Welcome to Early Childhood!
You'll find our youngest learners at Hathaway Brown busily engaged in everything from sharing their favorite books to "dancing" stories in Music class to measuring tree trunks in Courtland Woods. Our play-based curriculum may look like a lot of fun to a classroom visitor—and it is.
We know that children learn best when they're having fun, and we provide an environment that encourages them to explore, discover, and collaborate.
We have, in fact, become educational architects at Hathaway Brown, building a learning model that supports a spectrum of development. As educators, we are at our best when we lead children to explore who they are as well as where they are going, and we have done this by design. Because we believe that any journey of self-discovery is best undertaken through active inquiry and exploration, we refer to our educational model as Discovery Learning.
All successful journeys require the right preparation, and we built our learning model using the following cornerstones:
- Competence: The knowledge that one is truly capable of making the journey. Encouraging children to engage in appropriate risk-taking behavior—whether that takes the form of negotiating the monkey bars on the playground, or offering a new idea at group time—results in a willingness to take on new challenges, and diminishes the fear of failure.
- Cognition: The ability to read the map. We know that children are natural scientists who collect data, analyze, classify, and make predictions as they interact with the environment. This on-going process of discovery results in the construction of broad concepts as new information is integrated into an existing framework based on previous experience.
- Community: Knowing how to ask for directions. We know that social interaction is foundational to the learning process. As play becomes increasingly collaborative, children actively engage in planning and executing play scenarios, which inevitably involves problem-solving and negotiating conflicts.
We find that the insights we gain as educators as we engage the children in Discovery Learning leads to our own fresh inquiries and new innovations—a wonderful journey, indeed!
We invite you to browse through our website and take a look at the video below to see Discovery Learning in action. Enjoy!
Director of Early Childhood
Click here for a directory of Early Childhood Faculty & Staff.