"Everything children do is a response to something, whether it is to feelings within themselves or to situations and people outside themselves."
Cohen, Stern & Balaban, Observing and Recording the Behavior of Young Children

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."
Marvin Minsky

"What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we teach them just to do."
Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook

A goal at Stevens is to create independent, life-long learners. Therefore, classroom environments are carefully designed to be workplaces for children, rooms that stimulate direct interaction with real life. As children come to understand the interdependent nature of family roles, they gradually learn to make connections to the social structure of the classroom. They learn to participate in the upkeep of the space through a variety of daily jobs that include taking responsibility for materials and picking up. In this way, the children come to view their roles at school as multifaceted and necessary to the well-being of the class.

Together, teachers and children investigate new ideas as they emerge from discussion: Where does the money for parking tickets go? What are clouds made of? How do worms see? Why don't we have school on Martin Luther King's birthday? As children actively explore and make discoveries with open-ended materials, they also see that reading and writing skills are essential tools for learning and expressing their increasingly complex thoughts. Mathematical thinking and language activities are integrated into every aspect of the curriculum on a daily basis and complemented by whole-class and small-group skill instruction. It is at this age that Stevens begins to utilize parents and other adults who come from different cultures to share stories, recipes, songs and other rituals to introduce children naturally to the diversity that exists within the community.

In PreK/K, children also begin to explore the community outside the School by taking walking trips through neighborhoods and to particular places of interest, such as the firehouse, where they gather valuable information about community helpers. These experiences help improve their observation and research skills, introduce them to the process of articulating questions and ideas, and inform and enrich their daily block building and dramatic play.

Many questions originate from and are answered through the block-building program, a cornerstone of the curriculum that provides a comprehensive study of community for PreK-2nd Grade. In cooperative groups, students construct block cities, elaborate representations of the world they observe and want to understand. Intricate, customized details are fashioned with basic materials such as paper, clay and string; vehicles are made at the woodworking bench. Trips to neighborhood places such as banks, supermarkets, court houses, and train stations and the use of books and pictures from the Library provide common knowledge and experiences for children to incorporate into their cities and their dramatic play.

Students explore issues of community such as decision-making processes, distribution of goods and services, taxation, and justice. The culmination of the program, at the end of 2nd grade, is the construction of a "permanent city" often including electric lights, running water, public transportation, mail delivery, and a newspaper.

Daily work with the building blocks, math manipulatives and games, cooking and woodworking all provide practical application of math concepts and skills introduced in math lessons. Real life situations serve as a context for making formal arithmetic meaningful: We have two children absent and an extra teacher today, how many cups do we need? We've run out of long blocks; if we want to add 2 floors to the apartment building, how many blocks do we need to borrow? The problem-solving process is emphasized so children are encouraged to listen to each other's methods, to propose and test strategies, and to write about their math thinking. They discover that there are many ways to reach a solution.

Children's writing is valued and discussed by peers and teachers from early picture stories through dictation of words and attempts at sound spelling to the regular "publication" of each young author's stories and poems. Children contribute to collaborative class books which become valuable references for future block cities. Regular journal writing and drawing is nurtured in all classes and used as source material in Writers' Workshop, where children brainstorm possible subjects and then write independently or collaboratively to create finished works shared from the Authors' Chair.

Motivation for reading stems from the enticement of friends' stories, a literature-rich environment, and from a need for information to enhance the block buildings. To meet the goal of nurturing confident and competent readers, teachers carefully provide developmentally appropriate challenges and skill reinforcement within experiences of enjoyment and success. As children develop confidence and sight vocabularies, teachers address each individual's learning style and needs in small-group and one-on-one instruction in phonics, decoding and comprehension skills. Teachers read a wide variety of literature to the children every day, modeling the joy of reading, as do the reading "buddies" from older grades. Independent readers may also form reading groups, meeting in our comfortable reading lofts.

Scientific exploration and satisfying curiosity is an ongoing and integral part of the program. Teachers structure practice in gathering and analysis of data, hypothesis and experimentation through various units of study including sinking and floating, weather, magnetism, electricity and nutrition. Each year children observe and record information on different living organisms and life cycles including those of worms, butterflies, tadpoles, ants, and of course, seeds and plants which may be transplanted to our community or courtyard gardens.

Stevens Cooperative School
301 Garden Street, Hoboken • 201.792.3688
80 Pavonia Avenue at Newport, Jersey City, • 201.626.4020