Classroom Environment

Village offers two classrooms for play and exploration: our Block room and Art room. Both rooms are arranged into areas that provide students with repeated access to the five essential experiences of early childhood development. Each area within the classrooms is filled with carefully chosen materials that have been arranged to encourage exploration, support development and promote independence.

unit blocks

Perhaps the most important tool for preschoolers is a complete set of unit blocks. At first they line them up in a row, then they begin stacking, forming partial enclosures and then full enclosures with patterns and design.  In the process they deal with spatial issues and balance. 
 

sensory

A bean, rice and seed table invites children to pour, measure, sort and organize. Flubber or playdough is every day to knead, roll, flatten, and create, and nature walks as well as objects on the science and nature table provide children the opportunity to feel and smell the world around them.

gross motor

Gross motor skills are acquired indoors by dancing, tumbling, rhythmic movement and active group games. Children also engage in play and movement outside every school day, rain or shine, on our spacious outdoor playground, where they spend time balancing, hanging and swinging, digging, carrying loads of sand and water in buckets and wheelbarrows, jumping, running, skipping and ball handling.

art

Art is essential to self-expression—a creative process that stimulates the feeling of joy and satisfaction and comes wholly from the child. At Village, art is not copying a model or using materials in a way dictated by adults, but a unique mixing of concepts with regularly rotated materials.
 

Dramatic play

Children try out new identities, make-believe, explore relationships and discover feelings and solutions during dramatic play. Dress-up clothes, musical instruments and large blocks allow the children to create new worlds, and daily group time includes singing, dancing, puppetry, storytelling and conversation.

location

Just off the I-5 Freeway and Capitol Highway interchange, the classroom occupies space near the West Portland United Methodist Church and sits near multiple nature trails and field trip destinations (for Seniors). Nearby are Multnomah Village, Hillsdale and Garden Home.