PHILOSOPHY

 

The Children’s Center at Purchase College, SUNY serves the families of students, faculty, and staff of the college and of the community at large. Our primary commitment is to provide high-quality childcare in a safe, healthy, happy, and stimulating learning environment.

 

Designed to facilitate each child's social, emotional, physical, and cognitive growth, the program emphasizes gender equity and the development of a positive self-concept. These goals require that all members of the staff respect and maintain open, positive communication with the children, their parents, and each other.

 

Purchase College students utilize the center in conjunction with course work, independent study, field experience, and senior projects. The Children's Center also pays particular attention to the needs of the community by offering parents invaluable informational resources, referrals, seminars, and conferences.

 

The Center tries to respond to issues that face communities as a whole, such as public health, child nutrition, teacher training, and mainstreaming.

 

A very important part of our curriculum focuses on the integration of campus resources and early childhood practices.  We utilize the dance and music buildings to experience sound, rhythm, and movement through the performing arts. The children learn about science through our nature walks and outdoor activities.

 

In an open environment setting, the Children's Center provides children with developmentally appropriate activities, ongoing assessment of the children's development, and an anti-bias curriculum emphasizing inclusion and anti-commercialism.

 

Play—the universal language of childhood—is used at the Center to foster the growth of elementary concepts of time, space, number, and color. Games, painting, construction, modeling, dance, outdoor play, and music are used to sharpen cognitive and perceptual processes, as well as to allow children to interact constructively with others.

 

Through these exercises, we hope to create an atmosphere of self-respect and self-discipline, and to provide ample opportunity for teachers to guide the children as they learn to make their own choices and decisions.

 

The Children's Center at Purchase College, Inc. is a campus-based early childhood center and instructional facility.