Civic League Day Nursery Information

Civic League Day Nursery utilizes Creative Curriculum. The philosophy behind Creative Curriculum is that young children learn best by doing.  Learning isn’t 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).  By using real materials such as blocks and trying out their ideas, children learn about sizes, shapes, and colors and they notice relationships between things. With 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 â€" the stick and the block â€" 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 “readâ€� 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 “schoolâ€� learning.  It is the preparation children need before they learn highly abstract symbols such as letters (which are symbols for sounds) and numbers (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.