Peregrine School

location

2907 Portage Bay West

Near West Manor Park

hours

9am-2pm up to 7am-6pm

Phone

(530) 758-8845

Website

http://www.theperegrineproject.net

Owner

Peregrine Project Non-Profit

The Peregrine School consists of a Preschool and Pre-K/K: It's preschool, nicknamed "Escuelita", is a Spanish-English bilingual and project learning nursery school based on the Reggio Emilia philosophy. It's Pre-K/K, nicknamed "Primaria", is the new and innovative Pre-K/Kindergarten class. Escuelita is open to children ages 2 to 5, and Primaria is open to children ages 4 to 6 depending on the child's developmental readiness.

Why Spanish?

It is well documented that early childhood is the best time for children to acquire language in a natural, oral setting. Children’s minds are like sponges that absorb language, since one of their most important cognitive tasks is to listen to and imitate their home language. If a second language is added early, this language is painless for a child to learn and will not only become more natural to that child than if it was learned later, but will also cause the child to learn other languages more easily than a non-bilingual child. There is also much research evidence that speaking two or more languages increases a child’s level of general intelligence.

Spanish is the most important second language in California. Spanish fluency has immediate applications to daily life here. Ideally, we will balance our student population over time to include many native Spanish speakers. Our main teachers are native Spanish speakers who will model Spanish, “sheltering” it for accessibility to the children through the use of visuals, music, and the like. Fantastic Friday science and art activities and music and yoga classes will be taught in English and supplemented in Spanish.

At Peregrine School, lessons and routines will be delivered in Spanish by the teachers. Since the emphasis of the preschool will be on oral rather than written language, children will not be required to read in a language that is not their first. Peregrine School is a dual-immersion program, with Spanish taught part of the day but reading and math taught in English. This will insure that children can learn to read in their own language, then transfer their skills to literacy in a second language. A third language will also be offered in early elementary school, while children are still more open to language acquisition than they will be as they get older.

Why a family school?

Peregrine School is based on the idea that families are children’s first and most important teachers, and that the entire community of families and teachers can best guide our children by sharing the “funds of knowledge” which various people in the community hold. Our concept of parent involvement is not custodial, although we hope that everyone will pitch in to make and keep our environment clean and attractive. But our main purposes in asking parents to participate in school are two: 1) to build a caring community of families who support all of our children, and 2) to share the many talents we bring with this community. To accomplish the first goal, we will provide many enrichments such as yoga for adults, pot luck dinners, discussion groups, family outings, Spanish classes, and the like, to provide options for community building. To accomplish the second, we will provide opportunities for parents to share their special skills and interests in the classroom, especially when themes come up which correspond to these interests. One goal of parent meetings is to determine upcoming themes, and plan together ways to address them. Another benefit of parent time in the classroom is that parents will get to know each other’s children, which will increase our sense of community.

Parent involvement can take many forms. Working in the classroom is required, but there is a buyout option since many parents work. Working parents contribute to the school community by performing a family task. We will work with parents to create the right approach to involvement for each family.

What is a Reggio Emilia oriented school?

Children’s work is play. Collaborative play, the business of school, is an important part of children’s intellectual and social development. This kind of play is enhanced by two things: 1) a rich environment, designed to provide stimulation, challenges, and open-ended spaces for creative exploration; and 2) the mentoring of expert teachers who interact with children and model the process of problem solving as well as skills in the various intelligence areas.

Howard Gardner has defined eight types of intelligence that human beings need to develop: linguistic, mathematical, visual, musical, kinesthetic, inter-personal, intra-personal, and recently added, naturalistic. While Gardner’s theory has flaws, the basic idea can serve as a useful guide. It has been applied to the classroom in an approach often called an “integrated thematic curriculum”, which is what we plan to employ. In this approach, themes are chosen by the week or month, and a series of experiences in all domains are planned to fit these themes. This approach enables children to integrate what they are learning in, for example, science lessons, stories, music and dance experiences relating to harvest or the phases of the moon.

Young children are open to learning in every domain. Our goal is to create as balanced a set of opportunities for learning in all domains as we can, rather than to focus only on language and mathematics, as many school programs do. This goal is guided by the school in Reggio Emilia, Italy, directed by Loris Malaquzzi (See The Hundred Languages of Children: the Reggio Emilia Approachby Carolyn Edwards for more information) which has illustrated to the world that very young children can be expressive in a variety of art forms with proper guidance. The key is to create an ever-changing, creative learning environment in which children can guide their own projects, and to provide knowledgeable adults who are experts in various areas to provide direction and models. Our school will have one open room that will become the atalier, or art studio, in which various activities such as preschool yoga, Education through Music, Orff Schulwork music training, and theatre games can occur. Essential to this model is the idea that children do best when guided by experts. Children at Escuela Alobos will experience a variety of artists as well as their preschool teachers during the school day.

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2009-07-03 16:23:48   does the name peregrine come from lord of the rings, fitting in with the nearby streets of the Village Homes? —TimMatthiessen

• Given the logo, it is more likely that it has to do with the Peregrine falcon. The "Duck Hawk School" doesn't have quite the same ring.