Our Pedagogy

“Child is the true curriculum”.
- Sally Haughey

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Free-thinking inspired fluidity

The goals of our curriculum are to foster the growth of the whole child and to stimulate crucial neurodevelopment in our students using a holistic, thematic approach. Our curriculum is structured in a way that teaching and learning foster children's innate curiosity and inspire their imagination. At the core of our philosophy is the belief that every child can reach their full intellectual, social, physical, and emotional potential if given the opportunity to develop a positive, purposeful, and successful motivation to learn.

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“Do you know me well enough to teach me?”

We adhere to the philosophy that each child is an individual with their own set of unique needs for educational success. Acting on the question, “Do you know me well enough to teach me?” we use our students' interests, motivations, anticipations, and questions about the upcoming school year as a lens through which to guide our teaching. Our teachers can foster meaningful relationships with their students due to our small class sizes, laying the groundwork for a productive and individualized academic year. Our educators spend considerable time on diagnostics to learn about each student within the context of the curriculum to promote the growth of student curiosity and ultimately address the following:

• How children are competent and eager learners whose natural curiosity yields rich learning trajectories.
• That a child's learning is integrative and holistic, and subject-specific knowledge is best acquired through experiences generated by their surroundings.
• The assurance that no one aspect of a child's development takes precedence, it is essential to provide them with opportunities to grow in all areas, including physical and motor, linguistic, cognitive, social, and emotional.

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Creative and adaptive curriculum

Our classes are innovative and flexible. They are adaptable to the needs of each child and their unique interests and abilities. As a result, our educators creatively adapt the subjects to meet each child's favourite way of learning.

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Our creative curriculum has four stages:

‍Inspire – We inspire children through various pedagogies to fuel excitement and motivation. Quality active learning challenges children’s thinking using real-life and first-hand experiences.

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Discover – Children follow new pathways of inquiry, building on what they already know to discover new knowledge and develop new skills and understanding. Children are challenged with problems to solve and are inspired by imaginative and creative opportunities. Our students are given opportunities to engage with rich learning requiring their deepest thinking.

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Create – Our students compose, make, build, investigate, explore, write for different purposes, read across the curriculum, and participate in practical activities. They take on roles and responsibilities, developing negotiation skills, leadership, and cooperation.

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Communicate – Children become the performers, the experts, and the informers. They share their achievements with others, often by publishing their work to an audience in written form, artwork, drama, dance, or by utilizing information technology through a presentation or classroom exhibition. Students will be evaluating their work through talk and reflection.

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Curriculum and environment designed to deliver a rich learning experience for children

As our children enter formal education, our curriculum design is such that it allows children to learn within a state of ‘flow.’ The connectivity of our curriculum themes and longer lessons allows children the time, space, and opportunity to be entirely absorbed by a learning experience and task. SASE ensures learning is ‘experiential,’ providing opportunities for children to use their full sensory intelligence, opportunities to create, be in nature, and have real agency in their learning.

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Monthly forest school and woodwork sessions, partnership projects, and daily access to multiple subjects are taught in the context of a purposeful and meaningful topic that inspires, excites, and enthuses learners. These exceptional learning opportunities will equip them with transferrable skills for life-long learning. The progressive curriculum builds upon prior knowledge, challenges thinking, and enables a higher level of understanding for long-term memory acquisition, storage, and retention.

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Sustainability

Our curriculum is shaped around global challenges that can be accessed from a personal, local, and global perspective. Classroom inquiries are linked to the UN Sustainable Development Goals to help develop children’s understanding of how to look after themselves, others, and the world around them, as global citizens of the future with an approach of Posthumanism.