116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
College Community School District launches experiential learning program to teach through play
Educators in the district say this early childhood learning model is the first of its kind in the state
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CEDAR RAPIDS — A cluster of kids, all age 4 or younger, swarm into a colorful classroom with a particular theme; one that varies from the room just next-door. In the farm room, one child, within seconds, is already wearing a hat and bib overalls with a plastic trowel. In another room, a student hammers a plastic nail or builds a tower out of wooden blocks.
Some will see kids at play; what educators hope people realize is there is more going on than meets the eye.
As summer winds down and parents and students prepare for school to start again, College Community School District is finalizing and preparing to implement an educational model — the first of its kind in Iowa — that it hopes will better prepare students before their first year of formal education.
Specifically, CCSD is launching new experiential learning programs at its preschool and day care facilities in Cedar Rapids targeted toward ages ranging from infant to 4 years. Built upon two years of research and planning, the program will be formally launched for the 2025-26 academic year next month.
The new approach CCSD is taking to its early childhood education is housed primarily in its Early Childhood Center, or ECC, at 125 Prairie Hill Ct. SW in Cedar Rapids. Once finalized in mid-August for the school year, it will feature learning centers and individualized programming focused on adaptability and enhancing formative learning opportunities in the hopes of better preparing students for school.
In the place of traditional classroom setups, the ECC now features nine individual learning centers — equipped at a cost of approximately $5,000 to $7,000 per room, according to a CCSD presentation — which ECC Principal Kathleen Schulte said “enhances” their preexisting educational infrastructure.
Every room has a theme. Currently, two rooms are complete or near completion, those being a farming/farmers market room and a construction zone room, where children can interact with various activities in the hopes of increasing their vocabulary, communication, and tactile abilities.
The rooms are built around an “anchor” — a three- to four-foot deep structure that matches the room’s theme; a barn in the farming room and a house frame in the construction room.
CCSD Instructional Coach Alaina Daters said the main goal for the experiential learning environment is to engage children in several ways at once to provide the most adaptable yet direct educational environment. She mentioned decades-long research on how physical interaction and firsthand experience provide solid educational foundations.
“The research suggests that kids learn best when they're playing,” she said, “so rather than studying and delivering them information, we can provide them that learning within play.”
The room’s many components are adaptable to different needs, Schulte said. For instance, each room features a themed alphabet strip in one corner, which — in addition to showing the letters of the alphabet — includes a word fitting for the theme.
Other language skills are trained using cards with both names and pictures of an object, intended to help learners who understand imagery better than vocabulary, and vice versa.
Daters said the program is proactive about ways to reinforce information in students’ minds by adding additional layers of interaction with objects in the rooms.
One example in the construction room are building blocks with words printed on them; not only will students be able to engage physically by building the structure, but they can also develop English skills by building a structure using rhyming words, among other patterns.
Vocabulary is a particularly important issue, Schulte said, referencing an ongoing issue of declining vocabulary and linguistic skills. So, she wanted a large focus on vocabulary in the classrooms to encourage reading and language development.
ECC also will offer services to younger children using personalized data management to interpret developmental data and assist educators with physical and cognitive development in infants to 2-year-olds.
This educational style has seen success in institutions like The Learning Experience in Mansfield, Texas, where Schulte and others visited two years in a row to understand this approach to education and how to implement it.
Schulte referenced data from The Learning Experience’s operations, primarily data showing improvement in literacy scores among children of lower socioeconomic status from the 10th percentile toward the 80th and 90th percentiles.
She said ECC staff met for hours to better understand the research and educational techniques The Learning Experience advertised in order to bring it to CCSD, calling the educational design “systematic” as each room includes an anchor, sensory pieces with interaction capability, and components featuring math, reading, writing, and other tenets of curriculum.
Ultimately, as the kids play both on their own, with the guidance of an instructor, or with each other in these immersive environments, Schulte said the end goal is for the students’ increased awareness of themselves and the world around them while getting a head start in important curricula.
“We want to increase their social emotional skills, their literacy, their math,” Schulte said. “We just want to make sure that we're giving them that really strong foundation so that they have everything that they're going to need to be to be successful in kindergarten and beyond.”
Comments: 641-691-8669; evan.watson@thegazette.com
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