Educational Philosophy

At Preschool of the Arts we draw our inspiration from the Reggio approach to education and from our knowledge of developmentally-appropriate educational practices. We know that children's brains are elastic and our goal is to stretch their minds and inspire them through tangible experiences and concrete learning. Piaget once stated, "Knowledge is not given to a passive observer; rather it must be constructed by the activity of the individual." Accordingly, our curriculum is based largely on students' interests and curiosities. Our children learn science, math, social studies, literacy, the arts, Judaic studies, and moral values through an integrated approach to education. Our goal is to nurture each child's personal journey towards social, emotional, and educational growth.
Therefore, our curriculum offers differentiated motivational stimuli to enhance individual growth and progress,while students engage in collaborative activities. This gives us the ability to inspire them to become lifelong learners with an insatiable quest for knowledge and understanding of their world.

We enthusiastically embrace one of the most important tenets of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education - that the environment is the third teacher. Children thrive and develop most optimally in a beautiful, natural environment that reflects their interests and work while also reflecting the ambience of home. The colors, furniture, trees, flowers, objects d'art and natural elements all contribute to the preservation of the sense of wonder, curiosity, and zeal for life innate to all children.
Above all, we prize the culture of compassion, respect, tolerance, friendship, and communal responsibility we have cultivated in our school. Through immersion in our school culture, we trust that our children will absorb these values into their developing characters and exercise them naturally as they successfully steer their way through life.

Study Methods & Skills

Preschool of the Arts strives to create an environment for the self-initiated and self-directed learning that leads to intellectual, emotional, social, and moral development. Through engaging teacher-student dialogue and multisensory materials and activities, teachers engage students' curiosity and encourage them to make discoveries about their environment. Children can often be seen working collaboratively in dyads or small groups as they exchange thoughts and ideas with their peers and teachers.
Because students' interests and curiosities determine many of the curricular themes and these themes are often revisited and expanded upon in successive years, children are actively engaged in creating, revising, and deepening their understandings. Though literacy activities and print-rich classrooms, students develop a passion for literature and begin to understand the many values and uses of printed text. Pre-math explorations and manipulatives allow children to develop understandings of numerals, shapes, patterns, measurement, and logical thinking. Science and discovery- based activities, woven throughout the curriculum, fulfill children's innate need to explore, discover, and draw their own conclusions based on observations. By developing and practicing these skills, children at Preschool of the Arts build the conceptual foundations for their academic endeavors, and beyond.

Arts Curriculum

At the cornerstone of our school is our arts program. Children are naturally creative and derive much pleasure from involvement in the arts. They learn a host of skills and acquire tremendous self-esteem when given varied opportunities to create. Because we consider art such an integral part of our program, we have appointed an atelierista - an art director who provides our children with open-ended opportunities to create. Our children use a wide array of art media including acrylic, finger, and water paints, pastels, crayons, and markers. They create their works on diverse surfaces including wood, plastic, textured papers, foam, and canvas. Generating art in a host of settings, including our beautiful art studio, their classrooms, our indoor garden, and our outdoor yard, continually invigorates our children's creative juices. As our atelierista facilitates the art process but does not impose or intrude upon it, all works our children create are unique and reflect their own efforts and creativity.
We celebrate our children's creativity by prominently and artfully displaying their work in our gallery and throughout our school. Because we believe the artistic process to be even more valuable than the final product, we accompany each work with a transcription of the child's thoughts about the piece. In addition to our visual arts program, our children enjoy weekly music and movement as well as yoga classes with instructors who possess expertise in these fields. In music and movement class the children enjoy singing songs accompanied by a range of musical instruments played by their instructor including guitar, bongo, and piano. Additionally, their teachers expose them to music of many genres including traditional, folk, and classical music. By learning about rhythm, tempo, and beat, the children become discerning listeners and develop independent musical preferences. In yoga class the children learn a variety of poses that promote body awareness, self-esteem, and social awareness while enhancing flexibility, balance, strength, and coordination. In this fast-paced world yoga offers children an outlet for reaching relaxation and calm through enjoyable, non-competitive physical activity.

Judaic Curriculum

Our children learn the customs, traditions, and moral values of Judaism. These lessons are woven naturally through all of our disciplines so that they become both a meaningful and treasured part of each child's personal milieu.
Our children eagerly anticipate holidays such as Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, Purim, and Passover and understand how to meaningfully and joyfully participate in each holiday. We regularly celebrate holidays with parents and members of the larger Chelsea community. We carefully select teachers who model and nurture Jewish values such as charity, friendship, tolerance, discipline, and respect for the environment and the rights of others. Our staff strives to instill our children with a love for the land of Israel and the Torah and pride in their Jewish identities.

Parent Partnership

We wholeheartedly embrace and encourage parental involvement in our school and understand how it enriches our program and the lives of our children. A strong home- school connection demonstrates to children that we are all working toward the same goals and makes the lessons we impart at school even more significant and enduring.
We invite parents and grandparents to become our partners in their children's education by always welcoming them into our school, including them in holiday celebrations, and encouraging them to visit classrooms to share their areas of special interest and expertise. We cherish the warm relationship we enjoy with our parents that is regularly nurtured through such programs as our parent social, family holiday and Shabbat events, Me and My Favorite Guy Day, and Moms and Muffins, to name a few. We educate parents about our unique educational philosophy and keep them abreast of activities in their children's classrooms through weekly classroom newsletters. Parents learn precisely how we weave the educational disciplines together through written descriptions of activities and photographs of their children engaged in learning throughout the day. Through newsletters, families also attain important information such as the dates of school celebrations and holiday events and news of happy occasions such as weddings, births, and student birthdays. Newsletters are our opportunity to provide parents a window into how their children spend their day at school.