by Jesyca Russell Virnig, Program Director/Infant-Toddler Specialist Choosing Hearts and Minds for your family means choosing an educational program that will support your child to his/her fullest. We hear time and time again from our past families that the attention to individualizing for their child and the amount of detailed information they received about their child's development is sorely missed once moving on from our program. When visiting other programs, I often hear Fridays and summer time labeled as the "fun times" when staff choose to "lighten the load" for the children.  This always disturbs me.  I firmly believe that children are born "young scientists."  You just about can't stop them from learning!  They are predestined to do just that. There should be no "load" to lighten!  At Hearts and Minds, childhood is not stolen with the pressures of "school."  The adult notion that we must dread work so that we can get to the "fun time" of Friday or summer is not pushed onto children. They will get years of that soon enough!

We strongly believe in celebrating childhood, and protecting children's right to play.  We do not engage young children in activities you may find commonplace in many preschool and day care environments such as forced large group or "circle time" activities, teacher lecture, and worksheet activities to "drill" predefined skills.  Our youngest children simply do not learn best this way (actually, most adults don't learn best this way!).  It violates common sense to expect a group of young toddler or preschool children to all learn the letter "A" at the exact same time. While this may be the most cost effective way for a society to teach masses of children to an average level.  That is not what Hearts and Minds is about.  Here we provide the resources to support a small group of children their fullest...for some that means a natural transition to reading at 4 years old, others are most gifted in drawing, some put together puzzles intended for children twice their age...the list goes on.  My experience has been that every being has talents and challenges.  Our desire is to nurture your child's talents and support the challenges so that he/she may excel.

To best accomplish this, we teach the children in the meaningful context of their daily lives.  This excerpt from the wonderful book Much More than the ABC's (page 146) captures an example of exactly the type of individualized learning you may expect to see daily at Hearts and Minds: "Children at a table in a preschool classroom worked busily with puzzles and other manipulatives.  One child had selected a road-sign puzzle from the collection of puzzles provided on the shelf.  As he placed the stop sign in the correct space in the puzzle frame, he said to a nearby teacher, "Hey, this is a stop sign!"  "It sure is," responded the teacher, as she pointed to the letters on the stop sign.  "S-T-O-P," she said.  "That spells ssstoooppp." Soon one of the children at the writing-and-drawing table across the room called to the teacher, "Miss Blaney, I want to write Michaela's name, and I can't find it."  The teacher moved to the writing-and-drawing table and began to straighten up the set of name cards the child had been searching through.  "Let's get these all gathered together," she said as she organized them in the ring binder.  "Okay, now let's look for Michaela's name.  This name starts with a J.  It is Joe's name, not Michaela's.  And here's a name starting with B.  It says Ben.  And here's Chuck's name, with the ch at the beginning." They searched past a few more name cards, with the teacher naming the first letter of each name before identifying whose it was.  "Oh, here's a name that might be Michaela's.  It starts with an M...Mmmiiichaaaelaaa.  Yes, this is it.  I'll set it right here for you if you'd like to copy it onto your envelope.  Mmmmm, that envelope is rather fat.  Is there something inside it for Michaela?" "Yes, a picture," the child replied. ***************************************************************************************************** The first child in the scenario above had set out to work on a puzzle and the second child was searching for a friend's name.  Neither was trying to learn the names of alphabet letters.  Yet the teacher found ways to include alphabet learning as she responded to each child.