"Art doesn't transform.
It just plain forms."
Roy Lichtenstein
Arts-Based
Day Care
Hagerstown, Maryland
OPENING JANUARY 2011
Applications are now being taken for our Arts-Based Day Care & Preschool.
"Play is the gateway to metaphor, to scientific insight and to invention. Choose a school that will encourage children to open this gate before expecting them to perform advanced mental operations."
Jane Healy, Ph.D. Your Child's Growing Mind
The years before children reach age seven are an important time for development and for laying the crucial foundation for future academic learning. For children ages two and three, Walker Learning Centers offers a warm, nurturing enviroment for this phase of imitation and discovery. Our scheduling options for your child allows for an easier transition from home life to school.
A Day in the Classroom
Creative free play is a cornerstone of learning. Creative play and artistic explorations are both a direct line of ascent to adult imagination, creativity and problem solving. The whole basis of creative thinking and imagination evolves from free-form child's play.
In order to grow their bodies, children must be left free to move. Running, skipping, jumping rope, dancing, stretching and balancing allow children to develop the physical coordination and control needed to perform the more complicated and sophistcated movements involved in reading and writing. Modeling with clay, coloring, paiting and handwork all help children develop the fine motor skills. Current brain research has proven that these kinds of early movement are crucial to later brain function in the adult.
Circle and story time, creative puppetry and theatrical play provide the more structured parts of the day. Poems, songs, nature stories, classical folk lterature and recitation give children the opportunity to develop rich vocabulary and practice phonics, the foundations for reading. Listening skills and memory are developed, as well as the ability to focus and bring about atttention. Now the children can begin to form inner pictures of the spoken word, the basis for comprehension and making meaning out of the world. After practicing comprehension out of oral story, children become ready to make meaning out of symbolic, written language.
Our curriculum is based on the Reggie Emilia Approach and also includes classes in dance/movement, yoga, instrumental music (violin and piano), vocal music, theater and puppetry, visual arts, living arts such as cooking.
Please contact the office for more information or to be placed on our waiting list 301-733-8261.
REGISTER NOW on our REGISTER PAGE!
