How the Learning
Happens
Our curriculum is not a fixed syllabus — it is a living framework built around four core commitments: Mandarin immersion, Reggio-inspired inquiry, daily outdoor learning, and cultural depth. Each shapes how the day is designed, what children encounter, and how they are invited to think, build, and express themselves.
DSS Licensed · #013424115 · Albany, CA
Mandarin Immersion
The language that runs through the day
Reggio-Inspired Inquiry
Learning that follows the child
Outdoor & Nature
The classroom without walls
STEAM & Culture
Where curiosity meets making and meaning
A Day at Spring
The four pillars of our curriculum are not separate blocks in the schedule — they are woven together throughout the day. The following scenes are drawn from the kinds of days that happen regularly at Spring. A question raised inside becomes an investigation outside. What children discover outside comes back in to be shared, drawn, and documented.
Arrival & Morning Exploration
Children arrive and move into self-chosen activities — building with loose parts, looking at Mandarin picture books, returning to materials from yesterday's project. Teachers greet each child by name in Mandarin and follow their lead into conversation.
Morning Circle
The group gathers around whatever is alive in their thinking that morning — a question from yesterday, something a child noticed on the way to school, a topic the group has been returning to. The teacher listens, documents, and follows. The direction comes from the children.
The morning's questions move outside — and the outdoor world becomes the next place to look.
Outdoor Project Work
The inquiry moves outside. Children investigate in the garden — observing light and shadow, collecting materials, testing ideas from the morning. Here is where STEAM thinking takes shape: hypothesizing, measuring, comparing, and recording.
Outdoor Free Play
Child-led outdoor exploration — running, building, digging, observing. Social play develops negotiation, risk assessment, and physical coordination. Teachers are present and engaged, but the children lead.
Afternoon Circle
The group reconvenes to share what they noticed and discovered. Songs and movement games — chosen to reflect the morning's topic — bring the day's learning into motion and into Mandarin. The question doesn't end today. It grows into tomorrow.
The Language That
Runs Through the Day
At Spring, Mandarin is the medium of daily life — not a subject with a scheduled hour. Morning greetings, snack conversations, story reading, outdoor exploration, project discussion — the language running through it all is Mandarin.
Children who arrive with no Mandarin background begin absorbing the language through daily immersion — building vocabulary and phrases naturally over time, the same way they learned to speak in the first place.
You do not need to speak or reinforce Mandarin at home. Consistent daily immersion is what drives acquisition. Optional home resources are available for families who want to extend the experience.
In the early weeks, children listen and absorb. Words and phrases emerge gradually — first in context, then in conversation. By preschool age, Mandarin becomes a thinking language, not just a familiar sound.
The Classroom
Without Walls
Outdoor time is a daily priority — children spend meaningful time in our garden and outdoor space. Outdoor time is not recess. It is curriculum.
Children observe seasonal changes, tend to plants, investigate insects, and build with natural materials. These experiences develop scientific reasoning, physical coordination, and the kind of sustained attention that indoor environments alone cannot build.
Outdoor learning happens in Mandarin — connecting language to direct sensory experience.
Garden tendingChildren plant, water, observe, and harvest — developing responsibility, patience, and a direct relationship with the living world.
Nature investigationInsects, weather, shadows, soil — children's observations become the starting point for scientific inquiry — in Mandarin.
Child-led outdoor playUnstructured outdoor time builds physical coordination, risk assessment, and the negotiation skills that come from genuinely child-led activity.
Thinking Across
Disciplines
STEAM at Spring is not a dedicated activity period — it is a lens. Science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics emerge naturally from children's investigations.
A question about light and shadow becomes a physics and geometry exploration. A garden observation becomes a biology investigation. A building challenge becomes an engineering inquiry. The arts provide a language when words are not yet enough.
All STEAM inquiry happens in Mandarin — building content knowledge and language simultaneously, so children are never learning just one thing at a time.
Integrated, not isolatedSTEAM disciplines are woven into daily projects — children rarely experience them as separate subjects.
The Arts as languageDrawing, building, clay, and loose parts give children ways to represent thinking before they have all the words for it.
In MandarinInvestigations and discoveries unfold in Mandarin — deepening both content knowledge and language simultaneously.
Culture as
Living Experience
Chinese cultural traditions at Spring are not a unit in the calendar — they are woven into daily life. Festivals, stories, music, calligraphy, Chinese art forms, and traditional foods are experienced as living culture, not distant heritage.
We also celebrate the multicultural backgrounds of our families. Parents are warmly invited to share their own traditions, languages, and stories with our community — because a community is richer when every family's story is part of it.
What This Builds,
Over Time
Daily immersion builds Mandarin foundations naturally — and strengthens the cognitive flexibility that comes from thinking across two languages.
Children who learn to follow their own questions — and to stay with them over time — develop the capacity for sustained focus and independent thinking that serves them well beyond preschool.
Through STEAM inquiry and the arts, children develop the ability to represent ideas across different forms — in language, in materials, in movement, in drawing. This range of expression is how children show us what they know — long before they have all the words for it.
Children who grow up with genuine cultural immersion — not surface-level exposure — develop a sense of ease and belonging in more than one world. That is a gift that lasts.