Week 4 Plans Are Now In Review with the County

This week is very exciting for us because all the plans are now in review with the county. We are just days away from getting a shovel into the ground. We will let you know the second that happens. In fact, you may hear us shouting from the mountaintops!

We are also thrilled that we have received a grant from the Creative Curriculum Technical Assistance Project through Child Care Services Association. This grant will allow our teachers to be given the opportunity to learn and utilize the Creative Curriculum materials in our classrooms. The Creative Curriculum is a research-based program that helps teachers plan and implement a developmentally appropriate program. There are five components in the program: How Children Develop and Learn, The Learning Environment, What Children Learn, The Teacher's Role, and The Family's Role. The five components are then applied to interest areas such as art, dramatic play, discovery, music and so on. It is meant to be a blueprint that we can interpret and incorporate into our established program, which works perfectly for us. We hope that we will learn from this, but we also feel that we will be affirmed because we are already a strong program.

One of the main objectives of The Creative Curriculum is observing children and creating curriculum that correlates with our observations. This is what we do and who we are everyday. We, of course, already knew that we were cutting edge prior to this acknowledgment. Which leads us to this week's glimpse...

GLIMPSE: The Portfolio
From our inception we have struggled with finding an appropriate way to report our daily events to our families. The idea of handing a mom or a dad a piece of paper at the end of the day listing how many "poops" or "pees" we had during the day has just never sat well with us. It is just not who we are. Instead, we have really struggled to find a way to first describe what we see, second apply it to our children developmentally, and finally to report it to the parents in a way that
is brief enough to happen every day, but also profound enough to truly capture the experiences our parents miss during the day. This has been quite a conundrum for us.

In 2007, we hired Silva Stumpf to be a lead teacher in our preschool classroom. She shared this dream of creating a better system and worked intensively with Jennifer to create what is now our portfolio. Each child is observed and measured in about thirty different rubrics that
capture social, cognitive and emotional development. How it works:

The teachers begin the year with an assessment of each child that is then updated and supported throughout the year as the teachers record their observations.

The teachers document their observations with written narrative as well as photographs.

The teachers in their team meetings discuss their observations and methods of improving their means of noticing the children's unique abilities and struggles.

We meet as a team several times a year to share our ideas school-wide.

In the end, we have developed a great starting point in our current portfolio. In the future we are planning to continue to think about new ways to SEE the children. Over the past two years we have gotten better and better at this. We can't wait to see where we take this system in
the future.

Thanks so much for reading along with us. We know that the question on everyone's mind is: Are you still on time to open in September? We want to reassure you all that as of this day no one has even suggested that we are running behind schedule.