The Heart of Our Learning
At Kids By The Sea, we believe children learn best when we engage their hearts and minds. We want them to leave Kids By The Sea with confidence in their abilities, a great love of learning, and an understanding of the process of asking questions, investigating topics deeply, and creating meaning. To cultivate this type of learning, we use a project-based and play based approach to learning with an emphasis on spending most of our time outdoors.
Play
We believe that children learn best through play. Tragically to us, it feels as if we are losing true play from so many facets of childhood. Many preschools will say they are play based, but it is important to follow up and ask how they define play. At KBTS, play must be self-directed and self-chosen. So, if a teacher stands up at the front of a classroom and says, “Now we are all going to play this,” it can be fun and valuable, but it isn’t play because it isn’t self-directed or self-chosen.
Additionally, when teachers set up centers and childrena rotate through them, taking part in predetermined activities, these activities can again be fun and valuable, but they are not self-directed and self-chosen so they are not play.
Through true play, children learn not only content in specific subject areas like math and language and literacy but also learning dispositions such as creativity, initiative, the ability to make a plan and carry it out, to overcome obstacles, to collaborate, and so much more.
Project-Based Learning
We believe that to create an ideal preschool curriculum, there must be a quality child directed time, which for us is play, and a quality teacher directed time, which for us is project based learning. Children will take part in four projects in a school year: a project based around building community, a giving project, a building project, and an art-focused project. Each project begins with a question, followed by investigations to learn about how to answer the question, and ending with a final product and exhibition to celebrate the children' s learning as a community.
Outdoor Classroom
At Kids By The Sea, it is of utmost importance to us that children spend large amounts of time every single day outdoors. We intentionally design our outdoor spaces to provide many opportunities for children to engage and interact in diverse ways. We believe that, while gross motor play should always be available outside, children should also have the opportunity to engage in other areas. So each area that we have inside, we also have outside- the materials just differ slightly. For example, each classroom has dramatic play, art, building, and sensory areas both inside and outside. Indoors our block areas have wooden unit blocks, and small loose parts such as tiles, little wooden cubes, and fabric samples, while outside the building area has huge wooden blocks, milk crates, and tires. In each area the children are building, but their experience is very different.
