Welcome to the Evergreen room!
Meet the Evergreen Team!
Photo coming soon 🙂
Welcome to the Evergreen classroom! We are a mixed age preschool room that caters to children 3-5 years old, those who have another year of preschool and those that are getting ready for kindergarten. We focus a lot on individuality, creativity, and self expression. Each child is unique and we want them to feel like this is not only school but their home away from home. Our goal is to get children to step out of their comfort zone, try something new, and have an open mind to new things around them. We strive for independence and want children to feel like they have power over the choices they make. Our room consists of freedom, structure, and order. We aim for self-directed play, recognition of the environment and expectations, and age-appropriate boundaries and rules. This is the age where children should be exploring, feeling empowered, making mistakes, taking risks, and having fun.
We aim to make everything accessible for the children so they can easily explore and engage. Activities are at their levels, wall hangings are removable/interchangeable, and just about everything is theirs to use. Our room was designed with neutral/earth tone colors that embrace a feeling of comfort and safety. We have reduced the use of plastic toys using play materials such as wooden items and recycled pieces, and display multiple live plants. Centers are set up to touch base on all fundamental areas a child needs in order to prosper. When setting up centers, we focus on age-appropriate skills children need to gain, as well as incorporating challenges and items that interest them.
We have opportunities daily for tactile experiences and sensory exploration to promote growth in fine motor and pre-writing skills, body regulation, cognitive development, and science inquiry. Art is a major part of our space as well. We produce a plethora of creations involving process art. We not only use brushes and sponges but use various motor skills when producing them. We sometimes throw paint, drop from various heights, smear, use our feet and hands as painting tools, and fling or launch out of objects. Cause and effect are learning skills that intrigue and capture the children’s attention and it’s a tool we use abundantly. We also use various art mediums to craft with and try to reuse things we have on hand to teach resourcefulness and extend our creative minds.
We entwine nature into the room and incorporate a multitude of opportunities for weaving environmental learning not only into the space but the curriculum as well. We take full advantage of being a classroom connected to our schools hardtop area. When weather and schedule permits, we bring the classroom outdoors by setting tables like we would indoors, having meal times either picnic style or at tables, and we even nap in individual pop-up tents! Evergreen loves to explore nature, whether it is purely observing or getting our hands dirty with mud as we dig up creepy crawlers and wiggly worms. With having a stream right through our playground, we also find ourselves exploring in and around the water bed taking notice of how the water moves, what creates more or less of a water flow, and scooping/pouring containers filled up.
With our love for the outdoors, we also take part in seasonal gardening. We go through the whole process from start to finish and enjoy taste testing the vegetables. We strive to support healthy eating and what better way to do so than tending to your very own garden! We also have a test kitchen in our school, which is besides our classroom, that we aim to use no less than once a month to create tasty treats and gain basic cooking skills such as stirring, mixing, cutting, assembling, rolling, pouring, and measuring.
