As our students play outside at Our Kids’ Academy Town Center, on our beautiful new playground, we observe our surroundings beyond the fence. Nestled in the heart of Eagleview there are beautiful homes and condominiums within walking distance. Across the walkway sits a great coffee house and next door is a place to keep healthy. On the way to our learning center, we pass many corporate headquarter buildings that border Route 100, Pennsylvania Drive, and Eagleview Boulevard where thousands of individuals attend work each day. Of course, prior to living, working, having coffee or exercising in these locations, the actual structures were designed by architects and built by teams of talented individuals. Much planning was done long before the first hole was dug.
Recently, we came across an excerpt from a Community Playthings Blog. Community Playthings is a company that has been in existence for over 65 years that builds beautiful, sturdy and environmentally friendly products. We follow these blogs because our centers are full of these amazing materials, and they are filled with fascinating information. In the most recent Community Playthings blog posting, Dan Feil recalls his childhood and his simple set of toy blocks. “My unit block set gave me a quantitative spatial sense. I built walls. I built houses. I learned which blocks were good for long spans. I learned how much support the spanning blocks needed. I was learning geometric shapes and relationships, and didn’t even know it.”
Hands-on learning with items such as the blocks that Mr. Feil described are utilized on a daily basis in our learning centers. As our degreed teachers observe the children working with these blocks, they see the foundation of learning being shaped before their eyes. They see discovery, science, and math. The trial and error experiments experienced at an early age by Mr. Feil were done with the same blocks our children use today.
Mr. Feil is an accomplished Architect and his work has been nationally recognized. Although we have not personally met Mr. Feil, we sincerely appreciate that he shared his story with Community Playthings and, in turn, all of us. We anticipate in thirty….forty….fifty years some of our students will enjoy a similar success and we hope they take time to reflect on their days at our center and write a similar blog.
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Our Kids’ Academy at Eagleview and Our Kids’ Academy Town Center are located in Exton, and have full and part time enrollment opportunities for infants through kindergarten and offer Spanish, Music and Yoga Enrichment Programming. Hildebrandt Learning Centers operates early learning centers throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and West Virginia, including several locations in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
