Special Didactic Elements

Room specific elements reinforce and facilitate teaching themes. Creative Expression spaces have a castle and house feature which is used for child initiated imaginary play and role playing. The Language Arts area has a club house and reading nook. The former for structured teacher-dominated activities, the latter for informal child-initiated activities. In Math and Science the Forest Ring provides a naturalist surrounding for display and teacher-dominated presentations of natural sciences. The toddler space uses another natural form in teaching, the honeycomb, configured as a modifiable maze. These elements are literal in form but purposely minimal in detail, which allows the staff to make, for example, the play house a pyramid, or the castle a huge tree trunk by simple decoration. .