Welcome to the Child Development Center

The Center is committed to providing and a quality learning environment that is respectful and inclusive of all young children and their families, students and community families, and dedicated to supporting the early education teachers, staff, students, and the higher education community in their pursuit of research and professional development.

Philosophy

Recognizing the family is the child’s first teacher, we believe in partnership with the child and their family is essential and healthy. Integral to our philosophy is recognizing that children are competent learners who develop socially, emotionally, physically, creatively, and cognitively in an authentic learning environment.

We believe

• children develop optimally within a community of trusting relationships in a warm, safe and nurturing environment.
• children are born as competent individuals, with an innate curiosity and healthy desire to learn, and they construct their understanding of the world through their own interactions with peers, adults, and materials.
• children learn best in small groups with a trusting and responsive primary caregiver in a pattern of a continuity of care.
• a quality learning environment that is natural, flexible, and emergent according to a child’s interests and needs support a child’s integrated development.

Our curriculum is play-based, hands-on, and emergent to the children's needs and interests. We respond and reciprocate to the unique needs and interests of children in a developmentally relevant manner.

The teaching philosophy is based on the Constructivist theory. In this point of view, the growth lies in part within the maturing individual child, and it also occurs in part as a result of the interaction between the child, the environment, and the people to whom the child relates.

Our teachers' roles are intentional in their guiding, questioning, and empowering, in order for the child to learn by constructing or reconstructing what he knows as he encounters a variety of experiences and people who widen and enrich his knowledge.

In the same way, the "Reggio-Emilia" approach (an Italian-derived Constructivist method) will be actively implemented by the teaching staff. We see the child as a unique creation---strong, competent, capable of constructing his own thoughts and ideas, and having great potential to offer the world around him.

In the "Reggio Emilia" Approach, our teachers become a compass that may point a child to a particular direction, and education is seen as an ever-developing process that cannot be predetermined because it emerges bit by bit. We carry out short-term as well as long-term projects to encourage this building of their curiosity and knowledge into levels of discovery and mastery.