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.

Welcome to the March blog for Creekside kids! We’re thinking about staycationing in Colorado Springs. How do you plan a spring break locally that your kids will enjoy and appreciate later on?

There are many wonderful activities around Colorado Springs if you want to have a great time and still stay within a short drive of home. Rather than suggest a selection of places to spend your time adventuring, I’d like to present you with five guidelines for sharing your spring break with your kids:

1. Don’t over plan the day. There may be a brilliant opportunity to see something unique or do something you remember doing as a child, and that may inspire you to cram in a lot of “significant moments” for your kids. But if you push your kids from event to event, they will want to escape. Keep it easy, breezy, simple, with events planned around the things they need in their schedule, like food, potty breaks, and naps.
2. Plan for naps. Naps are essential when doing things they might find exciting or stimulating! They need the rest, and they need to come out of that rest knowing that everything is still okay for them. 
3. Expect meltdowns. If you are taking your kids out of their routine for something special, they may throw some pretty epic tantrums. The excitement and new things can bring out the worst in them because they aren’t their adult selves yet. They’re too young to appreciate the experience as finite and repeatable. Remember that they are each their own little bucket of neurosis and id. They may have a great time and then see a sibling have a great time and feel cheated somehow. Don’t take it personally if they become unreasonable. Remember that new things are difficult for them to process, and they may need more time and assurance from you.
4. Always have snacks. Activities and significant walking distances require snacks! Be sure to keep them on hand, and for yourself, too. You’re only human, and you need the energy, also.
5. Don’t forget to look after yourself. I recently took a trip back east to see my family, and on the airplane, the flight attendants went through their safety precautions. They noted that in the awful event that the cabin pressure drops in an aircraft and the oxygen masks fall, you should put your mask on first before helping someone else put their own on. You don’t need food and rest as much as your kids do, but you still need them. Always remember that self-care is also a part of organizing a great experience.

We hope your Spring Break is a great time with your kids. Things will not go according to plan, but you may just have a good time that they will remember for years between the struggles of parenting.

Welcome to 2021!

2020 was a terrible year from many perspectives, with civil unrest, murder hornets, wildfires, the COVID19 pandemic, and the associated problems (food and toiletry shortages, layoffs, homelessness) all conspiring to make our lives difficult. It’s easy to focus on the hardships and struggles of the past year.

It’s very easy to be negative, in the face of bad things happening. And it takes courage to be positive in the light of hard times. Right now, our kids need us to model resiliency and confidence as we fight our way through the troubles we’re facing. It’s a good time for our kids to see that even when things get bad, coming together as a family with optimism and determination have transformative powers. We are modeling this for the children in our care each day.

We at Creekside have a lot to be thankful for as we close the door on 2020. We’ve managed to retain much of our staff, despite our numbers dropping off as families moved, worked from home and struggled to stay safe in the time of COVID19. We are still offering flexible customized scheduling for our families and are happy that our families like that convenience. We’re so happy to see everyone, glad we are open again, and glad parents are getting back to work, moving our lives closer and closer to the sense of normalcy we once had.

We have managed to remain COVID19 free (knock on wood), and we continue to maintain high safety standards at Creekside. This is not just due to the staff. It also comes from the good practices towards hygiene our parents are teaching their children and our children are bringing into the school. We are grateful to be able to be a part of the education and growth of your wonderful, imaginative, terrific children. For that, we are most grateful.

Thank you for continuing to put your trust in us as partners in your child’s development. If your children aren’t currently enrolled, and you’d like to discuss a place at Creekside Kids for your child, we’d like to invite you to schedule an appointment. Let’s get to know each other! We’re located at 1201 W. Cheyenne Road, Colorado Springs, CO 80906, and we can be reached at (719) 635-9111. Our normal hours of operation are 6:30 AM until 5:45 PM, Monday through Friday; however, we have a shortened schedule during COVID of 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM.