PHILOSOPHY

At Skytown, we embrace a child-centered, play-based emergent curriculum. Children and children’s play are at the center of all we do: a children’s day here is spent playing. Teachers’ days are spent supporting and facilitating that play, so that children are seen for who and where they are developmentally and for what their needs are (big and small). 

In basing our practices in theory, we embrace a variety of educational theories and practices to construct our Skytown philosophy. We teachers work through reflection and iteration to ground our practices in theory and to bring theory to life through our practices. We don’t embrace a one-size fits all theory: we adopt and adapt theories that have worked through trial and error, but we have landed on our play-based emergent curriculum as the most respectful to children, developmentally appropriate, and pedagogically resonant, with a steep grounding in attachment theory.

First and foremost, we believe in attachment theory: children need to feel safe, secure, seen, and soothed in order to be able to embark on their projects of self-discovery and meaning-making. If children don’t feel safe, they aren’t in a space to grow and thrive. So we do our best to make our space safe for children - both physically and emotionally. This doesn’t mean there isn’t nonverbal physical communication: this is a preschool, and children are learning how to communicate using many different modalities, including their bodies and their words. But we work to acknowledge that children are learning and growing, and we work to make sure that adults create safe spaces for children to have feelings, to speak up for their needs and express their experiences.

Skytown also works to create an environment where the children are able to self-direct their own play. This includes making meaning of their world: to one child, a pot of sand & water is mint soup; to another, it is part of a water processing plant, and both meanings work in our space of self-determination. We work to create an environment that empowers children to learn through their own experiences. 

Finally, Skytown tries to take the performance of childhood out of our space. This means we work to make sure that children are not busy “performing” for us: whether a quick “sorry” for a head bonk, or performing a drum circle for us the appreciative adults at a circle time: we try to step out as far as possible to give children a chance to create their own games with their own rules and to make their own meaning through play. This isn’t easy - our culture has definite expectations for what our children should and shouldn’t do. 

At Skytown, we do hard work to center children and their voices. We work to make visible children’s learning through play, and to value that play as the work of childhood.