A Profound Education Within Basic Play

Watching young children play with blocks may look like simple, classic play on the surface. But as children stack, balance, and create structures, they are doing so much more than playing—they are developing foundational skills to support growth across every area of learning.

At Harmony, we recognize that block play is one of the most valuable experiences we can offer young children—and that our block areas are actually spaces of discovery, imagination, collaboration, problem-solving, and storytelling, where a rich, complicated education unfolds in real time. Sound too good to be true? We promise you—it isn’t!

Rest Time In The Early Years

We get a lot of questions from families about nap and rest time at Harmony—understandably so! As parents ourselves, we deeply understand that well-slept children create happy households, a functional schedule, and (hopefully!) well-slept parents—whereas under-rested children struggling with disrupted sleep can mean quite the opposite.

Children’s sleep or lack thereof similarly impacts time away from home too. Adequate sleep allows a child to focus, acquire new information and skills, regulate emotions, and make positive behavioral choices—each of which comes into play throughout a school day surrounded by peers.

How We Set Your Child Up For Success

Starting Transitional Preschool is an exciting step for your 2-year-old and your whole family. If your child has been in daycare or spent a lot of time with a babysitter, moving into Transitional Preschool may feel like a simple shift to a new environment. However, if your child has been home with you since birth, you may have been looking forward to this moment with a mix of eager anticipation and trepidation, wondering how the transition will go. Wherever your child lands on this spectrum of readiness to begin Transitional Preschool, we’ve got you. Our experienced team knows exactly how to set your child up for success—establishing the foundation to thrive not only within our 2-year-old classroom, but in all subsequent preschool years!

Our Multi-Age Programs Are Designed for Growth & Leadership

We’ve already explored the benefits of our Pre-K & Kindergarten program. Now, let’s take a look at the specific benefits of two years in Harmony’s Preschool program…

A second year in our Preschool program allows for more in-depth exploration of concepts and subjects from the first year, providing a stronger foundation as children approach kindergarten. They have more time to interact with peers, learn to manage conflict, and develop critical social-emotional skills like understanding rules and expectations. The second year also gives children the opportunity to take on leadership roles by helping younger peers. 

What our Pre-K & Kindergarten Program is All About

When parents ask us whether their preschooler is progressing appropriately toward kindergarten readiness, they are often surprised that our response has little to do with academic skills. Though we present the basics of numbers, math, letters, reading, writing, and science to children age 2 and beyond, the true measure of kindergarten readiness comes from the social-emotional behavioral foundation your child is working to master every day throughout their preschool years.

Whether your children begin their Harmony experience at age 2 in our Transitional Preschool program, ages 3-4 in our Preschool program, or ages 4.9-6 in our Pre-K & Kindergarten program, our primary focus as they learn through play is to develop their Social-Emotional Learning Skills—only once they have mastered these can they fully shift to Intellectual Academic Skill-Building…

Observing Play Schemas Through Simple Materials

Learning never ends at Harmony—both for our teachers, and the children who arrive here to play each day. Throughout the year, as part of our Harmony Approach to individualized, play-based learning, we are constantly rotating the play materials in each classroom, and love to silently introduce new, basic items to observe how the children choose to interact with them. Though it may sound simple—and of course, everything we do at Harmony is rooted in simplicity—each child approaches objects through his or her own lens, and as we observe this, we not only get a window into their perspective and what they are learning, we watch their play inspire new play ideas among the other children, while also inspiring us to incorporate additional items that build on their learning.

For Play-Based Learning, Less Is More!

It’s that time of year again! As parents, we can’t help but share our little ones’ joy and wonder as they take in the holiday lights, music, and get swept up in the swirling excitement of the season. Yet that excitement can so easily morph into pressure and overstimulation for all of us.

Last December, we shared our favorite strategies to sidestep the overstimulation pitfalls and simplify your holidays—we still highly encourage and recommend all of them! This holiday season, to accompany those tips to simplify the holidays, we’ve put together a handful of our favorite simple gift ideas for you to give your littles—they are the kinds of materials children enjoy playing with at Harmony every day, along with easy ideas for how to use them in your home.

Introducing harmonycurriculum.com

This is an incredibly exciting day for us at Harmony. It marks the realization of a goal we barely dared dream of when we founded Harmony Natural Learning Center in Newbury, MA, in 2010, as a space for families of children 5 and under to engage in the joys of simple play together. At that time, we offered Parent/Child Classes for babies and toddlers, parent coaching, and parent workshops.

As word spread about Harmony and community demand grew, we began offering Preschool (ages 3-5), Transitional Preschool (ages 2-3), and eventually Multi-Track Kindergarten (ages 4-6). When families were forced to isolate at home during the pandemic, it also forced our hand to fulfill our long-held dream…

Maximizing Your Child’s Learning Journey, Together

What is the best way to assess young children’s learning and development in school and comprehensively relay it to parents? This question has long been debated within the education community—across all student age groups. While many schools have settled on teachers filling out standard checked-box assessment sheets with limited commentary (Child exercises self-control; Child recognizes all colors; Child recognizes number 0-9…), at Harmony, that just doesn’t feel authentic to who we are, as educators who seek to holistically understand each child. Just as storytelling is central to our teaching and to the way children learn best, it is key to our preschool and kindergarten assessment practices.

4 Tricks to Winning Days

Exciting as it is, the summer-to-fall transition can be fraught with emotions. No matter how much we, or our children, look forward to a new or returning autumn routine, the actual shift from summer mode to school season can stir up big feelings in every member of the household. While these big feelings are necessary for growth and to help us settle into new situations and routines, they can still feel foreign or uncomfortable as the waves of change hit us at different moments. In addition to our comprehensive Back to School Tips for Success, we have a handful of time-tested tricks to help your family navigate the changing tides as smoothly as possible...