Honestly, before my daughter started preschool, I had assumed that learning looked a certain way and still followed programs like the ones I used when I was younger, which included flashcards or worksheets and depended on a child’s ability to sit still long enough to digest information. What I learned after she started coming home from Celebree School of Stafford is that play can be a powerful tool for teaching. My daughter excitedly identifies dinosaurs by name, sings rhymes when she’s washing her hands, or even ones that help her remember shapes and their number of sides.
To my child, she’s just at school playing all day and creating memories, and I’ve begun to realize just how much learning can be achieved through engaging activities. At home, we’ve turned preparing dinner into a complete lesson by pointing out different colors of ingredients, counting when adding them, reading instructions from cookbooks together that include identifying letters, and before we know it, we’ve been practicing things like math or problem-solving.
Children could be building towers from blocks or using their imagination to play pretend with others at Celebree while teachers use these moments to encourage confidence, communication skills, and independence. Educational moments don’t have to be picture perfect, as in fact they’re already around us through bedtime stories and, most importantly, our children asking “why?”
