Park Hill Adventure

Park Hill Adventure and its Natural Learning Approach, developed by Jan Gray, is a child-centric curriculum that leverages curiosity, creativity, and the logic centers of the brain.  Students are taught how to think, learn, and behave to their optimal potential while exploring concepts rooted in their natural interests.

 

Methodology

 

         A “concept” is an idea or mental picture of a group or class of objects that is formed by combining all their characteristics; it serves as a rule-set that allows us to understand general relations be­tween objects. Especially in their formative years, children use their senses to construct concepts and apply those concepts to the world around them.  For preschool aged children, the foundational concepts to learn are: emotions, colors, sequences, quantities, shapes, sizes, direction, time, textures and spatial relations.  Without knowing these concepts, children could be behind the norm of their classmates.

          A free-play between imagination and understanding fosters an awareness of age appropriate concepts. By creating an educational environment that is rich in sensory experiences, the Natural Learning Approach goes beyond the foundational concepts to teach diverse conceptual information around various disciplines such as science, art, geography, math, paleontology and many other topics of interest.

          Our teaching methodology employs the hierarchies of Bloom’s Taxonomy and the theory of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Bloom provides the educational objectives, which include both lower-order and higher-order thinking skills. Vygotsky provides a scaffolded approach to learning the foundational concepts.

          Throughout the course of a child’s education, curiosity, interest and motivation are linked to facilitate learning.  The Natural Learning Approach believes in engaging children’s creativity through a variety of strategies, guided by their interests, and organized into conceptual ideas. We devise controlled activities that exercise the connections between curiosity and creativity, leading to successful collaborative problem solving.

 

Principles

 

 The Natural Learning Approach, developed by Jan Gray, is founded on three simple principles:

 

1.  Curiosity is the driver and motivational process that keeps children stimulated to learn.

2.  Learning comes from a harmonious free-play of imagination and understanding.

3.  Creativity is the pathway to problem solving.

 

 

• Curiosity is the driver and motivational process that keeps children stimulated to learn.

 

Curiosity is the drive to ask the next question and explore new experiences.  It is a motivational factor that must exist for children to want to learn. When a teacher embarks upon a subject that holds a child’s interest, curiosity is naturally heightened.  Therefore, it is important for the teacher to be alert to the children’s interests. All lesson plans must be formulated by incorporating those interests as a way to emphasize the concepts.  The Natural Learning Approach uses many ways to excite a child’s curiosity and natural interest to want to learn important concepts. Invariably there will be natural ebb and flow to these lessons.  As the children ask more and more questions, or as their curiosity goes in new directions, pathways to different concepts could be explored inside the general parameters of the lesson plan.

 

 

• Learning comes from a harmonious free-play of imagination and understanding.

 

We create an environment that promotes the free-play state of mind.  During cognitive free-play, children can make associations and abstractions, and can jump from one concept to another.  They combine different ideas in their imaginations, and then organize those ideas into something new.  With the teacher’s guidance, the children can use their understanding of the particular concept to explore and learn even more complex concepts.

 

 

• Creativity is the pathway to problem solving.

 

Although some people may believe that there is a left-side and a right-side of the brain that controls thought processes, creativity is actually stimulated from many areas of the brain working together. It is one of the most powerful processes that allow children to become thinkers. Creativity is not only a skill used for creative tasks like painting or music, but is also a skill that is required for every day life. Creativity permeates every part of a child’s cognitive and personal development, including problem solving, divergent thinking, flexibility of thought, access to emotion, self-confidence, risk-taking and openness to experience. The Natural Learning Approach creates a program and environment that fosters creativity and leads to better thinking, learning and comprehension as well as increased self-confidence.  Creativity helps to facilitate both higher-order and lower-order thought processes by providing the children another way to explore each concept.