Our School Day

Hours of Operation 

• Full Time: 9 am–3 pm

• Pre-k Classrooms (Butterfly, Sunshine and Rainbow): 8:50 am-3:10 pm

• Early Bird Program: 8–9 am 

• After School Program: 3–6 pm

In all areas of preschool play, there are concepts of living, sharing, and understanding that take on added dimension with the growth and development of your child. It is our belief that children need both freedom and a sense of order in the events of the day to thrive. A fixed daily schedule gives children confidence because they know what to expect. However, the schedule is just providing a framework and can be easily modified as needed. Throughout the day, children are free to make many choices within the basic structure. Elements of our program include:

• Circle/Meeting Time This is a time to come together and reconnect as a classroom community. It is a time to share ideas, thoughts, personal items, anecdotes, a story or a song; a time to introduce a new learning concept; a time to reflect on a shared activity; and a time to gather cohorts and coworkers to engage in small group project work.

• Free Play Inside or outside, your child has the freedom to make choices, express themselves in dramatic play and relate to and negotiate with others. Our materials include puzzles, games, manipulatives, blocks, dolls, books, musical instruments, as well as art, natural and recycled materials to explore and to use to create. Dress Up/Pretend play is a very important way that children express their understanding of the world around them. We invite children to imagine, re-live and role-play adult, home and community activities using a variety of child-sized equipment and materials, including kitchen accessories, fabrics and dress-up clothes.

• Science and Math At BFS, we create a learning environment where the children can explore science and math concepts as they are moving through their immediate surroundings. Wooden unit blocks spur the discovery of measurements and comparisons. Manipulatives inspire the urge to categorize, sort and classify. Snails, leaves and insects motivate the children to observe and collect data. Blocks and other building toys offer many possibilities for the exploration of mathematical concepts as well as imaginative expression. Sand and water play or cooking also provide the opportunity for hands-on study of many scientific concepts. Teachers facilitate and watch, listen carefully, and find entry points for broadening the children's knowledge base and challenging them to ask questions, make predictions and create and test their own theories.

• Literacy Children want to express themselves and to be understood by others. We facilitate this desire by providing endless opportunities to have conversations, share ideas, dictate thoughts, enjoy children's literature, learn from reference books, and see the written language being used daily in real-life contexts. The exploration of letters and the alphabet is child-directed and teacher-facilitated. We support the children’s need to deconstruct and reconstruct their understanding and representation of words and letters. We share in their enjoyment of the expression of phonetic and phonemic awareness.

• Trips In addition to local parks, teachers also integrate the surrounding neighborhood into their classroom curriculum. Classes may visit the local hardware store to find a tool for a project or the local market to purchase ingredients for a recipe. In the spring, we take children on field trips that are related to the areas of study they are exploring. A class that has been engaging in a study of subway trains might go to the Transit Museum, and another that has been interested in farm animals might go to the Queens County Farm. Trips are taken only if enough parent or caregiver volunteers are available to chaperone.

• Celebrations We support the children in their celebration of many cultural and family holidays within the school. We believe that sharing different cultural backgrounds in this way develops healthy self-awareness and a positive understanding of others. We provide children with information about the traditions that surround such events through activities and stories. Families are encouraged to participate and to share how they celebrate at home. We also celebrate each child’s birthday if their family wishes.

Enrichment

Our curriculum is greatly enhanced by the teaching artists who work with us every week to facilitate the exploration of “the hundred languages of children”—whether the medium is movement, music or the visual arts.

• Visual Arts  A variety of materials are provided to stimulate the child’s imagination and help express their feelings and ideas through artistic creation. The mediums that children explore include painting and drawing, collage, sculpture, clay and dough. Gabi Moisan, our on staff “atelierista” is our part-time professional artist on staff who collaborates with classroom teachers and children to delve deeper into individual and collective artistic processes and express themselves through drawing, painting, printing, sculpture and collage.

• Music and Movement  We encourage the natural inclinations of children to sing, move and express with sound. Musical instruments are made available for exploration at free play time. Singing songs alone or together and listening to and appreciating various genres of music are part of the everyday curriculum. This daily experience is enriched by a visiting teaching artist who helps the children to sing tunefully, develop age-appropriate musical concepts, move expressively and rhythmically, and create their own music and movements. Joane Riel brings her child-focused improvisational based style of exploring movement and movement to our youngest classrooms, while Shawn Farrar brings an understanding of musical concepts as an opera singer into sessions with the older children.

• Spanish with Raquel from Espanate.