Voyager - Our School
The Voyager School Core Beliefs
We Create a Culture of Caring
- promoting the positive image of the child: an individual that is competent, curious, full of knowledge and potential, and interested in connecting to the world around.
- by fostering mutual respect and community building.
- by maintaining that parents are an essential component of the school, an active part of their children's learning experiences and helping to ensure the welfare of all the children in the school.
- by upholding that children, parents and teachers have rights to safety, care and welfare.
- by promoting the right and responsibility of each learner to make positive choices about learning and life.
- by providing a nurturing, developmentally sound, multi-age family approach.
We are Dedicated to the Success for All
- through our project approach integrated curriculum which creatively blends the arts and sciences together for holistic comprehension.
- by engaging our diverse community of students, parents, and teachers to fully participate in school life.
- by allowing the development, talents, interests of students to impact schedules, groupings, and routines.
- through an open-ended continuous progress structure for attaining content expectations.
We are committed to Best Practice
- though regular cross-age interactions and activities
- in the teaching of arts as integral to the curriculum
- by venturing out into the Grand Haven community and West Michigan as extended classrooms.
- through our extended project approach to learning which allows the community of learners to share ideas, exchange tasks, and create opportunities to extend and build upon theories that are uncovered.
- as the environment serves as another teacher through the conscious use of space, color, light, displays of children's work, and attention to nature and detail.
- as learners interact with a variety of materials: clay, wire, drawing, media, paper; and are encouraged to express their learning of content area through various forms.
- by capturing the learning process between children and teachers, making learning visible.
- by provoking wonder, which leads and challenges learners to further learning and research among teachers, children, and the entire community.
We Strive for Professional Excellence
- though continuing education
- in open-mindedness
- in a willingness to embrace change
- in continuing to pursue of fulfillment the original mission of "the Open Classroom."
- through the study and practice of sound progressive educational theory (Piaget, Vygotsky, Dewey, and Reggio).
- through the understanding that teachers are facilitators of children's' learning experiences. As partners, they listen document, challenge, and organize children's learning in a collaborative relationship with other colleagues.
- by teachers exercising a right to grow professionally.
We have High expectations as we
- inspire an attitude of life long learning.
- motivate students to take on the challenge of learning.
- promote child, parent and teacher collaboration and interaction.
Love and Logic
Trusted for 40 years - Love and Logic is a philosophy founded in 1977 by Jim Fay and Foster W. Cline, M.D. It is the approach of choice among leading educators, parents, and other professionals worldwide.
The Love and Logic Institute is dedicated to making parenting and teaching fun and rewarding, instead of stressful and chaotic. We provide practical tools and techniques that help adults achieve respectful, healthy relationships with their children. All of our work is based on a psychologically sound parenting and teaching philosophy called Love and Logic®.
