5 Ingredients of Active Learning

CrossLife Christian Academy implements the HighScope 5 ingredients of active learning into each school day. Children are naturally curious, so by stimulating active learning throughout the preschool and elementary years, your child’s creativity and curiosity will grow. When children are given the freedom to explore and make choices in their active learning environment, their interest and curiosity soars. Active learning allows your child to challenge themselves, develop their interests and talents, and learn skills at their own rate - typically accelerated! Every child learns differently, so when they are given freedom in their learning, it allows them to work with a variety of learning tools in a resource-rich classroom. These resources include: art supplies, blocks, dramatic play, science discovery items, letter and number manipulatives, and more. This provides accelerated learning for students with a multitude of different learning styles. CrossLife Cristian Academy implements the HighScope 5 ingredients of active learning into each school day. • Materials: A wide variety of age- appropriate, use-flexible toys and materials encourage your child to deepen their play through untried, new ways. • Manipulation: Your child learns by self-directed free play with these learning resources. Sprinkle creativity liberally throughout. • Choice: Allow children to choose the concrete particulars within an overall instructional design for that lesson. • Child Language and Thought: Invite children to articulate what they are doing and why. This stimulates children’s ability to think and express themselves, improving overall language abilities. • Adult Scaffolding: CrossLife Christian Academy staff support the children during their work and play, encouraging them to finish activities, providing help and assistance as needed, and creating resiliency.

Bible-based Preschool and

Elementary in Pflugerville

At CrossLife, we teach young children about the Bible every day. Your child will know and understand that they are created by God and so deeply loved by Him. All children are unique, with their own gifts and talents. Jesus died for them all, no matter their life circumstance. Jesus didn’t just die for the rich, or for the athletic, or for the intelligent. He died for all because he loves us that much! Every child at CrossLife Christian Academy, regardless of their life situation will know this, as together we live lives of faith. “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” -Psalm 139:14

Character-Based Instruction

Preschool and Up

Character-focused instruction is job #1 at CrossLife Christian Academy, both preschool and elementary. Our curriculum-based instruction recognizes the stages of moral and cognitive development. Your child will go through many stages of development in their early years. At CrossLife Christian Academy, we guide your child to develop the skills and traits (eg. conscientiousness) that will propel them to life success. The early lessons in character are often learned through play. To the untrained eye, a child playing may not seem like much, but this is your child’s work and world. Our Bible-based preschool and early elementary program is therefore a mix of teacher-guided instruction and play. Through guided, free, imaginative play, your child will work with other children, building crucial interpersonal skills such as cooperation as well as important communication skills including empathetic understanding and respectful speaking. Working with others in the classroom will help your child to develop leadership skills, but equally important, followership skills. Our children develop initiative, planning, and reflection skills during their work time. Character is thus forged as your child focuses on activities that interest him or her, building success traits, skills, and academic knowledge, all at the same time.

Conflict Resolution: A Focused

and Structured Approach

Another key life skill important for everyone is conflict resolution. At CrossLife, we teach even 3- year-olds six steps for conflict resolution: • Approach calmly, stopping any hurtful actions • Acknowledge children’s feelings • Gather information • Restate the problem • Ask for ideas for solutions and choose one together • Be prepared to give follow-up support These steps are based on five decades of research by the designers of our HighScope® Preschool Curriculum, integrated with Biblical principles. By following this six-step approach, children resolve conflicts, learn to work together more effectively, take responsibility for wrong actions, and consider more appropriate behaviors for similar situations in the future. This process allows children to understand how to handle conflicts in a peaceful way, without causing further hurt. Rather than being a problem, conflict provides a training ground for instilling character traits and interpersonal skills for success. Clearly, when it comes to these life-changing traits and abilities, the early lessons matter most.

A Unique Focus on Decision-

Making Skills

A centerpiece of the HighScope® Curriculum is that students themselves are constantly making decisions within the scope of the lesson which materials, toys, and/or resources they will use to deepen their understanding. The context for the building of decision-making skills takes place during classroom “work time” - which from your child’s perspective, is playtime. Your child will need to decide how and where they want to spend their work time. After work time is over, students talk with the teacher about the what and why of the choices they made. Like character, decision-making is a life skill best learned in the early years of your child’s life. When the teachers at CrossLife Christian Academy help your child work through a decision, they are building a structure for decision-making that they will likely use for the rest of their life. Teaching kids strong decision-making skills is a specialty training for CrossLife Christian Academy teachers. In fact, teaching students to make wise decisions is a cornerstone of the Martin Luther College’s Early Childhood Education program (Our classroom teachers are all graduates of Martin Luther College.) CrossLife teachers will help students think critically about their decisions - big and small - weighing all the options before making an informed decision. Wise decision-making starts from teaching your child to explain the reasoning behind their decisions. While the decisions of a young child are seemingly nowhere near as important as the decisions we adults face everyday, most of the principles are the same. For example, when your child makes a conscious decision to ignore a peer’s poor behavior and carry on with their own work, that shows that they have made the decision to do what is right and not do what is wrong. The principle is no different for adults, but it is much easier to learn early on, when the stakes are not near as high.