directions (social and emotional intelligence).
The benefit of this approach is that it engages children utilizing their interests, encourages curiosity, fosters a love of learning, and teaches emotional intelligence and problem solving — all through play!