At CCS we respect children as individuals. We honor childhood as a unique and important phase of life. We create a space that allows children to experience childhood as a time for curiosity, exploration and discovery. We provide our students with the opportunity to play. We support students as they develop tools for exploring, making meaning, developing their inner awareness and connecting with others.
Each day at CCS has a pattern and predictable rhythm that children become familiar with. This supports the development of their sense of independence and self-regulation skills within the environment. We intentionally provide learning experiences that encourage the children to work together building community and relational skills.
Our teachers work carefully and intentionally towards establishing trusting and mutually respectful relationships with the children, families and within the group as a whole. As children develop a sense of belonging to a community they build a basis for an understanding of their connection to the world around them.
Our Teachers
All of our preschool teachers are dedicated to our vision, mission, and values and play an integral part in building the community, curriculum, and future of our school. We train our teachers to bring yoga and contemplative and mindfulness practices into the preschool classroom.
Christine Algire, Head Teacher
Christine is thrilled to be a part of the Children’s Community School! Her family would say that she was born to teach; at age seven, she even requested that a chalk board be hung in her bedroom. After graduating from the University of Florida, Christine joined Teach for America because of her belief that every student should have access to a quality education. She worked in the Washington, DC public school system for seven years. She taught as a special education teacher for preschoolers with special needs for five years and most recently taught in a Head Start classroom. She is a certified general and special educator and holds a Master’s degree in Education and Human Development from George Washington University.
Christine has a passion for working with our youngest learners because she believes that in addition to a strong foundation in the more traditional academic skills, it is vitally important that students start out knowing who they are and how to work together within a community. Plus, she gets to sing with a captive audience that will laugh at her jokes and silly voices. She is always amazed at how much she grows and learns each year through teaching. She is excited by our school’s commitment to a child-centered approach that nurtures the development of the whole child.
Christine and her husband, Stephen, were married in May 2010. They recently left Washington, DC and moved to Philadelphia where Stephen is pursuing his law degree. They are enjoying discovering Philadelphia and all of the great food it has to offer. In her spare time, Christine loves to cook and has started practicing Vinyasa yoga.
Matthew Messing, Teacher
Another great joy in life is working with children. It is a privilege to be involved in the child’s process of exploration and discovery. And with this privilege comes the responsibility of nurturing the whole child as he/she constructs meaning of the world around him/her. I received a BA in General Education with a K-8 teaching certification at a small, liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, MI. I was granted the opportunity to conduct my student teaching practicum with a public Montessori school in Grand Rapids. This experience, in a nontraditional learning environment, began shaping my interest in progressive education. After graduation, I accepted a year of volunteer service in Jamaica, W.I. This year of service broadened my perspective and challenged me in amazing ways. I returned home and accepted a position as a Special Education Paraprofessional with a Reggio-inspired school in Grand Rapids. The experience of working with a committed community of educators and families has deepened my understanding and appreciation of progressive, child-centered approaches.
Alexis Wheeler, Teacher
Alexis grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania. She began working with children at age 14, the eldest cousin in a family with nine children under 7 years of age. She went on to become a face-painter at the Philadelphia Zoo and still later, a nanny.
Alexis has experience as a certified English teacher, as well as teaching at the college level where she was a peer teacher who designed and implemented lessons. She has a background in the arts but more recently has graduated with a degree in Linguistics.
She adores children and is excited to have a family of her own some day. She thinks that being silly is just as important to learning as nurturing is to development.
Alexis has recently begun studying and working as a doula because she loves mamas just as much as she loves children!
Curriculum
The Children’s Community School
Curriculum Guide: Ages Two to Four
The program at the Children’s Community School supports the development of all the necessary “academic” skills students need to be highly successful when they reach kindergarten. In addition, our teachers and our curriculum work to develop student’s confidence, curiosity, social abilities, communication, and abstract reasoning skills that will serve them as they continue to learn, explore and contribute in our world. We integrate receptive and expressive practices–yoga, mindfulness practices, art– to support the child in bringing their whole self to the educational experience.
How Children Learn:
Play provides the medium for understanding and consolidating knowledge for our children. Play is the means through which children think, feel, and create meaning.
- Children investigate and explore what they know and don’t know about their physical and social world.
- Within the relatively safe context of play, children try out roles, act out “what-ifs”, express ideas, try out solutions to problems, and simply imagine.
- Through the symbolic nature of play children lay the foundation for future, more sophisticated abstract and symbolic thinking.
- Students play with open-ended sensory materials- such as blocks, paint, clay wood, water, and sand.
- Practices such as yoga are integral to our play based curriculum, as they support the development of physical well-being, self-awareness and emotional stability. These practices enable the children to approach learning holistically, and to acquire powerful tools that support learning and development.
At The Children’s Community School we dedicate ourselves to the critical work of the preschool years when our children are actively learning to develop their Internal Selves, their Social Selves, and their Academic Selves. When planning classroom work, teachers consider the whole child and the inseparability of the social, emotional, kinestetic and intellectual components of learning and the self.
