Our Child Lab Classrooms

"Every day, children find a variety of art materials available on tables and art easels. Drawing, painting, cutting, pasting, and playing with playdough...provide important opportunities for learning. Children express original ideas and feelings, improve their coordination, develop small muscle skills, learn to recognize colors and textures, and develop creativity and pride in their accomplishments by exploring and using are materials."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 196)

"When [childern] build with blocks, children learn about sizes and shapes, spatial relationships, math concepts, and problem solving. When children lift, shove, stack, and move blocks, they learn about weight and size. Each time they use blocks, they are making decisions about how to build a structure or solve a construction problem."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 105)

"We encourage children to use the books on their own. We invite them to look at books and to listen to the stories. We also work with children one-on-one and in small groups. Every day we read stories to the children. We read books to introduce new ideas, to develop reading skills, to help children deal with problems, and mostly to develop a love for books."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 237)

"In dramatic play children take on a role and recreate real life experiences. They use props and make-believe about a wide variety of topics. The ability to pretend is very important to children's later academic success in schools. When children pretend, they have to recall experiences they've had to re-create them. To do this, they have to be able to picture their experiences in their minds."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 124)

"Children learn to read and write when real- life opportunities make learning fun and easy. In our classrooms, you may find the dramatic play area transformed into a restaurant, a bank, or an office. Such play presents a variety of opportunities for language use. Paper and pencils are always available on every center to encourage children to attempt to make meaningful communications to their friends."
(Diffily, D., & Morrison, K. Family-Friendly Communication for Early Childhood Programs. 50.)

"Manipulatives include puzzles, various table blocks, and other small construction materials such as Legos, tinker toys and collections of objects. When children use manipulatives, they learn many new skills and concepts, including: sorting and classifying things according to their own categories; judging distance, direction, right and left, up and down; and describing what they are thinking and doing."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 158)

"To stimulate a math moment, teachers use a variety of materials and ideas to create an environment in which children explore math concepts. In the math center are board games, puzzles, matching and guessing games, dominoes, cards, pattern blocks, and collections of objects that give children opportunities to recognize numbers and build math skills...In the block play, children construct cities by sorting and organizing and use words like long, short, small, and tall."
(Diffily, D., & Morrison, K. [editors] Family-Friendly Communication for Early Childhood Programs, 67.)

"Outdoor areas can provide rich settings for learning. The natural landscape offers many new objects to observe and collect and textures to examine. Opportunities to climb, run, jump, skip, hop, throw, catch, and use their "outside" voices provide children with a healthy release and break from the quieter activities in the classroom. Being outside allows children to stretch their muscles, breathe in fresh air, take in sunshine, and enjoy the freedom of space."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 327)

"Our program promotes the development of the processes that are integral to science: observing, classifying, communicating, measuring, inferring, and predicting. Observation skills are learned by examining rocks and leaves or by noticing the different sizes of shadows. Classifying skills are learned through sorting buttons or shapes and by recognizing similarities and differences of objects. Children develop measurement concepts and skills by measuring how much a plant has grown or by using blocks to measure their friends' height."
(Diffily, D., & Morrison, K. [editors] Family-Friendly Communication for Early Childhood Programs, 75.)

"Sensory play is not just fun - it is a natural setting for learning. When children pour water into measuring cups, they gain a foundation for mathematical thinking. When they drop corks, stones, feathers, and marbles into a tub of water, they observe scientifically which objects float and which sink. When they comb sand into patterns, they learn about both math and art."
(Trister Dodge, D., & Colker, L.J. The Creative Curriculum for Early Childhood, Third Edition. 216)

"Snack is served family style with a teacher and a small group of children, and children are encouraged to serve themselves. Children who serve themselves are more likely to eat what they take and are less likely to waste food. We use child-sized eating utensils and equipment to help them develop fine motor muscle control and we have relaxed conversations as we eat to help children develop language and social skills."
(Fletcher, J. & Branen, L. (n.d.) Best practices for serving food to groups of children. Moscow: ID. University of Idaho)