All Day Preschool operates twelve months a year and serves children 3-5 years of age.
This ECFE class is non-separating for parents and children birth to age 2.
Half Day Preschool offers options for 3 year olds to attend two mornings or afternoons per week or for 4 & 5 year olds to attend three mornings or afternoons per week.
Village Kids is a school-age childcare program that provides care before and after school and on non-school days for children in grades K-5 attending Wilshire Park Elementary School or who reside in St. Anthony-New Brighton School District.
Our early childhood camps and enrichment classes are specifically for children ages 2-6. However, some of our camps and classes are geared for ages 2-9 so siblings can attend together.
Experience the power of shared reading alongside educators, parents and community members through a community book read. The book we will read is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Our 2 facilitators will guide the group over the course of 4 meetings. Registration is required and closes November 20. Books can be picked up at Community Services between December 1 - December 20.
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Most importantly, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.