Education : Nursery School : Threes Class

Enrollment

BACNS follows the Santa Rosa City School guidelines for children's age cutoff dates. Most children will need to turn three before December 2nd to be admitted to the Threes class. The Threes class may contain children as young as 2 years 9 months, and children as old as four. The school will consider each child on an individual basis when making placement decisions.

BACNS does not require enrolled children to be toilet trained. In collaboration with the parents' wishes, the teachers use the transition times to change diapers and remind the children to use the toilet.

Schedule

The Threes school day runs from 9:00 am until 1:00 pm. Children can attend any number of days per week.

A typical schedule for the Threes class is:

Extended day care is available before and after school, and enrichment classes ( music, yoga, gymnastics) are available after school.

Snacks and Lunch

The school provides a healthy mid-morning snack such as pretzels, crackers, fruit, a vegetable and dip, and water to drink (occasionally juice). In the Threes class, everyone sits together for snack time.

Lunches are brought from home. Since the BACNS is a kosher facility, we request that no meat (beef, pork, or chicken) or shellfish be brought into school. Dairy, eggs, and regular fish (tuna, etc.) are fine.

Teachers

There are three teachers for the Threes. Lauren and Debby teach Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Lauren and Ellen teach Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Class Size

The teacher/child ratio in the Threes class is 1:6. There are two teachers and a maximum of 12 children per class per day.

Classroom Activities

The classroom has play areas and a loft designed for a variety of activities. Children are encouraged to use materials in creative and innovative ways, as long as safety and respect for the environment are considered. The area immediately outside the classroom is often open and can also be used to extend play possibilities.

The class provides many opportunities for:

• social and dramatic play, such as dressing up and role-playing "family" or "construction workers";
• cooking and tasting foods from our garden and baking challah each Friday for Shabbat;
• art and representational activities, such as working with clay, print making, easel painting, drawing, water coloring, and collaging;
• tactile investigations of water, ice, ooblick, flubber, birdseeds, and shaving cream;
• construction with a variety of materials;
• language and literacy development, with children looking at books, listening to stories from others, dictating their own stories, and engaging in many casual conversations;
• physical and natural science activities, where they can test ideas with ramps, rain gutters, and swinging pendulum balls; observe snails; care for the worm bin; and plant and harvest from the garden; and
• play with manipulatives that engage both reasoning and mathematical thinking skills and creativity.

The teachers document many classroom experiences through photos and the children's representations and explanations. This provides a visual way to show the parents the children's process of thinking and some of the meaningful ways they engage in play.

Our daily Circle time includes lively discussions and opportunities for problem-solving games and situations, stories, songs, finger plays, creative movement, dance, and yoga.

Outside play time includes large motor activities such as basketball, riding tricycles, and using the swinging bar. The children also engage in creative free play, gardening, playing inside our new willow house, art, story telling, and carpentry.

The children bake and eat challah (traditional egg bread) on Fridays, in honor of the upcoming Shabbat (Jewish Sabbath).

We take several field trips throughout the year, including hiking in Spring Lake and visiting the Jack London Wolf House in Glen Ellen.

Our curriculum is child-centered, with themes and activities emerging from the interests and questions of the children and occurrences in their lives. This emergent curriculum is inspired by the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. We emphasize the importance of children as active participants in their learning, where exploration, discovery and invention are of primary importance. We believe young children learn through play and need to construct and express their own understandings of the world. We provide an atmosphere where children are free to risk failure, to ask questions and to experiment with activities. The environment is designed to empower children to develop problem solving, thinking, and cooperation skills.

Areas of particular interest in our class have included the night-time sky, building enclosures and towers, sounds and instruments, snails, puddles, gardening, and obstacle courses. Discussions and activities around areas of interest might extend over days and weeks, or even be a thread throughout the school year. This approach is largely emergent and supports the children's natural curiosity about the world. It encourages them to explore, share their ideas, ask questions, and make connections.

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