The Golden Pond Way

The Golden Pond Way combines the best of established methods, such as Montessori and Reggio Emilia, with current neuroscience research on how children learn. This approach guides our teachers to nurture and educate the whole child by making learning meaningful at every stage in their rapid development.

Our curriculum emphasizes manipulating, creating, building, exploring and actively constructing knowledge through engaging, hands-on monthly explorations —like “Rain” or “Underground Animals.” These topics serve as lenses through which children develop the beginnings of a unique relationship to the world around them, along with new reading, writing, and math skills.

For instance, when studying “Rain,” children can see it, hear it, touch it, smell it and even taste it. They can interact with rain firsthand—take a rain walk, watch puddles evaporate, dissolve Kool-Aid in water, and then take a sip. Throughout the topic, children are reading and writing stories about rain. Even graphing the number of rainy days that month grounds the notion of rain in their immediate experience. By incorporating such a variety of ideas and activities around the concept of rain, not only is a child’s interest maintained but the learning is meaningful and real.

Additionally, the Golden Pond Way recognizes the importance of meeting a child’s emotional and physical needs in the learning process. Children learn best when they feel secure. They need to be challenged not stressed. They discover through all of their senses and are especially motivated by the new and unknown.

From an educator’s perspective, the Golden Pond Way is a developmentally appropriate, brain-based, and integrated approach to a child’s early learning needs. A parent will see the Golden Pond Way as a path to a life-long love of discovery. To a child, it means learning is FUN!

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