Welcome to the Peanut Garden Playschool. We are a certified in-home preschool located in the West Cully neighborhood of NE Portland serving children 24 months through pre-kindergarten. Inspired by the municipal pre-primary schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, our school is built on the foundational belief that children are competent, capable learners and teachers.  Our project-based curriculum is designed around the emerging interests and developmental stages of the children present and rooted in a classroom culture that emphasizes self-management, peer mentorship and social responsibility.  Through teacher and peer modeling, we help children learn to communicate emotions, negotiate conflicts, persist through challenges and work both cooperatively and independently.

The daily schedule and staffing of our classroom allows us the flexibility to explore our project work and experiential learning with rotating small groups designed around the varied ages and interests of our mixed age classroom.  This allows us to give our younger Peanuts the emotional support and modeling for building their knowledge and feeling safe and supported at school while also allowing us to support our older Peanuts and pre-kindergarteners as they explore more in-depth projects and build the skills and knowledge that they will carry with them to kindergarten and beyond. 

As teachers, we facilitate our roles as co-learners and collaborators with the children by documenting the children's play, interactions and project work throughout the day using photographs, video, audio recordings work-samples and note-taking.  With these artifacts, we are able to revisit and reflect on the concepts and connections the children are exploring as individuals and as groups and use this information in how we plan our projects and provide materials to encourage and enrich this child-generated learning.  Our observational documentations are collected into a classroom book made available in the classroom, individual portfolios, which tell the story of each child's learning and growth over months and years, and in rotating displays posted throughout the classroom that celebrate our classroom community and encourage children to revisit, reflect and build on their past experiences.

In addition to the child and the teacher, we view the physical and sensorial environment as playing a critical role in the learning experience.  As such, our indoor and outdoor spaces are carefully and thoughtfully designed to facilitate exploration, collaboration and above all, play.  Our classroom is open and bright with a wall of southern-facing windows that look over our expansive outdoor space that includes chickens, a seasonal garden and fruit trees, a large play structure and lots of open space.

We look forward to meeting you.