The K'TonTon Way
Smiles. Laughter. Playdough. Blocks. Paint. Sand. Water. Singing. Challah. The sights and sounds of K’Ton Ton greet you the moment you enter our doors. They draw you in to a world made for children to do what children do best. We inspire children to encounter the world with joy, curiosity and confidence. Clad in backpacks and excited anticipation, children race in to hang up their things, change their shoes and start a day full of playing to learn.
At the heart of what we do is heart. K’TonTon remains the premier preschool in Northwest Indiana, for over 60 years, because of the emphasis we place on relationships. When families register their child for K’TonTon, they become part of our K’Ton Ton family. We embody the notion “It takes a village.” Our commitment to supporting one another is seen in staff to staff interactions, staff to family interactions, and family to family interactions. We are not just a school, but a community at its best. Our level of understanding and application of developmentally appropriate practice truly sets us apart. Children learn in an environment of equipment and materials that are used freely and creatively with adult support and guidance. The goal of facilitating social, emotional, physical, and cognitive abilities underlies all that we do. Our children learn to expect consistency, fairness, affection, and respect from teachers, while discovering the joys of mastering skills. We support and follow the best practices developed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and when children graduate from K’TonTon, the foundation of their house of learning is strong enough to build an academic mansion as they move on to the “big” school. The most important piece of the K’TonTon curriculum is our focus on Social-Emotional Learning. From brain research, we now know that the strength of our right, “feeling” brain determines the strength of our left, “thinking” brain. For our children to be ready to learn, they have to have a strong foundation of social emotional skills. Our Conscious Discipline program does just that. As the only preschool in the area committed to a brain-based social emotional program, our K’TonTon family learns breathing strategies to help us calm, skills and strategies to help grow self-regulation, and solve problems. Our children are taught how to talk to each other, stand up for what they need, and fix things when we have an “oops”. On a daily basis, our teachers guide children through our curriculum with emergent literacy (sharing books, poems, rhymes, awareness of letter sounds and names, dictation, and speaking skills), numeracy (patterns, sorting, counting, graphing, numbers, classifying, measuring, adding and subtracting), creative arts (music, process art, dancing), gross motor skills (big body movement, jumping, skipping, hopping), and fine motor skills (cutting, gluing, squeezing). The children of K’TonTon come through our doors and enter a magical land of wonder and discovery, budding self-sufficiency, first friendships, shrewd negotiations, limitless imagination, delighted giggles, big classroom jobs, small winter slippers, intriguing books, artistic masterpieces, beautiful messes, warm hugs and the beginning of a lifetime of finding joy in learning. |