Staff & Teaching Techniques

Teaching Techniques

We believe that play is a child's work, so our preschool is play based. We use the Reggio Emilia philosophy that children learn best when they can take the lead and experience new things that are of interest to them. Their natural inquisitive nature will bring them deeper into areas of knowledge as long as their environment is very rich and their teachers are trained to listen, watch and assess the children. We believe that the environment is one of the best teachers in the classroom, so we strive to have a very rich environment that leads children to learn. www.mnreggio.org

We use Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory to be sure that our environment includes things that will speak to all children, no matter what their learning style. Emergent curriculum is based on allowing the children to express their interests and then having a skilled teacher set up a unit that helps the children explore those areas of interest to widen and deepen their knowledge base. http://iae-pedia.org/Howard_Gardner

We are using an Emergent Curriculum program from Early Learning Success. They have some really fun project ideas!

Assessments

We observe and assess preschool children twice during the school year and set up family conferences after the assessments have been completed. We use Emergent Curriculum www.silvertonfamilies.org/ and a combination of the Early Childhood Indicators of Progress (ECIPS) http://www.mnafee.org (search Indicators of Progress) and the Work Sampling System www.fairtest.org/ (search Work Sampling) to assess our preschool children.

Curriculum: Early Learning Success Curriculum, by Nancy Dougherty. Assessments: Focused Portfolios

Each child has their own portfolio with goals set up for them based on these assessments.

Promoting Self Regulation

For young children, we support their emerging sense of autonomy and give them plenty of choices so that they can have some control over their environment. We encourage independence and set up our environment to promote this. We help then to regulate their own emotions by helping them with their strong emotions of anger/fear/sadness or happiness.

At Hearts and Minds Preschool, we use positive guidance strategies to help your child learn to self regulate their behaviors into appropriate social behaviors. We make sure the children know why we need to set some rules for order and safety and help them understand how to follow the rules. We use positive redirection and guidance, being very specific in helping them to learn these behaviors. A sense of humor is definitely a necessity in the staff at our Preschool/Daycare!

Again, check out www.loveandlogic.com , www.parentingmojo.com and http://child.tcu.edu/ for examples of our behavioral approaches.

Building Relationships

We believe in helping children build trusting relationships, because this is so critical to learning life skills. We encourage discussions and agreements with even the youngest children. We work on empathy skills in teaching little ones that others have feelings too and that everyone's feelings count - theirs included.

We provide young learners with the words necessary to work out their stresses so they don't feel the need to physically handle their problems. When they have enough vocabulary skills, we encourage the "talking table" where children sit and talk out their problem and come up with an agreeable solution before they can return to their play.

Challenging Behaviors

Temper tantrums are dealt with by helping the child calm down. We have an Angry Bird chart with 15 choices for them to connect with so they know their acceptable behavioral options. A child may be brought to a safe place to finish their tantrum, then they are welcomed back to the play area.

Biting is a difficult situation for all involved. We understand that biting is caused by many things; teething, anger, anxiety, excitement, etc. We take care to protect others when a child exhibits biting behaviors and we work through observations to change the environment to help the biter be in control. They may be required to wear a teether during play and when a teacher sees the stress building, they can be reminded to "bite your key!". Many times just having a safe thing to bite close at hand solves the problem.

Guidance

We encourage children to play with many different materials so that we can extend their knowledge of things and they can increase their skills in many different areas. Teachers use a lot of descriptive vocabulary with children and extend their knowledge by looking for ways to teach them within their interests. Finding books on areas that interest them is one example of extending their play into knowledge.

We have some CD 's and a DVD from Love and Logic and the TBRI approach (for children overcoming trauma) available to take out of our lending library. We also have many parenting books for loan in our lending library. Please inquire!