A well-rounded and integrated early childhood curriculum in a nurturing environment is a must in helping students succeed in elementary school, middle school, and beyond.
An integrated curriculum with thematic approach in the early years provides for a strong foundation in developing lifelong learners. Ideal early education recognizes that combining arts, science, music, and math provides for an educational opportunity steeped in the splendor of the Renaissance.
The best education institutions value science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, as well as performance and visual arts. Why? Because there is a synergy to learning any field of study: science helps math which helps music which helps the self which helps the world. There is value in arts for arts’ sake but there is more value in arts for developing a complete, well-rounded individual.
Self Development Preschool (SDP) has been incorporating arts with STEM, called STEAM, for decades now. The fact that other elementary schools and preschools are using STEM+Arts education and curricula is deeply encouraging to the SDP team of educators.
In the real world, in our daily life, in our jobs, we utilize concepts together, in an integrated fashion. For instance, spatial mapping, prioritizing, short term memory, multiple variable fraction use, long term multi-variable mathematical planning, and mental evaluations of non-linear rates may simply amount to a trip to the grocery store.
We do all those things in our heads when we take trips to the grocery store. Even more, our jobs are much more complex, requiring what becomes an intuition about how to know when a kiln is properly heated, what is trending in fashion and what does that mean for TV network design, and responding to competing demands and necessities during a pandemic. Indeed, the ubiquity of STEM+Arts (STEAM) programs heralds a stronger, more brilliant society of thinkers and poets.
What makes the brain of a child so special is the combination of a blank slate and perfect design, waiting for the right, elegant sculpturer to truly bring out its true flourishing beauty. That is what Self Development Preschool has been doing for 30 years.
Our new STEM lab collects the most sophisticated hands-on activities, that are engaging, require deep analytical and creative thought, and, according to one student, “make time fly by.” The biggest concepts in all of the universe and the smallest organisms can be seen inside this room, which for 30 years has been perfecting an advanced STEM program. Amazingly, modern technology inside young learning devices can now offer students what graduate students did not have access to when we opened the school! We teach students coding that is more complex than what adult students were originally learning.
SDP’s STEAM program is rigorously engaging. Literally, generations have passed through our doors becoming experts in interdisciplinary learning. Once children, now adults, they have only known one place as the STEAM school that molds children in unpredictable combinations of what SDP provides all their students: love, advanced education, deep thinking, creative insights, and eternal friendships. SDP continues to innovate ways that increases critical and creative thinking to create the next generation of curators of extraordinary works of art and curers of diseases that are waiting to be solved.
To give your children a strong foundation for developing a love for learning and an opportunity to participate in a highly enriched educational environment, contact Self Development Preschool at (480) 396-3522. SDP is a private school, serving students from ages 2 to 5-years-old, and has a before and after school program for school age children.