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Academics Early Childhood Philosophy:
The early childhood classroom serves as a community where children learn to trust themselves and others. Kabbalat Shabbat, daily tefillah, and holiday preparations are joyful, shared experiences where the children become familiar and comfortable with basic Hebrew vocabulary and Jewish behaviors, rituals and concepts, including mitzvot, God, and tzedakkah. Since early childhood education provides the foundation and motivation for life-long learning, we want every child to experience success. We also believe that children benefit from learning to manage disappointments and conflicts in the context of a supportive school setting so that they can become more independent and effective young people. Through caring, nurturing relationships between teachers and children, our youngest students are encouraged to question thoughtfully and think for themselves. As they succeed, children develop self-esteem, feelings of competence and a sense of independence. As they interact with each other, they grow to understand the value of belonging to a group, a family, a community and the Jewish people. To download a copy of our Lower School Curriculum Guide, click here.
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Lower School
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A Jewish day school early childhood experience is an opportunity to instill in children a love of learning. At Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union, we believe that young children learn through play and interaction with other children and caring adults. We provide opportunities through planned activities, experiences and guided discovery for each child to grow in a number of dimensions – social, emotional, creative, moral, intellectual and spiritual. Children develop new skills and competencies through linguistic, logical, kinesthetic, artistic, musical and self-expressive tasks. The school provides developmentally appropriate experiences that challenge them to observe, explore, experiment, draw conclusions, ask new questions and enjoy the satisfaction of solving problems. Teachers foster children’s natural curiosity and inquisitiveness. However, they stimulate children’s cognitive growth through a wide variety of hands-on activities with everyday phenomena from the natural environment that extend and enrich children’s interests and experiences.