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From the first days of kindergarten and throughout the Lower Elementary years, our children enjoy encouragement, freedom and an orderly environment that enables each to experience schooling as a positive and personally affirming experience – confirming and reinforcing our children’s natural love of learning.
A Child-Centered Educational Process
The child is at the center of the educational process at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan.
- All learning begins from the child, originating in the child’s prior experiences, understandings, and questions and proceeding outward, linking up with new, challenging experiences.
- All learning is driven by the child’s natural curiosity, by the need to make meaning out of daily experiences in his or her physical and social environment. Observing what happens, the child reflects on it, asks questions, and seeks to formulate answers.
- All learning culminates in the child’s increasing competence to understand what he or she only vaguely understood before, and to do what he or she could almost, but not quite, do before
Each child is unique in personality, temperament, learning style, background, and interests. While all children go through the same steps of the learning process, they do not do so in the same way or at the same time. One of the teacher’s tasks is to recognize and provide for each child’s individuality, while at the same time maximizing the opportunities children have for social learning from each other.
Each child is a whole person, with mind, heart, spirit, and hands. To educate the whole child, we strive to devise learning experiences that touch on all of these domains. In addition, because the domains are interrelated, we help children make connections across domains and subject-matter disciplines.
A Safe and Stimulating Environment
In the Lower Elementary years of kindergarten, first, and second grade, play is an important vehicle for children’s learning, as well as a reflection of their learning. Play provides a safe context for children to function on the edge of their developing capacities to use language, take on new social roles, attempt novel or challenging tasks, and solve complex problems. They learn serious things through play; it’s pleasurable for them to work.
Children develop and learn best in a community in which they feel safe, valued, and secure. Therefore, an important task of the Lower Elementary division is to help each child become part of a kind and caring community of adults and children who enjoy positive and consistent relationships with each other.
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