OUR MISSION
TerraNichol Academy of The Arts Preschool.
Is the kind of school parents expect, educators celebrate and children adore.
When TerraNichol Academy of The Arts Preschool was founded in 2006, our singular purpose was to strengthen families and the foundation of our community. It has been an honor and privilege to witness this vision come to fruition.
We are committed to providing every family with early childhood education, essential skills, resources, and support.
As we embark on a new school year, we extend a warm welcome to all and invite you to join our expanding family and put down roots.
Overall, the mission of TerraNichol Academy of The Arts Preschool is to provide a supportive, inclusive, and engaging learning environment that fosters the development of the whole child. They believe that every child is unique and capable of constructing their own knowledge, and they strive to create a learning environment that supports and nurtures each child's individual strengths and interests.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
The philosophy behind our curriculum is that young children learn best by doing. Learning isn't just repeating what someone else says; it requires active thinking and experimenting to find out how things work and to learn firsthand about the world we live in. In their early years, children explore the world around them by using all their senses (touching, tasting, listening, smelling, and looking). In using real materials such as blocks and trying out their ideas, children learn about sizes, shapes, and colors, and they notice relationships between things.
In time, they learn to use one object to stand for another. This is the beginning of symbolic thinking. For example, they might pretend a stick is an airplane or a block is a hamburger. These early symbols - the stick and the block - are similar in shape to the objects they represent. Gradually children become more and more able to use abstract symbols like words to describe their thoughts and feelings. They learn to "read" pictures which are symbols of real people, places and things. This exciting development in symbolic thinking takes place during the pre-school years as children play.
Play provides the foundation for academic or "school" learning. It is the preparation children need before they learn highly abstract symbols such as letters (which are symbols for sounds) and numbers (which are symbols for number concepts). Play enables us to achieve the key goals of our early childhood curriculum. Play is the work of young children.