ADDITIONAL INFO

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Philosophy

The San Francisco School preschool is a Montessori-inspired, three-year program, founded on the ideals of teaching self-reliance, responsibility and learning through experience. Over the years SFS has combined Maria Montessori’s educational techniques with more recently developed early childhood approaches. Together, these powerful learning practices enable our highly trained and experienced teachers to tap into and nurture our youngest students’ hunger to learn while challenging our kindergartners and ensuring their readiness for lower school. Throughout the grades, teachers are committed to cultivating a life-long love of learning in each child.

For more than forty years The San Francisco School has provided students from multicultural and diverse socioeconomic backgrounds a safe and wondrous place to discover themselves intellectually, physically and socially. For most of the students, the learning begins in one of our two large, light-filled preschool classrooms.

The educational program provides an increasingly rigorous and challenging intellectual experience that is based on a spiral method of learning. Ideas and concepts fundamental to understanding topics such as algebra and scientific inquiry are introduced to our youngest students and then revisited with more depth and complexity as the children mature.

In our mixed-age classrooms, our students, who range in ages from three to six, benefit from learning from their peers as well as their teachers. The older children serve as mentors to the younger children both in play and academics, while the younger children participate in a wider range of educational experiences.

As is true throughout The San Francisco School, the curriculum in the preschool is designed on a continuum: we introduce concepts in the lower grades that are then reinforced and built upon as the children grow. For instance, under the umbrella of language arts, the teachers’ first focus is on the acquisition of language. As the children gain mastery over speech, they move toward phonemic awareness, making books and rhymes as well as learning to write the alphabet.

Guided primarily by each child’s developmental readiness, the teachers focus with the kindergarteners on reading at an individually appropriate level and writing stories using best-guess spelling. The same philosophy holds true for the preschool’s academic approach to math, science, social and cultural studies, as well as its music, art, physical education and Spanish studies. Children are provided with experiences and activities that foster inquiry, challenge the intellect, and build personal confidence.

In addition to Montessori-specific materials that focus on learning through the five senses, each classroom incorporates many other resources to help cultivate play as a way of learning. These include a working child’s size kitchen, play house and costumes, as well as a wealth of building toys, easels, watercolors, books, puzzles, and board games. Carefully selected manipulative materials such as the marble game, wooden trains and peg boards help children develop small motor dexterity, as well as provide the opportunity to explore spatial relationships.

Music, dramatic play, physical education and regular Spanish language classes are also important components of the program. Materials are selected that are multicultural, non-sexist and non-stereotyping. Children both learn to make wise choices and are guided to experience every area of classroom activities.