Operation Information

Ages

11 months to 5 years old

Phone #

206-326-0672

Email

petahvillageschild@gmail.com

Curriculum

The Petah Villages is inspired by Reggio Emilio which believes that Relationships are at the very heart of our work. This philosophy is reflected in an environment that encircles the child with three “teachers,” . The first teacher—the parent—takes on the role of active partner and guide in the education of the child. The second is the classroom teacher. Our teachers often work in pairs, the classroom teacher assumes the role of researcher and intentionally engages children in meaningful work and conversation. The third teacher is the environment—a setting designed to be not only functional but also beautiful and reflective of the child’s learning. It is the child’s relationship with parent, teacher, and environment that ignites learning.

We believe children construct their own knowledge through a carefully planned curriculum that engages and builds upon the child’s current knowledge, recognizing that knowledge cannot simply be provided for the child. The curriculum, often emergent in nature, is based on the interests of the children. When learning is the product of the child’s guided construction rather than simply the teacher’s transmission and the child’s absorption, learning becomes individualized. Most important, teaching becomes a two-way relationship in which the teacher’s understanding of the child is just as important as the child’s understanding of the teacher.

We believe that Emergent Curriculum is not a free-for-all. It requires that our teachers actively seek out and chase the interests of the children. This kind of teaching environment demands a high degree of trust in the teacher’s creative abilities and envisions an image of the child as someone actively seeking knowledge. It is a perspective that turns structured curriculum, with predetermined outcomes, on its head. We believe that standardized curriculums that are designed to replicate outcomes often eliminates all possibility of spontaneous inquiry, stealing potential moments of learning from students and teachers in a cookie-cutter approach to education in the classroom. Given the diversity of the children we teach, accepting a canned recipe for teaching, evaluation, and assessment is problematic at best. Each child we teach is unique, requiring us to use our own judgment, instead of rules, to guide our teaching practice. To teach well, as educators we must ensure that creativity and innovation are always present. Although good teaching requires organization and routines, it is never inflexible and rarely routine. It dances with surprise. It pursues wonder. It finds joy at every turn.

Our flexible indoor and outdoor environments allow our teachers to be responsive to the interests of the children, freeing them to construct knowledge together.

For example, a teacher may conduct an outdoor spider investigation with a child. In an inflexible environment, the teacher could simply leave behind the children’s interest in spiders, limiting the activity to the playground. Instead, The Petah Villages educators would encourage the children to draw what they observe and to share those observations and drawings during class circle time. To be sure their curiosity and interested were fostered, the teachers would already have an activity planned for the daily circle time; they set it aside to pursue knowledge on a subject that has sparked the children’s imaginations. One of the classroom teachers, Kristine Lundquist, describes what happened next.

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