Santa Fe Sprouts

Giáo viên của chúng tôi

Maggie Maddux, owner and lead teacher, has a B.A. in Early Childhood Education and 25 years of experience working in preschool settings. Santa Fe Sprouts has been thriving since 2012 under her leadership. Teachers here are well-trained, supervised, and continuously pursuing professional development and further education in the field of Early Childhood Education.

Triết lý

Santa Fe Sprouts is guided by the understanding that the experiences of early childhood powerfully influence growth and development and that the quality of those experiences has a profound impact on future success in school and life. Parents of young children are also in a new and vulnerable developmental stage and need extra support during this time from an active, involved community of caring adults. We seek to provide children with a healthy, safe, consistent, and secure environment; to foster an expectation in children that they will be treated with respect and kindness as they go forward in school and in life; to provide children a loving, supportive, enriching, creative, and inclusive environment; to maintain communication with parents and encourage parent involvement; and to facilitate community-building among families by providing opportunities outside of school for socializing and forming bonds.

An important part of the work we do at Santa Fe Sprouts involves guiding the development of emotional intelligence (being able to understand how you feel and express that to others) and non-violent communication (being able to speak up for your needs in a way that others can hear and are likely to respond positively to without using blame, shame, guilt or coercion). We believe emotional intelligence to be the required foundation for building stable, healthy relationships and a successful life in general.

A major key to fostering this kind of emotional intelligence is providing children with calm, consistent attention and connection when they are experiencing the big feelings that go along with separation from parents and negotiating peer relationships at school. We believe the best way to establish this sense of connection is to allow and encourage children to express their emotions in the arms, or at least in the close physical presence, of a loving adult. To this end, when a child is upset, teachers will not rely on distraction to make the feelings “go away,” but will instead encourage the expression of these emotions, within a safe context so that children won’t be able to hurt themselves or others, but will be able to fully process and off-load difficult feelings.

We also firmly believe that young children thrive in a home-based program, learning and growing with a small number of other little ones, lots of loving parents around, and an early childhood professional holding the space for it all. Large, institutional preschools are a jarring and inappropriate setting for our youngest learners, who clearly need lots of support and nurturing as they embark on their long journey of social learning. Additionally, in a large preschool setting, there is little time for parents and teachers to develop the kind of intimate relationships that our young children need for us to have in order to best support them. Home-based care and education, when done with integrity and led by early childhood professionals, is the best bridge we can build for our little ones from the world of home and family into the world of school and other social institutions.

Địa điểm

We are located in the Barrio la Canada neighborhood next to Bicentennial Park. We are right on the river trail and very close to downtown Santa Fe. We have a large, shady play yard and an outdoor classroom, and we spend most of our day outside!

Về chương trình của chúng tôi

At Santa Fe Sprouts, we create a welcoming atmosphere where children thrive. Our program focuses on building strong emotional skills while allowing little ones to explore the great outdoors. With a caring approach to early learning, we ensure that every child has the chance to grow, learn, and play in a safe and joyful environment.