Welcome to Creekside’s blog for April! We hope you and your family have had a good March and a restful Spring Break together. We spent time during the break organizing and cleaning our toys, books, and materials. We’ve cleaned the classroom thoroughly, and we hope to continue with our track record of excellent health among our staff and students. Mr. Mike has been busy sanitizing and cleaning the entire school, and we are all looking forward to a wonderful and healthy spring.

This month we’re looking at the importance of STEAM over STEM educational models and how that factors in for your child’s experience at Creekside Kids.

STEM is the push for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics in our schools. Giving kids the basics they need to understand and excel at STEM subjects is excellent but often takes the creativity, passion, and inspiration out of learning. The STEM movement came out of a national trend pushing for more students to go to college and not consider trades or other career paths. Many high schools dropped their vocational programs and work-study programs during the rise of the STEM movement. In the past few years, there has been a big push to bring vocational programs back, and high schools have formed some creative partnerships with corporations and junior colleges in response. Your children, who are at the beginning of their educational careers, will benefit from this improved and more broad approach.

By adding the Arts (A) to the STEM model and making it arts influenced, educators have restored the creative and inspirational pieces. If you take a moment, you can see how art involves math and science, so we should not exclude art from a STEM curriculum. No matter what study and career path your child chooses, your child needs to be inspired and creative. To take it a step further, even Physical Education has science– the physics of making a slam dunk, hitting the home run, and even the biology and mechanics of the human body. At Creekside Kids, we do not have a formal PE program, but we encourage age-appropriate physical activity and plenty of fresh air. Young children need to be outdoors daily. Did you know children need approximately three hours (or more) of outdoor sunlight to help their eyes develop properly? At Creekside Kids, we are taking a holistic approach to your child’s development, and the A in the STEAM model is essential to us.

Kids often don’t have enough expressive language skills to thoroughly discuss their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world. Science is a kind of language, as is mathematics which is often described as the universal language. Art is a language, too. It is another way to help children speak, demonstrate what they understand about the world and how they feel about their place in it. At Creekside Kids, we enjoy asking the children about their drawings and their creations. Sometimes the children surprise us with very in-depth explanations for what looks like scribbles to an adult. Often, their artwork reflects their curiosity, their interests, and their emotional development. When asked about their work, the children can be quite articulate, allowing us to have a peek into their minds. It helps us plan our child-centered curriculum.

One of the most important questions we ask our students is, “Can you tell me about this?” and then to be quiet and listen. Asking a few follow-up questions shows them we care, consider their thoughts and feelings to be of significance, and are interested in them. This is the basis of love, and children need to love their teachers, parents, family and know that they are loved back in order to grow well.

In The Reggio Emilia philosophy, we speak about the Hundred Languages of Children. It’s the idea that children communicate in many ways other than words. Our job as educators is to provoke them to continue growing and learning and observing them and reading them–including their artistic products, body language, words, and behaviors. We believe that a holistic approach to guiding children is the best approach.