About The Olive Branch Preschool
Philosophy Approach
Curriculum Essential Ingredients
Essential Ingredients
Community
The Olive Branch Community School’s mixed-age classrooms foster a culture of respect and cooperation. In order to learn to find answers to their questions, the children are encouraged to work together, experiment, research, and to consult experts. This helps to foster the development of positive character traits such as empathy, respect, curiosity, and confidence.
Our school community includes not just our children and teachers, but also our program families and all those who care for our children. To ensure this, OBCS hosts monthly Open House events for program families to spend time in our learning environment. At these events, all Olive Branch community members are encouraged to mingle and visit with one another while spending time viewing the rotating documentation of children’s work displayed on our bulletin boards and in our monthly newsletter.
Children are Empowered and Respected
It is of the utmost importance at The Olive Branch Community School that the children are honored and respected, and that they possess the agency to guide and construct their own understandings of the world. We help children to shape their ability to explore and to learn, and teachers facilitate learning by figuring it out alongside them. With inspiration taken from the empowering works of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, The Olive Branch Community School allows children the ability to shape their own learning in the most meaningful ways.
Bringing the Outdoors In and the Indoors Out
At The Olive Branch Community School, we are committed to facilitating a closeness with sunshine and nature, as we believe these are extremely important avenues of learning across all domains. For the majority of each morning spent at OBCS, our program operates as a hybrid indoor-outdoor model. Our intentionally low teacher:child ratio allows children the freedom to choose their most suitable learning environment at any moment, moving from our indoor classroom to our outdoor classroom and back as they see fit. When indoors, children are surrounded by natural elements, with an intentional minimization of synthetic materials. This creates a beautiful, comfortable, and respected learning environment with plenty of avenues for important sensorial exploration.