Building Bridges. Breaking Barriers.
WHOLE CHILD APPROACH
Our staff understands that many factors shape and influence how a child develops during childhood. That's why we have adopted the Whole Child approach. We take into accountability whether a child’s skills are progressing, if they are healthy or not, and if they have access to the resources they need? The whole child approach applies this concept to early childhood education. It goes beyond academics to focus on building a child’s character while requiring teachers and educators to learn and gain a deeper understanding of who the children they care for are as well as the people around them.
Research supports that classrooms that implement the whole child approach have better learning and development outcomes for children. It can also help mitigate the negative effects of trauma and stress by teaching children important social-emotional skills like managing stressful emotions and creating positive learning environments that prioritize supportive relationships between children and teachers.
As teachers and educators, we are given the responsibility to help families raise children who are confident, compassionate, and problem solvers. These skills and qualities will continue to develop throughout your child's adolescents' years and into their adulthood shaping them into well rounded citizens within and out of our community.
Five Fundamentals of Whole Child Approach
Healthiness
- Provides health education curriculum and instruction
- Delivers physical education schedule, curriculum and instruction that address lifetime fitness knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and skills
- Addressing the health and wellbeing of each staff member
- Collaborates with parents and the local community
- Integrates health and wellbeing into the school’s ongoing activities, professional development, curriculum and assessment practices
Safeness
- Provides students, staff, and family members with regular opportunities for learning and support in teaching students how to manage their own behavior and reinforcing expectations, rules and routines
- Fosters a community in which staff, students and family members establish and maintain school and classroom behavioral expectations, rules and routines that teach students how to manage their behavior and help them improve problem behavior
- Teaches, models and provides opportunities to practice social-emotional skills, including effective listening, conflict resolution, problem solving, personal reflection and responsibility, and ethical decision making
- Upholds social justice and equity concepts and practices mutual respect for individual differences at all levels of school interactions—student-to-student, adult-to-student and adult-to-adult.
Supported
- Personalizes learning through the flexible use of time and scheduling
- Uses a range of diagnostic, formative and summative assessment tasks to monitor student progress, provide timely feedback and adjust teaching-learning activities to maximize student progress
- Ensures that adult-student relationships support and encourage each student’s academic and personal growth
- Welcomes and including all families as partners in their children’s education and significant members of the school community
Engaged
- Create policies and a climate that reinforce citizenship and civic behaviors by students, family members and staff, and include meaningful participation in decision-making
- Use curriculum-related experiences such as field trips and outreach projects to complement and extend curriculum and instruction
- Have staff work closely with students to help them monitor and direct their own progress
- Expect and preparing students to assume age-appropriate responsibility for learning through effective decision-making, goal-setting, and time management
Challenged
- Ensures that each student has access to challenging, comprehensive curriculum in all content areas
- Provides curriculum and instruction that offer opportunities to develop critical thinking and reasoning skills, problem-solving competencies and technological proficiency
- Utilizes curriculum, instruction, and assessment that demonstrate high expectations for each student
- Works with families to help all students understand the connection between education and lifelong success