I do a mixture but because I want to only enroll 3 and 4 year olds, I do have to run a "preschool" in order to get parents to enroll. And in our state, if you have 4 y/o's and want to be more than 3 stars on the rating scale, you have to use Creative Curriculum which I do anyway. But true Creative Curriculum is child led, child centered with minimal teacher input. The environment is arranged to allow the children to explore and learn. I have tons of theme boxes and we rotate through based on what the children are interested in.

I change out items in the classroom based on what skills the children need to focus on. I have boxes of puzzles and rotate them based on what we are talking about so that they lead to further discussions. Books are rotated regularly, manipulatives, sensory table, science center, etc. are all rotated. The art center is open all of the time and there are a ton of materials for them. But I also will change what is available based on what we are learning. For example we are talking about the color green right now so the paints available last week was only regular green, light green, and dark green. This week I took the greens out and put in blue and yellow. I didn't need to say anything because the first person who used the art center said that the greens were gone but look I can make green when I mixed the blue and yellow. So through discovery, they figured it out.

I also tell parents at the interview that learning letters, shapes, colors, numbers, etc are all great for Kindergarten but what Kindergarten teachers really want to see are social skills and self help skills. We work on a lot of self help skills. Children are allowed to struggle and learn to put their shoes on before we go outside. I don't intervene unless asked and even then I don't do it for them, I walk them through the process and assist. The children are expected to learn to use their manners and say please and thank you, to take turns, to share, and to be polite and respectful of the other children as well as the adults. They are expected to clean up after themselves and most usually do it readily. They serve themselves at lunch time and use their manners at the table. They learn to sit on the carpet criss cross applesauce with their hands in their baskets when we need to like the times we come together as a group. They need to be able to sit without rolling around and having their hands and feet on each other. These are all important "preschool" skills that take time to master and are part of what we work on.

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