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| EEC has brought in furniture designed for child-development purposes |
Preparations for the September 2012 opening of Qatar Academy’s Early Education Centre (EEC) are continuing with furniture and equipment for this learning facility now being put in place.
Adhering to the centre’s Creative Curriculum, developed and published by Teaching Strategies LLC, every piece of educational material complements the curriculum’s approach of enabling a child to grow in physical, social-emotional, cognitive and language development.
Margaret Dick, a member of the centre’s administration team, enumerated the five central components that make up the curriculum’s framework: partnering with families; knowing infants, toddlers, twos and threes; creating a responsive environment; what children are learning; and caring & teaching.
The facility is designed with this responsive environment in mind. The areas are divided into sensory rooms (Sensortorium), multipurpose rooms (Exploratorium), an outdoor pavilion, outdoor adventure areas and an indoor play area.
Dotting these pods is an array of Play + Soft furniture, a research-backed series of children’s furnishings that invites creativity and endless explorations even for the youngest set of learners. Alongside these creative environments are pieces of furniture manufactured by Community Playthings, a renowned childcare furniture manufacturer who have been in the business for over 60 years.
The design of their furniture fits right into the centre’s pedagogical approach of enabling the children to develop independence, responsibility, creativity and confidence as each piece of furniture is designed with the learning and developmental needs of the child in mind.
Another key centerpiece of the school’s learning environment is its interactive projection system: A fun, exciting and engaging sensory learning equipment which provides optimal audio-visual experience for the children. It is a video projector that responds to the smallest gesture or movement enabling students of all ages and all abilities to easily interact and generate immediate, real time multi-sensory experiences.
Dick notes: “Our curriculum is based on the premise that birth to age three is the most important period of development as this is when children begin to become competent learners. This interactive system fits with our goal of providing our students the most developmentally appropriate environment during this all important period of their growth”.