Families Together Coop Nursery School

Families Together Cooperative Nursery School offers children and their parents an outstanding early school experience. Our programs for ages 2.5 to 5 years are play-based and our emergent curriculum offers children a nurturing and stimulating classroom experience. The emergent curriculum is facilitated by teachers who structure the environment but not the process of play.

The teaching philosophy, inspired by the theories of John Dewey, Erik Erickson, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget, is based upon constructivist principles of education. In practice, this means that the classroom is set up to be an active and engaging environment in which children can experiment with their ideas by interacting with the classroom materials, as well as other children and adults in the classroom. The teachers support each child in finding and expressing their own individual interests, while also helping children find effective and appropriate ways of interacting with others.

A peek into our open classroom reveals children engaged in an array of activities. During a typical day in our classroom, you might see children constructing roads in sand, reading in the book corner, baking or dressing up in the imaginative play area, creating books at the writing center, building with blocks and other manipulative materials, painting at the easel, working on a puzzle, or exploring the world around them at the science center. In addition, a variety of process-oriented materials are set out daily to promote creativity and tactile learning. The arrangement of the classroom and materials promotes children’s interactions through the exchange of ideas and the opportunity to listen and share together.

The staff at Families Together value outdoor and large motor experiences for young children and make time for such activities daily. These experiences may include playing at the park across the street, going on a walk around the neighborhood, visiting a nearby community garden or having time to run and play in the large gym facility within our building.