Gate City uses The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood for its preschool and infant/toddler educational programs. Our four-year old classrooms at Gate City Day Nursery Association are funded through Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, Georgia Lottery Pre-K program. You can find more information about the Georgia Pre-K Program through their website: http://www.decal.state.ga.us
The philosophy behind out program and curriculum is that young children learn best by doing. Learning is not just repeating what someone else says; it requires active thinking and experimenting to find out how things work, and to learn firsthand about the world we live in.
In their early years, children explore the world around them by using all their senses (touching, tasting, listening, smelling and looking). In using real materials such as blocks and trying out their ideas, children learn about sizes, shapes, and colors, and they notice relationships between things.
In time, they learn to use one object to stand for another. This is the beginning of symbolic thinking. For example, they might pretend a stick is an airplane or a block is a hamburger. These early symbols—the stick and the block—are similar in shape to the objects they represent. Gradually children become more and more able to use abstract symbols like words to describe their thoughts and feelings. They learn to “read” pictures which are symbols of real people, places, and things. This exciting development in symbolic thinking takes place during the preschool years as children play.
Play provides the foundation for academic or “school” learning. It is the preparation children need before they learn highly abstract symbols such as letters (which are symbols for number concepts). Play enables us to achieve the key goals of our early childhood curriculum. Play is the work of young children.