The Internal Self:
- establish independence and self help skills
- examine, evaluate and understand the effects of one’s own behavior
- regulate self control and impulse control
- take risks, try new things and be flexible
- persevere when the going gets tough
- ask for help when needed
- expressing feeling with words
- discovering what makes you feel better and what does not
- develop language, problem solving skills, and receptive practices to begin to manage frustration and conflict resolution
- respect others work, bodies and possessions
- develop skills and language to prepare for new experiences
- learn to express the internal self and experience with expressive movement, language, body oriented practices, and creative arts
- develop respect for their physical selves, their bodies, and their capacity to relate to others through gesture and movement
The Social Self:
- show their friends respect and care by being careful and caring
- be a good sport by taking turns and playing fair
- share toys, ideas and time
- listen and develop active listening skills
- be a peaceful problem solver by learning how to calm down, listen, talk and settle on solutions that take care of everyone
- join in and to make new friends
- expect and ask for respectful behavior from friends
- feel safe and strong with new friends
- respect differences, be inclusive and appreciate others as they are
- recognize and be thankful when given to by others
- develop a deep respect for their physical selves and their bodies in relation to others, as well as to build their capacity to relate to others through movement
- respect the physical differences and capacities of one another
The Academic Self:
Over the course of the year, children to learn through engagement in our social studies-based, core curriculum. Topics in this curriculum include learning about themselves, school, family, and community. Other academic areas such as literacy, mathematics and science are meaningfully integrated into students’ social studies and classroom work. The emphasize is on the the importance of active engagement in the world around us, and the skills and concepts found in reading or mathematics, for example, help us interact and make sense of our world. Within the interdisciplinary curriculum, students are given rich and varied opportunities to develop literacy and math readiness skills as well as systematic opportunities to practice them.
Social Studies Areas of Study:
- children’s growing world, from home to school, and becoming a member of the classroom community
- ourselves- exploring similarities and differences, growing and change, feelings, etc…
- families
- school community
- local community
Literacy Skills and Concepts:
- oral language development
- phonological/phonemic awareness
- alphabetic knowledge
- concepts about print
- comprehension
To develop these skills, students are given the opportunity to engage in a variety of rich oral language and early literacy experiences, including:
- storybook reading
- book discussions
- creating books
- listening comprehension
- word play
- meaningful writing
- dramatic play
- storytelling
- classroom responsibilities such as taking attendance
Math Skills and Concepts:
- develop an understanding of the meanings of whole numbers
- recognize the number of objects in small groups without counting
- begin counting and one to one correspondence
- sort, match, and compare shapes and objects
- recognize and create patterns
- use landmarks to find objects or locations
To develop these skills, students are given the opportunity to engage in a variety of rich early mathematical experiences, including:
- opportunities to enhance their natural interest in mathematics and to use it to make sense of their physical and social worlds
- manipulative work with building blocks, pattern blocks and puzzles
- games
- play with auditory, movement, and visual patterns
- classroom responsibilities such as setting up for snack (one napkin for one chair)
- play with attribute blocks and toys (for grouping and sorting)
- dramatic play
- storybook reading, songs and poems
Science Skills and Concepts:
- observe
- investigate student generated questions
- debate and discuss the investigations
- debate and discuss the evidence
- construct a beginning understanding of classification (similarities and differences)
- construct a beginning understanding of space (physical relationships, cause and effect, positions, directions and how things fit together)
- construct a beginning understanding of time (duration, predictability, and sequence)
A Typical Day
8:30-9:00- Arrival
Students arrive with their parents. Parents may want to play with students or read them a story to help them settle into the classroom environment.
9:00-9:10- Morning Meeting
The teacher guides the students in reading the morning message, taking attendance, singing, and sharing work from previous day. The teacher may also model the special project or activity of the day at this time. This is an opportunity for students to hone their noticing and listening skills, as well as to express themselves.
9:15-9:50- Work Time (Play and exploration is the work of this age group)
Students will choose to work in the block area, dress up, manipulatives, writing/drawing, water/sand table, or on a special project. Students will clean up or choose to save work. In their work they will be developing math, literacy, and academic skills and concepts.
9:55-10:15- Snack
Students, as members of our learning community, will help set up and clean up a healthy snack.
10:20-11:00 Special (Music or Movement)
In music, students are given the opportunity to play with, create and experience music with an emphasis on rhythm, rhyme, imagination and play. In movement, they will participate in structured play as they do stretching, yoga, dance and creative imitation of the world around them to promote and support motor development, listening skills, self-esteem and imagination. The integration of both quiet and active movement supports the child’s innate capacity to utilize his/her body to understand the world around them. Our movement program encourages students to have a healthy relationship with their bodies, to move creatively, to reflect and to be present.
11:00-11:30 Outside play and exploration
Part of this time may be spent with free-play outside or on the playground. Some of this time may also be spent exploring the natural world or tending to a garden.
11:40-12:00 Lunch
12:00-12:30 Story and Good-bye circle
The purpose of this gathering is to notice, listen, share, take turns, express understanding, develop vocabulary, and enjoy the shared process of learning and discovering.
12:30 Dismissal