A child’s brain undergoes an amazing period of development from birth to three—producing more than a million neural connections each second.

- Zero to Three website

Medical and educational research has now fully accepted that a child’s brain grows and learns more from birth to age 3 than just about any time in life.  Your child may not talk much at this time, but everything that your child does and experiences is building connections in their brain that will help them learn later in life.    A wonderful resource for parents to learn about this topic is Zero to Three.

For this reason, we want the teachers and parents at our school to know how to best support that growth and development.  Using lots of vocabulary, helping children learn the words they need to describe what they feel and what they are doing does wonders to help children’s brains grow lots of new connections.

Our educational philosophy is that children at every level of our preschool have lots of opportunities to do hands-on activities that will let them experience and talk about the topics they are learning.  As you walk through our preschool, you will see more time spent playing and doing things and less time working on papers and dittos.  

Children do not develop at the same pace, however, and our teachers are very familiar with the developmental stages of young children.  All children in the preschool are screened for developmental progress using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire. Results are discussed with parents and if there are concerns, we have good relationships with agencies who can help follow up to see if a child needs extra help to catch up.

These efforts pay off!  We are proud that Interamerican has earned a reputation in our community for students who move on to elementary school ready to learn!  The neighboring elementary and charter schools regularly report that they are pleased to have our students join their schools when the families move on from our VPK or kindergarten.