There is Tremendous Method to the Magic

Walk into one of our Early Learning Center classrooms on any given morning, and you may find a restaurant operating out of a play kitchen, a castle under construction, a child carefully covering a page with circles, and two friends engaged in very serious negotiations over who gets the blue marker.

It can look a little messy, a little noisy, and if we're doing it right, a lot like play.

But watch a little longer.

The child building the castle has an idea she is trying to make real. When the tower falls, she adjusts her plan and tries again. The restaurant owners are assigning roles, remembering orders, and figuring out what to do when everyone wants to be the chef. The child making circles is strengthening the small muscles he will eventually use to write and discovering that marks on a page can carry meaning.

And those two children with the marker? They are practicing some of the hardest work of all: communicating, listening, managing disappointment and finding a way forward together.

Beneath all that play, important learning is unfolding.

Between ages three and five, development is rapid, wonderfully uneven and deeply connected to play. Children are building language, strengthening their bodies, learning to regulate emotions, developing relationships and beginning to think in increasingly complex ways. A three-year-old who understands the world largely through her own experience becomes a four-year-old who notices, remembers and wonders; and, eventually, a five-year-old increasingly able to plan, solve, negotiate and anticipate.

Because of that, preschool shouldn't simply be a smaller version of elementary school. Young children aren't only learning information. They are building the framework for how to learn.

At Battle Ground Academy's Early Learning Center, that understanding shapes our blended approach to curriculum: teachers hold intentional learning outcomes while also making room for children's interests and questions to guide the experience.

Recently, our students explored a study called We Are Storytellers. In one classroom, children created their own books and then collaborated on a class story. To a child, they were making up characters and deciding what happened next. Underneath that delightful work, however, they were imagining, planning, sequencing, representing, revising and communicating. To create something together, they also had to listen, negotiate, compromise and collaborate.

Another class explored storytelling through photography, asking children to consider themselves, their relationships and the things they love. Taking a photograph required them to notice, choose, frame, capture, interpret and communicate.

The finished products were wonderful, but the process was the education.

School readiness is bigger than writing a name, knowing letters or counting to 100. It is also the ability to wonder, persist, communicate, solve a problem, join a group, consider another person's perspective, and believe, "I am someone who can learn."

Those abilities are built in hundreds of ordinary childhood moments: a tower falls. A friend says no. A story needs an ending. Someone else has the blue marker.

There will be plenty of time for bigger desks and thicker books. For now, there are blocks and stories, paint and questions, friendships and imagination: the serious and joyful work of becoming.

It looks a lot like play, and there is a tremendous method to the magic.

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Battle Ground Academy is Franklin’s only independent, nonsectarian, college preparatory school serving students from age three through twelfth grade. The deadline to apply to BGA’s Early Learning Center for Fall 2027 is December 1^st.