Szelog Family Child Care

Wildflower Atelier welcomes you and your family to our community. We strongly believe that all children are capable, passionate, and creative thinkers who are always constructing their own ideas about the world around them. We view education as a process of learning and not a product that is achieved. We strive to create an environment that supports creativity, cooperation, critical thinking skills, a sense of pride, integrity, and a passion for life long learning. At Wildflower Atelier, we value the individual child, the family unit as a whole, as well as the greater community that we are all a part of. Wildflower Atelier has been designed as a family centered program where we believe in creating and supporting genuine and authentic relationships, as well as a strong sense of community and support.

Wildflower Atelier is a Reggio inspired program for young children that is built on principles of respect, responsibility, and community.  We achieve this through exploration and discovery in a supportive and enriching environment that is based on the interests of the children through a self-guided curriculum that is developmentally, individually, and age appropriate.  We believe that children are active learners that thrive in an environment that provides meaningful contextual learning rather than abstract instruction.  Education should be an ongoing process of learning and growing that is unique to each individual.  It should not be a product or end goal that is achieved in the same way with the same product for every child in the end.

We have designed our program with an environment that encourages children to freely explore different objects, materials, and ideas.  We believe that the environment acts as an additional teacher and should provide authentic and meaningful tasks that encourage children to work together.  We truly believe that building authentic and genuine relationships between children, teachers, families, and our environment not only strengthen us as individuals, but also as a collective whole.

Children are always internally constructing their own knowledge and ideas about the world around them through the process of the scientific method.  We all come from different walks of life with different experiences, different truths, and different perspectives of our complex world.  True learning involves considering all of the different representations and perspectives, and through negotiation, children can clarify and even modify their ideas and understandings thus enabling them to build a deeper understanding of their own personal knowledge base.

At Wildflower Atelier, we respect the importance of family and community.  We encourage and welcome parents and family members to be active participants in our school community in a variety of ways.  Parents are welcome to come in and cook with children, help us plant and maintain our organic and edible garden, or share a special interest or talent with the children.  The possibilities are endless.