C5 Children's School

C5 Children's School includes activities such as arts, music, language, literacy, math, and nature activities. Children engage in listening, developing word familiarity and vocabulary, speaking, telling stories, rhyming, singing, presenting, and experiencing books and other language-related materials. The program also includes recognizing and developing symbol systems such as letters, reading, writing names, finding and making literary elements in the environment and in life, counting, measuring, sorting, and working with relationships, patterns, groupings, shapes, and applying these to understanding and solving problems in the environment and life.

• Ages: 6 weeks–6 years old

Children at C5 Children's School take part in observing, questioning, hypothesizing, exploring, testing, documenting, engaging natural and artificial aspects, concluding, examining implications for living, and envisioning. They collaborate, design, represent, present, negotiate, calculate, prototype, assemble, problem-solve, correct, evaluate, and report. The program includes graphics, drama, sculpture, photography, and film making, as well as self-orientation, developing social skills, developing group effectiveness, developing roles and responsibilities, and developing awareness of feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and scope of effects. Activities also address basic large and fine movements, balance, awareness of body, space, and directions, coordinating with others, and variable active, strong, flexible, and creative physical activity. One documented project includes making a 3 foot wide, 10 foot long, 3 foot high cardboard version of Jacques Cousteau’s fully outfitted Calypso research vessel, simulating the Calypso’s first scientific voyage to the Great Barrier Reef, and amassing information on the ship, crew, their research methods and equipment, its mission and activities, and discoveries.

Since 1985, C5 Children’s School has provided children and their families with safe, nurturing, and educational spaces in which to learn, grow, and thrive. The mission of C5 Children’s School is to facilitate young children’s optimal development and learning in a safe, supportive, and enriched environment. The program is described as an award-winning program for Infants, Toddlers, Preschool, and Pre-K children, and its centers are described as influential models in the field of early learning and development. The program includes a comprehensive Pre-K program influenced in part by the California Department of Education Preschool Learning Foundations, and children typically meet and exceed all of the standard academic and social requirements for kindergarten. Every individual team member in the San Francisco early learning and development centers has the training and expertise to support children’s success now and later in their life.

C5 Children’s School uses an emergent curriculum where what comes from the child becomes the curriculum and uses the “100 Languages of Children” approach. The program includes an embedded STEAM curriculum (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) and emphasizes diversity in bodies, brains, multiple intelligences, learning styles, attitudes, perspectives, approaches, materials, tools, processes, equipment, environments, languages, concepts, and cultures. The program serves a diverse population of children and families and offers many opportunities for regular parent and family member involvement in line with each one’s interest, availability, and resources. The program recruits parents and family members and calls in individuals with experience, ideas, and expertise from the community as resources. Families receive frequent reporting on classroom and individual learning group activities and progress via a private website and in person.

Last updated March 7, 2026.