Rising Five Program

Our Rising Five class is a small, intimate group  of younger five-year-old children. While still a part of our nursery school, this program enriches and expands upon nursery activities to help the children cultivate the skills, mindset, and character that will serve them well not just in kindergarten but also in life for years to come.

We achieve our goals through a hands-on, unpressured accent on nature and literature, with great emphasis on Emergent Curriculum and Play. Our nature program promotes the reverence and stewardship of the Earth through frequent and deep engagement with natural objects, the outdoors, and our environment.

Our interdisciplinary approach to literacy, math, science, and the arts allows children to draw rich connections within and between subject areas. Through active, hands-on learning in the classroom and outdoors, the children are able to integrate many ways of knowing the world. Children truly enjoy this process of inquiry and they come away with a sense of accomplishment, which sets them on a path of lifelong learning.

Field trips are integral part of our curriculum, incorporating much of the science, math, language and creative content of the children’s studies. They provide opportunity to collect, compare and evaluate data, improve their skills of observation, detection, direction and classification, use their experiences as a launchpad for creative projects, as well as experience historical and environmental settings which cannot be replicated in the classroom.

Our focus is on the process rather than the product, and on the whole child – physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and creative. Our goal is to provide an environment that is safe, loving, happy, and inspiring, to help build mastery and self-esteem in readiness for the years ahead.