Early Childhood

The Early Childhood division includes:

Please visit the grade level pages linked above for more information on the teachers and what to expect in their classrooms.  While our PK-1 program features accelerated and enriched academics, our classrooms are a fun place for students to create and explore.  The PK-1 teachers provide engaging hands-on projects, encourage students to ask lots of questions, and give them time to be 3-6 year olds with play and choices for activities.

Da Vinci Academy provides an excellent program for young learners who show signs that they need a more challenging academic environment.  These students are intellectually curious, have a natural passion for learning, and demonstrate accelerated development in one or more areas.  Our Early Childhood students typically function beyond their same-age peers in one or more of the following areas: verbal skills and complexity of language, memory, learning new concepts quickly with little repetition, making connections, recognizing patterns and relationships (language or math concepts), and visual-spatial skills (puzzles, taking things apart, advanced building or art).  Each child is unique and has different strengths, but these traits are common among the students in the early grade levels at Da Vinci.

Students who enroll in Pre-K or Kindergarten have a variety of school experience.  Some have only been at home, and we often hear from their parents that they have run out of ways to keep their children challenged or sufficiently engaged.  For these families, they know that their child needs to be in school where they can be challenged by experienced teachers.  Others come to Da Vinci having had some school experience in daycare, Montessori, or park district programs, whether partial days or full days.  Children like this typically have benefited from the social experience, but their parents are seeking more structure and academic focus.

Whether children have had school experience or not, we follow a careful admission process to find a good fit with our youngest students.  It is important to assess the child's academic level, but also to ensure a good social fit and the child's overall developmental readiness to begin at Da Vinci.