The Early Learning Center
of Aspen places an emphasis on all aspects
of a child’s growth and development through a
play-based curriculum.
Evidence shows that one of the most important precursors to a person’s lifetime of success is found in the quality of the environment that a child has in the first 5 years of life. Play satisfies a basic human need to express imagination, curiosity and creativity, which are all key skills in a knowledge-driven world. Learning through play helps children cope, find joy, and use their imaginative and innovative powers to better the world around them.
Our classrooms focus on each child’s social-emotional, physical, language, and cognitive development. Teachers use an assessment tool called Teaching Strategies Gold to track where each child is on their development and build their curriculum to their specific classroom’s developmental needs.
Infant (8 weeks-18 months)
Our infant classrooms focus on children’s secure attachment to their caregivers by providing a warm and caring environment for babies to feel secure and safe. Our teachers sing and read to the children throughout the day, help children to build on their gross and fine motor development, help them to learn how to use self-regulations tools, and promote a healthy routine of secure attachment through meeting the children’s needs. The infant classrooms are breastfeeding-friendly rooms.
Toddler (18-36 months)
Our toddler rooms build on the social and emotional skills of attachment and start working intentionally on a child’s ability to self-regulate, communicate feelings, problem solve, and use friendship skills. Toddlers often do not have the communications skills necessary for talking through frustration, which can often lead to a child biting or hitting a friend. While this is a normal part of a toddler’s development, the teachers work on helping our toddlers be able to self-regulate their emotions instead of reacting to their frustrations. Teachers focus on emerging literacy and math skills and foster the children learning through the world around them. They create an environment where children can dive into learning based on the interests they indicate.
Preschool (2.5-4 years)
Our preschool classrooms continue building on the students social and emotional development in order to give them the skills to self-regulate with their emotions and be successful problem solvers. They also learn a lot about friendship skills! The teachers put together learning opportunities to continue to increase children’s literacy and math development. Our goal in our preschool classrooms is to facilitate learning in a way that a child walks away from the Early Learning Center with a passion and love for learning. We do this through rich facilitated free play time in the classroom’s learning centers, art projects, fine motor and gross motor activities, circle times, small group instructions, field trips, and much more.
PreK (4-6 years)
Our PreK classroom focuses on getting each child ready to successfully enter into Kindergarten the next year! These skills include social success, being able to identify and manage feelings, problem-solving skills, understanding, following rules and instruction, having the ability to sit quietly and keep their bodies calm, self-help skills, book awareness, rhyming, recognition of letters, writing and recognizing their own name, ability to hold and use a pencil or crayon, counting to 10 and recognizing shapes. The classroom also goes on fun adventures throughout our community to continue discovery-based learning about the world around them.
“The opportunity for education should begin at birth.”