Our early learning program interweaves STEAM into learning every day, but our pre-k and kindergarten also students get an extra-big, multi-age, engineering-focused shot of STEAM once a week.

Once per week, the fourth and fifth grade class collaborates with the younger students on a STEAM challenge. 

This mentoring by the older students is invaluable for many reasons. It builds a sense of community. It allows an opportunity for one-on-one work on projects that require more hands than teachers and instructional aides can supply. Our young students get a chance to work on projects that they have big ideas to manage, but might need help with fine motor skills, strength, and height. The older children gain respect for the younger ones and a realization that they are more than the cute ones. 

As a kindergartner put it: "If they don't know something, we can teach them. And if we don't know something, they can teach us."

Learning looks like play in our early learning classrooms. While play times appear spontaneous, the classroom environments are carefully designed to encourage play in a way that develops imagination and creativity, curricular concepts and skills, cooperation and social skills, fine and gross motor skills, collaboration, problem solving, independence and self care. When at play, children are able to imagine, explore, hypothesize and choose the direction of their own learning. 

Especially for young gifted children, play becomes a means for exploring complex questions and ideas, giving children the chance to share knowledge with peers as they pretend together. A group of young Seabury students playing veterinarian with stuffed animals used a light table to look at x-rays, discussed anatomy, used stethoscopes and bandages to treat and diagnose, set up a system for making appointments, billed patients, collected money with the cash register, and more. This "play" lasted for days and showed complex learning far above pre-k and kindergarten level.

All children have their own areas of strength. However, some children have unusually advanced abilities that require special adjustments at home and school to help them grow and learn. As you watch your child grow and develop, you might notice skills or characteristics that are quite different from those of other children the same age. For example, your child may:

• Be especially curious and observant.
• Use adult-sounding words and reasoning.
• Think of many unusual ideas.
• Recognize complex patterns or relationships.
• Come to surprising solutions to problems.
• Show a strong memory.
• Ask unusual questions.
• Demonstrate advanced talent in a certain area (such as mathematics, science, writing, art, music, or drama).
• Learn letters or numbers early and read before being formally taught.
• Display an unusually intense passion for a subject, such as dinosaurs, space, or insects, and seemingly soak up everything there is to learn about that topic before moving to the next passion.