Philosophy

We believe that early childhood is a time of natural exploration and discovery. We know that young children learn by “hands on” experiences and that every child learns differently. There are many different philosophies in Early Education and we get to know your child first to mold the teaching philosophy based on the learning style that they will thrive best with.

Our teachers are highly qualified to scaffold each child’s growth and development in a natural way to help them discover answers to their curiosities about the world around them. Children come into our world eager to learn and discover and the teachers want to support and engage them in a way that will turn them into lifelong learners. 

Curriculum

We have a multi-cultural play-based curriculum that encourages learning through art, language, music, pre-math, pre-reading, science, and socialization. We prepare children for kindergarten in a way that makes learning a natural and fun hands-on experience. We focus on the children’s interests when we build our emergent curriculum and try to be the experiences and unit to life.

Our main teaching philosophy is focused on the concept of community. We want the children to learn what it is like to be a part of the community and how they can contribute to the community. We take daily walks in the Inner Sunset community and we know all of the surrounding businesses where we also take mini field trips. For example, Easy Breezy and Hometown Creamery open their doors for us before their business hours to allow the children to take a tour, and Park Smile welcomes us to visit and chat about dental hygiene. For Halloween, we go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. And as a way to say thank you and to give back to our neighbors, we take the children caroling in December. We also visit and invite SFFD and SFPD into our school every year to talk to the children about different ways to be safe.

In addition to teaching the children about our neighborhood community, we also teach the children how to be a part of their school community. We encourage the older children to help out in the younger classrooms, and we also teach children to ask their fellow classmates for a helping hand to see if they can solve the problem together before asking a teacher. Our end goal is to mold our children into kind tiny humans who know how to navigate living in a city.

Our graduating class take monthly field trips to the California Academy of Sciences. We take advantage of our close proximity to the museum to bring our science units to life! Every month, we focus on one exhibit to become experts on. After we learn about the exhibit, we take the children to document in their science journals – explore, observe, document. Then afterwards, we recap the lesson with what we learned while we were there. Every month is a different exhibit of the museum. Oftentimes, going to a museum can be overwhelming with so many things to learn. The intent here is to really make it developmentally appropriate for our young learners to focus on one exhibit at a time. At the end of the year, parents can see the fine motor development in their journals as well as the growth in their observations (teachers write down their words for their observations).

To facilitate an age appropriate curriculum, we have four separate classrooms, 2’s and 3’s, 3’s and 4’s, 4’s and Pre-K, and Transitional Kindergarten. 

Preschool Highlights

• Flexible scheduling, including extended care as part of tuition
• Low child-teacher ratio (6:1) 
• Four classrooms to facilitate age-appropriate learning
• Daily excursion to Golden Gate Park and surrounding gardens
• Monthly field trips to places in the community to encourage community building for all ages
• Strong Pre-K & TK (5’s) program: Our graduating class take monthly field trips to the California Academy of Sciences to document in their science journals; visits to kindergarten classrooms to mentally prepare for the transition; learning how to be a part of the community and how even tiny humans can make a difference. See an example of Stepping Stones Preschool’s community involvement in our Community Recognition section!