Preschool | Queen Anne - Hilltop Children's Center

Preschool | Queen Anne

Hilltop Children Center’s full-day preschool program is for children three to five years. Our classrooms are open from 8:00am-5:00pm, Monday-Friday and run from September to August.

Your preschooler is growing up fast, potty-trained and eager to learn new things. At this age, your child is more coordinated and is absorbing lots of information every day. Inspired by the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, educators approach preschool education with a play-based, child-centered, reflective teaching practice. We want to understand what children are passionate about, challenge their thinking, and support their social-emotional, physical, creative, and cognitive growth and development.

The day is carefully planned out with a variety of hands-on activities to encourage learning and socialization. At this age, we also put a large focus on teaching self-awareness and fostering independence by helping your child master their self-help skills.

We design our preschool classrooms with these developmental milestones in mind and equip each classroom with age-appropriate, educational toys to help continue inspiring your child’s curiosity and desire to learn and engage with their classmates and their environment.

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Stories from the classroom: Play-based learning

Rohan spent about 40 minutes working with the play dough in the studio this morning meticulously shaping the meatballs he was to eat for breakfast. He shaped them through a slow and intentional process of construction, starting out with a very small piece of play dough and slowly adding really tiny pieces, one at a time. He’d roll each small ball through and around his fingers with its added tiny piece of dough stuck to the outside, until it seemed smooshed into the ball enough. Then he’d repeat the process again and again and again until the meatballs were just the way he wanted them to be. Occasionally he would stop making them and put them in the bowl. Some times he would pretend that he was really having breakfast and blow on the meatballs as thought they were still hot.

Typically I see Rohan engaged in big physical play, or dramatic and imaginative pretend play. He doesn’t often engage with sensory or art materials for extended periods of time, as he does with these other kinds of play, so it was great to see him spend such a dedicated amount of time with the squishy and salty play dough. I appreciate that he was able to find a new and different way to act out his ideas for pretend play. Often Rohan acts out scripts from books, television shows, or movies, all while up high on a piece of furniture or with broad and dynamic announcements of his intentions. During his meatball breakfast play this morning, Rohan created his own script instead. Has Rohan been more creative in his pretend play at home recently, finding ways to still use his imagination without the direct script from other sources? In what ways can we (parents and teachers) continue to support the more creative side of his imaginative play?