Great Beginnings Preschool prioritizes the ‘fun’ in fundamentals
It’s not uncommon to see architects, police officers or fire chiefs on duty at Great Beginnings Preschool. They don their uniforms at the career station every morning and get right to work, building towering monuments and ensuring the safety of their fellow threeand four-year-olds.
These young aspiring professionals are learning through the “Play in Preschool” approach.
Implemented four years ago in the Great Beginnings classrooms, the play-based method gives the students a free choice in learning activities through open-ended questions and various “stations” that teach valuable lessons in sharing, problem-solving and teamwork while dually fostering reading, math and language skills.
They’re still learning the same fundamental concepts, just through a different avenue.
“We don’t tell them what to do,” Great Beginnings Preschool Director Marla Ford said. “Instead, they selfdiscover.”
According to Quality First, the statewide program that leads Great Beginnings’ teacher training sessions, 90 percent of a child’s brain develops before age 5. Through their play-based method, Great Beginnings preschoolers are honing their curiosity, self-confidence, social skills and even vocabularies as they engage in the interactive, hands-on activities in the classroom. It’s part of the Crane School District.
According to Ford, the teachers have watched remarkable success stories unfold as students who started the school year on a shy or nonverbal note found their voice and self-esteem during playtime.
“That’s something they’re not going to get just sitting at
a table,” Ford said. “If we can teach them their social skills now, then those tools are set up for them to learn their academics when they get to Kindergarten.”
Great Beginnings operates five classrooms at the preschool on Avenue
C and one at Gary A. Knox Elementary School, with a second to be added after Christmas. Among the six are two migrant classrooms, where success rates are equally high as students add another element to their developing arsenal of skills: grasping a new language.
“They’re picking up the meanings and grammatical structure and speaking English by kindergarten,” Ford said. “A lot of them test out of ELL [English Language Learner program] right away.”
All of the classrooms have a “family-style” breakfast and lunch time each day, where the teachers and students sit together and have conversations that further foster the concepts and skills they’ve been working on.
According to Ford, it’s settings like these that benefit their preschoolers the most as they learn and grow.
“Our ultimate goal is to help them be successful in elementary school and have that executive function that everyone needs in the world,” Ford said.