Early Childhood

Children enter the world with a sense of wonder and trust, which inspires our teachers to meet them with reverence, joy, and a deep interest in discovering who they are. Working from wisdom steeped in research and years of child observation, the teachers in our private Nursery and Kindergarten programs seek the individuality of each child. Given a nurturing and supportive environment, the children’s abilities begin to reveal themselves. In early childhood, children learn best through play, exploration, and imitation.

Our Early Childhood programs are based in outdoor play and work. Interspersed with time in warm, home-like classrooms, explorations in farmland, field, and forest are at the core of our activities. Everywhere they go on our 11-acre campus, children in Green Meadow’s private preschool programs are welcomed into learning environments that nourish their senses.

Our children benefit from a rich variety of outdoor spaces. In addition to our beautiful playground, they experience the natural wonders of the farm, fields, forest, garden, pond, and woodland stream, all right outside the doors of our classrooms.

Rain or shine, our children spend time outdoors each day, developing strong, healthy bodies and expanding their sensory experiences. Depending on the time of year, children sled down snowy hills, climb rocks in the Rocky Dell, and balance on fallen trees in the Fairy Woods. Such activities foster a lifelong respect for the earth and a deep appreciation for nature’s bounty.

At the heart of our Early Childhood program is our understanding that self-initiated play is critical to healthy development. As soon as children learn something new, they start to play with their new capacities, practicing and testing their skills until they tackle more and more difficult tasks. Therefore, ample time for creative indoor and outdoor play is part of each morning.

Open-ended toys made from natural materials, like silk scarves, knitted wool puppets, wooden blocks, and acorns collected from nature walks, nourish the child’s developing senses. With these natural items, children flex their creative muscles and imaginative capacities, and further develop their emerging fine motor skills. Moveable structures that they can explore help develop gross motor coordination. We believe that creative play is the child’s most important developmental tool, whether to discover new skills, work with experiences they have had, or express emotions.

Young children come to know and understand the world around them though movement. In addition to ample outdoor time every day, our Nursery and Kindergarten circle time lets the children exercise their joy of movement, while stimulating their imagination. Woven out of archetypal activities of life and experiences of nature, the songs of our circles nourish the child’s language development, invoke their natural delight in singing, and invite them to participate in a shared rhythm.

Children engage in a broad range of skill building, allowing them to expand their attention and focus, improve their dexterity, and develop an appreciation for aesthetics. Painting, coloring, beeswax modeling, wet-wool felting, sewing, and finger knitting are a few examples of artistic opportunities in our program.

Practical activities include snack preparation, washing and chopping vegetables, baking bread, caring for the environment, watering plants, polishing toys, mending, and making playthings. Collecting kindling for an outdoor fire on a winter morning, gardening in Fall and Spring, and hiking across the stream and through the orchard build strength, agility, and social skills. These practical experiences are carried out with as much independence by the children as possible. Working with their hands provides a foundation for focused attention, critical thinking and problem solving, and allows children the ability to create objects of beauty and function.

When children listen to stories, they develop an ability to tune into, remember, and sequence events. They can pick up the subtleties of characterization, and, most importantly, imagine. Countering the artificial noise of electronic stories and digital media, our teachers practice the arts of storytelling and puppetry. Creative adults inspire the same qualities in the children around them. The teller’s intonation, gestures, and expressions support the children’s growing vocabulary, listening comprehension, and attention span. We encourage them to begin to “think the pictures”, creating a strong foundation for literacy skills.