PHILOSOPHY

Our school environment is built around two main ideas: community and language. The nursery school is the child's first community outside of the family. Our job is to guide children in learning how to be effective members of a group while maintaining their own individuality. We believe that the key to this critical life skill is language.

We offer a rich variety of materials and activities that encourage self-expression and support the children's growing abilities to make choices. Teachers help children to express their wishes and feelings by talking about them and by dictating letters and stories.

Conflict resolution skills are a major component of our curriculum. We guide children in learning how to listen to each other's feelings and ideas and work together to create solutions that work for everyone involved.

Columbus Park West is dedicated to creating a healthy environment in which children can grow. We believe that the key to cognitive and social development and to general mental health is language. Children growing up in New York City are surrounded by a very stimulating world. They benefit most from opportunities around them if they know how to talk about what they see and what they feel. And practice in talking about the world around them and about their feelings enables children to cope with the more challenging aspects of the world they live in. We work closely with parents and support and respect their role as the primary adults in the lives of young children.

The emphasis of our program is developmental. We encourage children to explore and the world and express their own discoveries in many ways, including imaginative play, art, block building, social interaction, and physical activity. Classroom activities are appropriate to the children's stages of development. At three, children are beginning to play cooperatively and are learning to negotiate the world more independently. Your three-year-old is learning how to put on her coat, turn on the water faucet, pour her own juice. She has begun to know how to choose activities that will be rewarding to her, how to ask someone else to play, how to make her needs and wishes known. Your four-year-old will continue to expand on these competencies and will also be learning how to play in a larger group of children, how to effectively express his own ideas while also integrating the ideas of others. He will begin to gain satisfaction from feeling part of a group and therefore be responsive to full-group projects led by an adult. He will begin to ask questions about writing and spelling and will increasingly use mathematical concepts to make sense of his world.

SEPARATION
We are sensitive to separation issues. We begin each school year with a phase-in period that includes small groups and shorter hours. We work individually with parents and their children to ease the separation, acknowledging and talking about the feelings of both the child and the parents.