Education Statement
For information about our specific educational programs please email education@childmusephx.org.
The Children's Museum of Phoenix believes that in order to develop and sustain healthy individuals, families, and communities, children and adults need to spend time engaged together in joyful and constructive educational activities. We integrate the following proven educational principles and beliefs into our exhibits and programs:
- Children need to think of themselves as lovable, capable people in order to establish a sense of self worth. We esteem children when we give them voices.
- Children are empowered when they are given appropriate choices.
- People learn naturally through playing, exploring, manipulating their environment, and interacting with other people. Children have inherent attributes that help them learn: active bodies, keen senses, curiosity, and enthusiasm. Optimal learning takes place when they have the opportunity to use all these attributes, in a safe and supportive atmosphere.
- Learning needs to be concrete, before it can be abstract. Experience must come through the hand, and body, before it can become knowledge in the mind.
- Play is the way young children learn. In play they rehearse later behaviors and master fears.
- Children imitate the people they observe around them. Adults are the primary role models for young children, and children can inspire ongoing learning in the adults who care about them as well. Learning occurs across the life span, and each new educational experience leads to further understanding.
- Learning is individual. People will absorb experiences and information in different ways depending on age, perspective, interests, and learning styles.
- Learning is facilitated in an environment that is free of criticism and comparisons, where there is freedom to make mistakes and to explore within clear boundaries, and where respect and basic values are encouraged.
- Early in a child's development, the process of using the imagination, learning new things, and practicing skills is more important than the end product.
- Understanding the connections between events, processes, and sequences helps people to make sense of their world and contributes to literacy.
- People have lived in very different ways throughout time and across the world. Each culture has attributes that make it original, and there are some human characteristics that are shared by everybody.
- The children in our lives are vital and important, and deserve to be protected and nurtured.