about us

Sprogs Garden Playschool is proud to offer the “Garden Playschool” approach to early childhood care and education. A Garden Playschool offers a progressive and comprehensive approach to early years care and education that is based upon a large body of multidisciplinary research and knowledge in the field. This ecelectic approach integrates ideas from the most influential theorists in the field such as Piaget, Dewey, Ainsworth, Vygotsky and Gardner to the most respected early years approaches of Reggio Emilia, Montessori, and High Scope to early years curriculum documents from countries around the world. By not adhering to any single resource or program, this approach can be flexible enough to adapt to the school community while also being free to incorporate the cumulative and most up to date research, theory, and knowledge in relevant fields of study from around the world. This includes incorporating knowledge gained from the Science of Early Child Development - a contemporary field of study that focuses on consolidating research in neuroscience, biology, medicine, and developmental psychology as it relates to how best to care for and promote the healthy development and well-being of our youngest children. Since opening our doors in February of 2018, the provision of extensive professional learning and ongoing coaching opportunities for our teachers along with many parent presentations have been essential to the effective realization of our Garden Playschool approach and in creating a place where children can thrive and be happy!

Flexible Attendance Options

To meet the individual needs and preferences of our students and their families

High Quality Program Setting

Spacious extensively resourced and carefully prepared classrooms and a beautiful garden playground provide a calm, stimulating and richly resourced environment

Qualified Professional Teachers

A Garden Playschool encourages professional learning, dialogue, reflection, and collaboration.

Parents are Welcome, Valued & Supported

We promote mutually supportive, trusting and collaborative relationships between teachers and parents.

PARENTS AS PARTNERS

In our Garden Playschool, Approach, home and school are the two most important worlds in a young child’s life and so the quality of the relationship between these two worlds has a powerful influence on the child’s healthy development and wellbeing.  A Garden Playschool Approach holds that:

• Parents are valued!  The teachers care about creating an environment that is inclusive to families and make it a priority to get to know the families of each child in their care.

• Parents are experts!  While teachers are experts in the field of early childhood care and education, parents are viewed as experts on their own child. When you are in the process of enrolling your child, we will ask you to write a letter describing your child and any important information you would like the teacher to know about your child. This serves as the starting point for a parent-teacher relationship that values parent input and views open communication and understanding as essential to the quality and consistency of care for the child. 

• Parents are informed!  We offer both formal and informal opportunities for parent-teacher communication about each child’s learning, experiences and responses to the program. Formal opportunities will include regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences and parent presentations, sharing of student portfolios, presentation of documentation boards displaying experiences, invitations to a variety of classroom activities/celebrations, newsletters, and electronic communications (both group and individualized).

• Parents are welcome!  Opportunities for interested parents to become involved are numerous such as volunteering in the classroom, guest visits, field trips, reading with children, attending parent workshops/presentations, and planning and/or attending community events. We are receptive to parent suggestions of ways that they might like to become involved with their child’s experiences with us either from home or in the school.

• Parents and Families are unique! Our teachers will work together with families over time to build mutually supportive relationships that are responsive and therefore individualized to best meet the needs, goals and preferences of each child and his or her family. 

YOUNG CHILDREN AND NATURE

In a Garden Playschool Approach, the value of children interacting with, exploring and experiencing nature with their five senses is an integral part of the program philosophy. Our program provides opportunities for children to freely explore nature and to engage in child-initiated and teacher-supported inquiry about the natural world. This emphasis on nature learning is guided by the shorter term goal of providing children with rich experiences in an area that naturally fascinates them while also achieving the longer term goal of reinforcing in children a life-long love for and appreciation of the natural world. We hope that this appreciation will serve as a motivating force for taking action to protect and take care of our planet throughout the child’s life. In a designated gardening area next to our bunnies, the children plant and care for seeds. We have produced carrots, cucumbers, avocados, and even a watermelon in addition to the mangos from our larger garden to give to our bunnies to enjoy.

Visiting the bunnies is a popular activity and the children enjoy observing the bunnies in an intentionally created large area that has been created to closely mimic the natural habitat of bunnies rather than have the bunnies in cages. In our Garden Playschool Approach, we know that children benefit when they learn from the example of their school that people have an important responsibility to ensure the best possible environment for animals in their care, including the provision of food, water, space, shelter, and companionship. Our Bunny Schedule Chart is a meaningful use of literacy that is embedded in context and authenticity for the children because we are using print to help us to meet this responsibility each day for the bunnies in our care. Also, in this type of set-up, the children have the privilege of observing the natural behaviors of bunnies such as burrowing, hopping, digging, drinking, cleaning each other and eating plants which promotes a lifelong appreciation of animals and the natural world.

In a Garden Playschool Approach, children are recognized as competent learners and natural scientists intrinsically motivated to figure out their world together. Interested teachers support, guide and encourage the children as they delight in and communicate together about new discoveries and learning.  

The following innate propensities of young children are recognized, valued, celebrated, supported and facilitated in our Garden Playschool Approach:

sustainability/ environmental practices

We will strive to empower the children to drive change and improve their environmental awareness, becoming little ambassadors of our planet. Children will be encouraged to create ‘little nature reserves’ within the school grounds, encouraging Biodiversity. They will learn about energy generation and conservation, water conservation techniques, waste management - reduce, reduce, reduce then reuse and recycle, which will all be taught by example as the children also learn about these things from our facility.

Healthy living will be encouraged through involving the children in organic gardening and farming where they will have the chance to eat what they grow. The garden has a number of fruit trees including guinep, mango, avocado and children will be planting and tending to tomatoes, pumpkins, melons etc. Children will abe encouraged to be physically active throughout the day, setting the foundations for an active life.