Inside Our Preschool Classrooms: Learning Areas

In the field of early childhood education, the classroom environment is often referred to as the “third teacher,” with educators and peers being the other two major influences. Because young children need concrete, hands-on experiences to make sense of the world, the centrality of the materials and their environment is a key component to their learning and development.

Each of our new preschool classrooms includes learning areas that offer hands-on, intentional experiences that facilitate students’ acquisition of important social-emotional, cognitive, and expressive skills, like collaboration, representational thinking, and more—all while building creativity, confidence, and responsibility.

“Play is the way that children learn how to learn,” says CDS Early Childhood Program Director Antonette Greene. “When we're developing activities and experiences for kids, we’re really using observations of children’s engagement and play to develop the curriculum and support deeper learning.”

From sensory and science tables to a dramatic play area, every part of the classroom invites children to dive into activities that develop inquiry skills and deeper understanding and spark curiosity and joy. Whether they’re building an airplane in the block area, creating self-portraits in the art area, or exploring the written word in the book area, your child will find plenty of opportunities to strengthen their relationships with their peers and teachers and self-direct their learning throughout the day.

Let’s take a closer look inside a CDS preschool classroom to see how these spaces nurture imagination and discovery!

The Art and Tinkering Areas are filled with opportunities for your children to develop their representational thinking and expand their expressive vocabulary by doing observational drawings, collages, paintings, clay sculptures, and models made of recycled materials. Along the way, they learn to illustrate their stories and model an idea, explore art in their community and around the world, and work with artistic mediums and tools. When children work on projects like these in early childhood, it serves as an important mode of expression for young learners. As children learn to look closely at things in the world around them and represent what they see and imagine, it develops the important relationship between mind, eye, and hand.

The Block Area is more than just a collection of wooden shapes. By building bridges, houses, castles, and other structures out of blocks, your children will begin to think about the spatial relationships of objects, understand the geometry of part-whole relationships, develop their hand-eye coordination, and collaborate with their peers to solve problems and create spaces for dramatic play. Blocks are a valuable learning tool across many developmental areas. 

The Book Area is a chance for your children to explore the written word and build their knowledge and vocabulary. In addition to independent reading, they can read and talk about books with their friends and teachers. As they move through their preschool career, they’ll learn to recognize words, predict what will happen in stories, seek out books that can answer their questions about the world, and link the books being read to their own life experiences in the world.

The Dramatic Play Area is a world of make-believe where your children can act out stories and put themselves in any situation they can imagine. It’s a great opportunity to work together with their peers, develop their mind and body, and explore the world and their role in it–what they are, what they’ve observed, and what they hope to become. Dramatic play is also the perfect vehicle for young children to develop executive function skills like planning, inhibitory control, and the flexibility to respond to an evolving play narrative created with peers. 

The Manipulatives Area has a wide collection of manipulative materials for your children to delve into exploring early mathematical concepts. Playing with math manipulatives supports children in measuring, quantifying, modeling, and developing a deeper understanding of concepts like patterns, sets, and more. 

The Science Area always has something fascinating to look at, whether it’s silkworms munching leaves from the playground or a decomposing pumpkin that helps your children learn about the life cycles of plants. It’s a spot for young learners to build their observational skills, discover how to pose questions, think of hypotheses, and develop curiosity for the world around them.

The Sensory Table contains kinetic sand, water, cornstarch, playdough, and plenty of other materials with different textures that will stimulate your children’s senses. Sensory play encourages exploration and experimentation and can be soothing and grounding emotionally. Children pay attention to physics and volume and make connections between objects and actions through sensory play, developing their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.  

The Writing Area is an important spot in the classroom where young learners can develop their understanding of authorship and learn to organize and express their ideas through illustrations and writing. As your children start to understand narrative structure and how to share non-fiction information, by dictating stories and facts they are learning about the connection between communication and writing. The writing area is where children also begin to learn the connection between letters and sounds, how to write their names, and how to spell words and share information in context.