A positive environment full of learning opportunit
Who Are We?
Seeds of Learning is a stand-alone, not for profit, NAEYC accredited early care and education center, located in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. We serve preschool and toddler-aged children. As a community based facility, we encompass parenting classes, educational opportunities for our families and other early childhood professionals, and participate in community outreach projects.
Mission
Our mission is to provide high quality early care and education to children ages 18 months through age 5, regardless of family structure or income.
Vision
The vision at Seeds of Learning is to work in partnership with families and our community to provide a learning community in a developmentally appropriate environment which promotes the growth of the "whole child" and instills a love of learning for diverse young learners.
Philosophy
Quality early care and education not only includes excellent care, education and parent education, as well as health and safety, but a relationship between children and their families. We acknowledge the fact that children are unique and individual, come from their own culture, and deserve respect in regard to that culture. We can truly prove our love for children and their families by respecting their culture.
The Seeds of Learning philosophy encompasses high quality early care and education, the Incredible Years Dinosaur School (problem solving and conflict resolution for children), Creative Curriculum curricula offered to all children, the Incredible Years Parenting class, as well as any other topic brought forth by families. It is our wish to work closely with parents to meet the social, emotional, physical and cognitive needs of each child, thereby promoting the child's self-awareness and self-confidence. We partner with families so they feel respected, supported and nurtured in their child rearing efforts.
Warm, supportive and respectful relationships between adults and children lie at the heart of good care for children. We believe early care and education centers can and must be a place where children, parents and caregivers alike can feel a sense of belonging, as if they are family. Healthy children and healthy families make healthy communities.
Program Instruments
Creative Curriculum was chosen for Seeds because it is based on the latest research on how children learn best and has been shown through experimental and quasi-experimental studies to improve classroom quality and promote the school readiness of preschool children. Creative Curriculum meets all of the standards put forth for effective early childhood curricula by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Equally important, evaluation research provides strong evidence that the Creative Curriculum for Preschool improves classroom quality and promotes positive physical, social and cognitive outcomes for children.
The Environmental Rating Scales are designed to assess "process quality" in an early childhood or school age care group. Process quality consists of the various interactions that go on in a classroom between staff and children, staff and parents, among the children themselves, as well as the interactions children have with the many materials and activities in the environment. The established reliability and validity of the Environmental Rating Scale make it particularly useful for research and program evaluation. It should be noted that ECERS (Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale) and ITERS (Infant Toddler Environmental Rating Scale) were used as comprehensive quality measures in the National Child Care Staffing Study (Whitebook, Howes, & Phillips, 1989) and the Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes Study (1995), the major studies of their time.
The Incredible Years, our award-winning parent training, teacher training, and child social skills training approaches have been selected by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention as an "exemplary" best practice program and as a "Blueprints" program. The Incredible Years Dinosaur School used in the preschool classrooms promotes social, emotional, and academic competence in children as well as increases children's social skills, children's understanding of feelings and children's conflict management skills.
Children will experience growth and learning in their social-emotional, physical, language and cognitive development as a result of observations and assessments taken through these programs. Families will feel included and supported in their own child-rearing as they participate in their child's learning experience at Seeds of Learning.
