Learning Center
Empowering, mentoring and challenging youth
Open Monday - Friday, 6AM-6PM | Available at our South Haven and Coloma locations.
Creative Curriculum
The Four Stages
The Creative Curriculum focuses on developmentally appropriate goals and objectives for children within four main categories of interest: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language.
The social/emotional stage promotes independence, self-confidence, and self-control. Within this stage, children learn how to make friends, how to have group interactions, and how to follow rules.
The physical stage helps children develop their gross and fine motor skills.
The cognitive stage is associated with thinking skills, and here children learn how to solve problems, ask questions and think critically.
The language stage deals with communication. Children learn how to communicate with others, listen and participate in conversations, and recognize various forms of print. In this stage, children begin to recognize letters and words and begin writing for a purpose.
The Organization Of The Curriculum
Five basic components comprise the curriculum. From these, focus and planning can be targeted so that learning is best achieved.
Knowing children — describes the social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development of children.
Creating a responsive environment — offers a model for setting up the physical environment for routines and experiences in ways that address the developing abilities and interests of children.
What children are learning — shows how the responsive relationship you form with each child, the interactions you have every day, and the materials and experiences you offer become the building blocks for successful learning.
Caring and teaching — describes the varied and interrelated roles of teachers who work with children.
Building partnerships with families — explore the benefits of working with families as partners in the care of their children.
Introduction to Spanish
Implementing a Spanish curriculum early in a child’s life can accelerate Spanish learning. Teaching a child a second language at the start of their childcare journey has countless benefits, including:
Develop early language skills.
Take advantage of the critical time in early development when acquiring language skills comes naturally and easily. A child’s capacity to pronounce unfamiliar, foreign sounds and to absorb new grammar rules is highly enhanced prior to age six.
Understand English better.
Both English and Spanish share roots in Latin. Studying Spanish increases children’s understanding of the English language and how different languages evolve, which can also help with learning English vocabulary.
Expand future employment options.
Knowing Spanish is always a bonus when looking for a job. The earlier children start learning, the easier it will be for them to become fluent.
Drawing Into Reading
Drawing Children Into Reading is an award-winning fine motor skill-building program helping 4 - 10 year-old students in their reading, writing, drawing, and expressive efforts.
When a student is taught to draw using this step-by-step method, their pencil grip, hand-eye coordination, attention span, and visualization skills are enhanced. We have seen these skills transfer into strong, legible handwriting.
Within this program, we hope to spark the critical development of children's fine motor skills as they listen, write, and draw! As they complete tasks, we are igniting pathways to a child's brain between their hands, eyes, and ears.
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