Animal House Preschool

Our mission at Animal House is to provide a consistent, quality preschool education in a safe, caring environment. We work to ensure that our children are well prepared, happy and confident about entering school when the time comes and already excited about learning.

Our philosophy is built around recognizing and responding to each child as an individual. With this in mind we strive to provide the necessary amount of interaction, monitoring of progress and individualized planning for each child to fulfill his/her academic potential, whilst encouraging social and emotional development.

We follow the Best Practices Curriculum. These practices have been identified through extensive research, field testing and revision to determine the activities which work most effectively in promoting education in preschool children.
All our children participate in group activities together, at varying levels of difficulty appropriate to each individual's age and ability. Research indicates that this practice of non- graded, mixed age grouping is particularly appropriate and effective for preschool learning. We include teacher directed and child directed activities to allow opportunities for individual, partner and group interaction, encouraging independence and cooperation.

Our preschool is a print rich environment, utilizing posters, labels and signs to introduce early literacy skills. We have a well stocked, comfortable library where we have group story time every session with a book chosen by our teacher which is relevant to our current theme. Following this story and discussions about it, we invite the children to choose books. There is no time limit on story time, we are happy for it to last as long as the children are engaged. Our library also has a display table which is constantly changing to our current theme. We encourage the children to bring themed items from home for the table. This helps initiate conversation between the children and with their parents which will reinforce their learning and help our home/school connection. We also showcase our work here for parents to view.

Our play centers spark the imagination, arouse a natural curiosity and the desire to explore and understand the world in which we live. Our grocery store, workshop, playhouse, fire engine and post office help to develop oral, literacy, math and number skills while encouraging positive social interaction through role play.