Our Approach
Our Story
The founder and Director, Yvonne González created Mi Escuelita 18 years ago with a unique vision. Mixing the Emergent Open Creative Curriculum and the Reggio Emilia Approach. Combining these methodologies allows us to work with our children to ensure that they learn in the best possible way, nurturing both cognitive as well as emotional-social skills.
Mi Escuelita is proud to be local, independent, and women-owned. At Mi Escuelita, we embrace both childcare and teaching using our own unique approach.
Emergent Open Creative Curriculum
The Emergent Open Creative Curriculum is a widely accepted teaching approach that balances teacher-directed and child-initiated learning. At Mi Escuelita, we also add a very progressive way of teaching to it, combining different ages in an open classroom. Kids range from 2-5 yrs old. Having a mixed-age class promotes compassion, empathy, and role model, giving young ones the chance to interact/play with older kids and vice versa.
The Emergent Open Creative Curriculum stimulates this progressive way of learning and teaching, emphasizing and responding to each child’s interests and emotional needs allowing and encouraging them to build their strengths, confidence, and interests.
Critical components of the Emergent Open Creative Curriculum include but are not limited to promoting social-emotional skills and the arts, which allow children to develop socially, emotionally, physically, and cognitively.
Our Emergent Open Creative Curriculum is built on play and hands-on experiences to help the children’s physical, intellectual, social, and emotional growth.
Our daily schedule includes dramatic play, blocks, art, music, movement, gardening, mindfulness, and cooking, the foundation upon which literacy, math, and science are supported.
The Reggio Emilia Approach
The Reggio Emilia Approach is an innovative educational philosophy that, combined with the Emergent Open Creative Curriculum, sets our methodology apart from other programs.
This approach to teaching treats children as protagonists. Alongside the parents and teachers, children are the main characters in the story of learning. Working in small groups, the children communicate through language, movement, drawing, painting, building, dramatic play, and music.
Our teachers/tías are not only nurturers and guides but also act as researchers, asking questions to learn more about the children’s background knowledge and interests. Then, they build their curriculum around the answers to these questions. Children are allowed to construct their own learning styles, develop a strong sense of self and become better equipped to use problem-solving strategies independently.
