Our Program

The preschool room at the Hampshire College Early Learning Center is a mixed-aged classroom with children of three to five years old. In the preschool room, we spend most of our day outdoors either in the play yard or exploring the Hampshire campus. We play with loose parts, and ambiguous objects that can be used in multiple ways. Loose parts invite the children to interpret and make meaning from their environment as part of their play.

We are very fortunate to be located on the Hampshire College campus. Across the street from our school is the Eric Carle Museum, the leading children’s book museum in the country. We enjoy visiting for story time and art making in the art studio and experiencing the tremendous rotating art exhibits of world class children’s book art. The College's campus is full of outdoor spaces to explore bursting with beautiful nature: community gardens, pathways with big rocks to climb, outdoor sculptures and forest trails. We often visit the art gallery, library, dance studio, and other adored spaces filled with colleagues and friends of the Early Learning Center.

Our days are spacious, following a flexible schedule that allows for spontaneity while offering routine and consistency to the children. We find this to be an empowering combination for preschoolers. At the start of the school year, the classroom follows a more specific routine to support preschoolers transitioning into a new environment. As they grow more comfortable, the daily schedule shifts to become more fluid and dynamic. This flexibility allows people (preschoolers and teachers alike) to dive deep into their interests and relationships. It also grants the teachers more capacity to meet the needs of individual children and allows us to honor and embrace unique styles of learning.

Our teaching team, which this year consists of two co-teachers and two assistant teachers, practices a very collaborative and highly creative teaching style. As teachers, we consider ourselves co-researchers alongside the children, parents, and with each other. Together with preschoolers, we deliberately fabricate a strong sense of authentic and empowered community, composed of individuals who are encouraged to be themselves and have a voice. We focus on community building as the nucleus of social/emotional learning and critical thinking. Preschoolers participate in shared experiences as a whole group and also regularly participate in small group activities. Teachers curate small group experiences to experiment with different social configurations and provide more individualized social scaffolding for the children. The small groups encourage children to try things outside of their comfort zone and give time for certain relationships or dynamics to be explored.

We share the rich, complex, and entertaining adventures of the preschoolers in our emails to parents and families. Our classroom documentation tells the story of the group; how its identity and values are emerging, and provides developmental context for the culture and dynamics that develop. We try to center the children’s voices in our messages to parents, and sometimes preschoolers will help recount stories from the day.

Once or twice a day, teachers and preschoolers gather for meeting time. Meeting time is a time for shared experience; it can be group songs and games, story time, or group discussions about things that matter to the preschoolers. At meeting time, people practice taking up space and giving space to others. Empowering each child’s unique voice and encouraging mutual respect gives the opportunity for children to be active protagonists in their own educational experience and lives. It also sets us up to engage in reciprocal collaboration with the Hampshire College community and our peers at the Early Learning Center.

Later in the year we often wind up doing dynamic and complex collaborations with Hampshire College students. We have had ongoing collaborations with professors and classes over the years where students and preschoolers participate in projects together. We have had the honor and privilege of getting to work with students on their final thesis projects around nature education, dance and movement, and Early Childhood education program comparative analysis. In these collaborations and interactions with Hampshire students, preschoolers’ ideas and voices are heard and respected. Their presence on campus and in the world is valued and appreciated by Hampshire students as the brilliant, creative, ingenuitive, compassionate, thoughtful, and interesting young community members that they are!