Curriculum and School Programs
Infant Center
Parenting can be both difficult and rewarding. But it can be much more difficult trusting other people with your child while you’re away. We understand this because we’re parents too. It is our policy to treat our Stars with the same love and attentiveness as we give our own children at home. With a 4:1 ratio, we have crafted a learning environment that is inviting, warm, and supportive for infants.
This learning environment includes, but not limited to:
Flexibility: For your convenience, you can visit your child whenever you want. We also have a quiet and secluded breastfeeding area in which mothers can nurse and bond with their children. Finally, we understand that every family is different and each child is unique. Our teachers will work closely with you to ensure we are giving the best possible care to your Star.
Warmth: We believe that school should feel safe and comfortable. We make it feel like home by receiving our Stars with smiles, hugs, kind words, and fun music. By the end of the day, they are leaving us with Happy Goodbye stickers, kind words, smiles, and warm hugs. Parents often comment that their children have a hard time leaving us.
Cleanliness: Many other schools are not clean and, as a result, their children and teachers are needlessly exposed to illness-causing germs. At our school, we are strict about cleanliness. We take preventative measures against germs by:
a. always sanitizing every object on the infant room with anti-bacterial wipes and UV light
b. always labeling bottles with names and dates
c. cleaning the carpets weekly
d. NEVER allowing infants to share cribs
e. always performing NAEYC approved health checks everyday
f. always making sure that utensils are individually used and labeled.
Safety
We maintain all safety standards mandated by state and federal licensing. In contrast to other schools, we keep our ratios low to ensure that every child has our full attention at all times.
Daily Activities
We use language and social interaction as our first mental tools. Infancy is within the sensorimotor stage, in which social interaction between caretaker and infant is extremely important for the child’s brain development. We help our Stars navigate through this stage by constantly interacting with them. We choose daily activities selected in Reggio-inspired, Montessori, and Waldorf classrooms. These activities are designed to challenge infants to reach the next stage in their development. Some of these activities include, but not limited to:
a. Reading stories
b. Singing songs in English, Spanish, and Arabic.
c. Making art with different materials
d. Sensory activities
e. Fine motor activities
f. Gross motor activities
Toddler Center
At 12 months of age, children enter toddlerhood. Toddlerhood is between 12-36 months of age. At this stage, the child’s self-concept is emerging. She begins to realize that she is an individual distinct from others. She begins exploring her self-concept by saying “no” to most commands that parents issue. For many adults, toddlerhood can be a test of wits and patience. Some have even labeled it “the terrible twos.”
Don’t worry. We’re here to help.
We have carefully designed a safe, loving, and stimulating environment that will help toddlers master their next set of mental tools: self-regulation and manipulating objects. Our toddler classroom has a 4:1 ratio, which affords every toddler individualized attention.
Self-Regulation
One way we assist toddlers with self-regulation is by modeling good behaviors for them. From our years of experience, we have found that children observe and internalize the qualities shown by their caretakers. All of our teachers have been carefully selected for their warmth and patience, which our Stars will begin using in their relationships with others.
Furthermore, our teachers and Stars regularly partake in Montessori practical life activities together. These activities include,
but not limited to, watering plants, peeling and cutting bananas, and arranging flowers. These activities emphasize care of self, care of the environment, control of movement, and grace and courtesy. They help toddlers develop self-regulation, which is built on order, concentration, and independence.
Manipulation of objects
We assist toddlers in using different objects known as loose parts because studies have shown their importance for brain development. Among other benefits, loose parts:
- Train the attention center of the brain, which builds its capacity to learn activates the same areas of the brain responsible for language
- Challenges multiple brain systems to integrate and function properly
- Builds children’s capacity for happiness, creativity, peak performance, development of talent, productivity, and self-esteem
Apart from self-regulation and loose parts activities, we have a toddler curriculum designed to stimulate imagination, numerical and literary awareness. Through science experiments, art, finger plays, songs and dance, we introduce colors, numbers, shapes, and the alphabet.
Meals
Many other schools serve overly processed foods to cut business costs and, as a result, they compromise the children’s well-being. In contrast, we serve healthy, balanced meals that are well above standard. These different foods, rich in nutrition and taste, are freshly prepared in our kitchen everyday. We have a cook on site who can accommodate children with allergies. Examples of our menu include:
Breakfast
Day 1: cheesy scrambled eggs with spinach & whole grain toast
Day 2: Chorizo, egg, and potato burritos wrapped with whole grain tortilla, served with a cup of 1% milk.
Lunch
Day 1: Turkey Penne Pasta, served with peas, fruit, and a cup of 1% milk
Day 2: Battered tilapia served with quinoa and mixed vegetables.
Snack
Day 1: Whole-grain raisin bread spread with cream cheese, served with a cup of 100% juice.
Day 2: Cucumber slices dipped in ranch dressing, served with a cup of water
Preschool/Pre-K
By the time our Stars reach preschool and pre-K, they are ready for our curriculum that focuses on leadership and the prerequisite knowledge needed to pass the AABL test.
Preschool / Pre-K
By the time our Stars reach preschool and pre-K, they are ready for our curriculum that focuses on leadership and the prerequisite knowledge needed to pass the AABL test.
Leadership
The 21st century needs innovators. It needs future leaders who will one day have the courage, knowledge, and curiosity to create new technologies that will create new jobs and clean the planet. The world will need Stars. Our curriculum will help them develop the qualities of innovators, which include, but not limited to: courage, creative problem-solving resilience, compassion, self-confidence, risk-taking, and responsibility for oneself and team.
Our method is to encourage Stars to work together in small teams on projects of their interests. In the process of completing projects, our teachers will be challenge them to use all of their resourcefulness to resolve conflicts, explore possibilities, creatively solve problems, and find new improvements to completed projects. Our teachers will also challenge them to learn how to fail and persevere until a solution is found, as this is the mindset shared by leading scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.
By the time our children promote to kindergarten, they will be able to
1. ask good questions and communicate their thoughts and feelings confidently
2. examine a problem from different perspectives
3. work with a team to solve an ill-defined problem
4. make a hypothesis, experiment, and draw a conclusion
5. focus and self-regulate behavior
6. take on new challenges without fear of failure
7. make connections between two or more unrelated things to produce an original idea
8. direct their own learning
AABL Test
The AABL Test is a popular test for soon-to-be kindergarteners seeking admission into some of San Diego’s most prestigious private schools. It assesses a child’s verbal and quantitative reasoning, early literacy, and mathematical ability. We prepare our Stars for the AABL test, intending for them to excel within gifted academic programs found in many public and private schools.
Upon promotion to kindergarten, our Stars will know how to:
1. Recognize and name numbers.
2. Count and skip count.
3. Determine ordinal position.
4. Add and subtract.
5. Identify basic shapes.
6. Recognize common measurement tools.
1. Blend phonemes into words and recognize phonemes in isolation.
2. Manipulate phonemes.
3. Rhyme and letter–sound knowledge.
4. Decode words.
5. Read words and sentences.
1. Recognize and apply addition, subtraction, or another numerical concept.
2. Infer or deduce solutions to novel problems.
3. Compare and contrast quantities.
4. Identify shapes and patterns.
1. Reason and solve problems that are presented in pictures.
2. Analyze relationships between two different ideas presented in pictures by identifying their shared characteristics.
3. Make comparisons and group various objects based on their common properties.
4. Extract explicit information to infer and interpret situations
5. Use deductive reasoning.