SMART LOVE PRESCHOOL PHILOSOPHY

We believe the true nature of preschool is a place where children come to feel happy and competent emotionally, socially, and cognitively. This is at the heart of all we do. By nurturing children’s positive experience of school, we ensure they begin their education career with curiosity, optimism, and self-confidence that will endure throughout their elementary years. Smart Love’s approach to early childhood education is guided by the well-established and endorsed Smart Love principles. At its heart, these principles promote an understanding of a child’s mind and emotions at every stage of development. Our highly trained teachers use this understanding to foster every child’s love of learning and their potential. This teaching style is widely regarded as a mark of a high-quality early childhood education program.

OUR UNIQUE APPROACH

What is unique to Smart Love Preschool are the relationships our teachers foster with each child. When the child-teacher relationship is built on trust, understanding, and compassion, the child’s emotional needs are met. This allows children to grow their confidence, to explore their ideas, to nurture their curiosity, and to develop positive feelings towards school and learning. From this place, effective social-emotional development and learning occurs in a natural, child-focused way.

THE RESEARCH

Starting school is a major life transition and the importance of this transition is widely acknowledged in national and international research. When a child experiences a positive start to school, they will have more future success both academically and socially. Smart Love Preschool’s approach to early childhood education ensures a positive foundation from which children enter into elementary school with optimism, confidence, focus, resiliency, and happiness towards school. At Smart Love, we believe every child deserves the opportunity to grow and learn in a play-based, socially, and emotionally robust preschool.

THE HAPPIEST PRESCHOOL

Written by respected author and clinician Martha Heineman Pieper, Ph.D., and Kelly Perez, the director of Smart Love Preschool, The Happiest Preschool is the first teaching tool to take current ideas about the importance of fostering active playful learning and social-emotional development and present them in a format teachers can follow.

Early readers have applauded The Happiest Preschool

Arne Duncan, former U.S. Secretary of Education under the Obama Administration and former CEO of Chicago Public Schools:
"The Happiest Preschool: A Manual for Teachers is a strong advocate for high quality preschool, which is what every child needs and deserves as a springboard for academic success and the development of social-emotional skills and self-confidence. Teachers will learn and benefit from comprehensive topics and specific examples that illustrate how to create an exciting, cooperative, caring, inspiring classroom

David Kirp, UC-Berkeley public policy professor, The New York Times contributing writer, and The Sandbox Investment author:
"The Happiest Preschool is the go-to book for teachers eager to turn state-of-the-art ideas about how to create a preschool where children will thrive into on-the-ground reality in their classroom."