Reenie's Daycare

Information may not be reliable

My approach to pre-school education is to encourage children to construct their own knowledge in the areas that interest them – which covers just about everything parents want their children to learn. Children are active and competent learners – when given the time, the resources and the space to satisfy their natural curiosity. Just watch what happens when you give children ready and easy access to paint, paper, beads and buttons, sponges, playdough, blocks, the great and marvelous outdoors, dress ups, cars and trucks, dolls, pencils, crayons, chalk, and music, glorious music. What about educational toys? Sure, I have them also, but children are actually more interested in, and learn more from, materials that are open-ended, that don’t dictate “play-with-me-in-just-one-correct-way.”
Once, a child asked this question: “why do balls bounce?” Is it true, as another (older) child suggested, that “balls bounce because they are round and full of air”? Good answer, of course, but can we go further? I asked the children: are all balls round? Are all balls filled with air? Do all balls, in fact, bounce? How can we discover the answers to these questions? We can assemble all different types of balls and experiment. We went outside with our collection and discovered that footballs, while not round, do bounce. Tennis balls really bounce! Balls made of playdough don’t bounce at all. Baseballs are solid and can bounce also, a little. The learning process starts with questions, continues with exploration and discovery, and ends….where?
I am married, 52 years old and have 27 years experience caring for and educating young children. I am mom to six, grandmother to three, and have been a home daycare provider to more than sixty children. References of current and past families are available upon request. You could call them and ask why did they enroll their child here, and more importantly: why have they kept their children here for two or three or more years? Some families, with more than one child, have been here for six or more years – an investment in trust I have done my best to earn.