Philosophy and Programme:

Social development
Learning areas
Extra Curricular activities
Family development

Social development

As a school we emphasize the acquisition of skills that enhance social and emotional well being and intelligence, both informally at the play ground through mediation in conflict situations and more formally in group sessions during class time. We are proud to say that our children, after 3 years in our school, become quite responsible and good conflict solvers. As staff we nurture balance friendships and provide for an atmosphere of belonging.

Our children develop self knowledge and positive attitudes such as responsibility, generosity, kindness, gratitude, love, and caring through daily participation in the social processes of a school community.

Our team of teachers model these virtues in their interactions with children and amongst themselves in the formal and the informal part of the programme. As we all know, attitudes are caught rather than taught. Our community service programme sensitizes our children to the needs of the wider community through the collection of books, clothes, and toys for the less privileged.

Learning areas

Four of the learning areas are carefully sequenced and systematically developed according to principles of development. The activities of the practical life, the sensorial, the math and language area are hands on experiences, carefully thought out to build upon previous preparation and to assist the child to move to a higher level of development i.e. motor, visual, tactile, auditory, mathematical, decoding of words… individual work is the most common in these areas, whereby each child can follow his own pace and rhythm and acquires important self knowledge and self motivation for learning.

Two other learning areas i.e The cultural and the art area are more integrated and experimental in nature. They both have a set basic curriculum, but follow a monthly theme, which develops organically and actively encourages creative expression of the children, through drawing, painting, play dough cutting and pasting activities, construction work, song and dance. Small group work is most common in these areas, providing children with the tools for cooperative work. We have a daily slot of singing and stories adapted to the interest level of each group of around 10 – 14 children.

Extra Curricular activities

The weekly cooking activities are very popular and reinforce the theme. We make porcupines with half a potato and salty sticks as quills and so on. Our Outdoors are wonderful study grounds for small wildlife with plenty of grasshoppers, chameleons, worms, caterpillars and lizards. Excellent gross motor exercise is offered through a fantastic jungle gym. A slippy slide, a big sandpit, soccer and other ball games. We have our favorite swingers, our addicted see sawers, our stone diggers, our baby avocado collectors and our chameleon searchers.

Real life play is happening in our Wendy house. Once a term we have outside fieldtrips to places such as animal farm, a nature park, a wild flower meadow, the animal welfare society, or the fire brigade.
In the reading corner, children can find a selection of books renewed each fortnight. Children can share storybooks from home. They can be thematic, or inspired by the mood of the day.

Body awareness, balance and graciousness of movement is further facilitated through dance experience accompanied by classical music. A wide choice of board games and construction material is available to our children during unstructured playtime.

Family development

We very much welcome family involvement, for example, we always have observation chairs available for visiting teachers and parents. A monthly newsletter and a cultural / arts report is another way of keeping contact with families of our children.

The programme consists of toddlers group (18 months – 3 years) with two trained teachers and Pre- Primary group (3-6 years), including grade 0 with 5 trained teachers.