Our Philosophy

The Emmanuel Day School offers a nurturing, intimate and exciting learning environment with enriching opportunities for preschool children to discover and explore. By building on children’s natural passion for discovery we encourage students to work together in a multiage environment to investigate new concepts. In keeping with the traditions of Emmanuel Day School, of meeting the social, academic and spiritual needs of each child, our program will exceed no more than twenty students a day. This intimate setting will give each child an individualized learning experience that excites the imagination, inspires creativity and instills a lifelong curiosity.

Emmanuel Day School embraces the Rhode Island Department of Education’s Early Learning Standards. These standards serve as a guide for the design and development of our curriculum. The Rhode Island Early Learning Standards cover nine domains; physical health and motor development, social and emotional development, language development, literacy, cognitive development, mathematics, science, social studies and creative arts. We work to ensure all nine of these domains are incorporated throughout each and every school day.

The curriculum which is used at EDS is not a predetermined and fixed set of information. Rather, it is an ongoing plan of action, based on the program philosophy and the individual children enrolled in the program. Each month, teachers collaborate to design our environment and program topics to meet the interests and needs of our students. Play is a valued component in our program through which children explore their world, problem solve, feel competent to try new ideas, test their skills and learn from one another.

At Emmanuel, we welcome students and families of all abilities and backgrounds. We offer many different approaches to learning within our day, ensuring that all activities are developmentally appropriate and differentiated or modified to meet the individual needs of each child. We use a variety of local resources and partnerships to provide students reasonable accommodations in our environment.