Philosophy

At Friends Preschool, we celebrate our students as individual learners as well as integral members of our school family. Our teachers are knowledgeable in how to employ a variety of learning strategies to meet and support multiple intelligences so that every child’s unique learning style is understood and validated. We balance both vertical and lateral thinking: exposing children to develop both conventional and creative solutions to real life problems and experiences. We celebrate solitary and collaborative ideas: understanding that each child has remarkable capacities and together we can achieve the impossible. We provide experiences to crosswalk between the left- and right-brain through connecting facts, logic, imagination, and holistic thought. We work effortlessly to ensure that our classroom is based on best-practice and is developmentally appropriate as we treat our students as serious learners. We observe our students in play and scaffold experiences to ensure that they mature through the various levels of play: from observer to participant to leader.

We wish for our students to understand their worth, their value, and to develop a positive self-concept. Through understanding how remarkable their talents and ideas are, we help to develop children’s confidence and self-motivation. We educate our students on the importance of morals and civics and regularly explore and study character development. We believe that kindness is the greatest skill that we can model and pass on to our students, and we emphasize the importance of the children being kind to themselves, to others, and their world. Our dream is to help educate a generation of divergent thinkers, of compassionate role-models, of culturally-sensitive peers, of out-of-the-box thinkers, of innovative inventors, and above all: life-long learners.