Programs
Small groups of children gather in our studio spaces each day. In the studios, children 
are invited to use many media to explore their ideas and represent their understandings. The studios are used for focused project work and for spontaneous exploration. In the studios, you’ll see children engaged in exploratory work, sensory discovery, and detailed, intricate work with varied art and construction media. You’ll see adults working closely with children, facilitating their use of materials, asking questions, or offering materials that provoke children to stretch their thinking. Teachers watch and listen to the children closely as they work, taking photos and making notes about the children’s work.
At Hilltop, we seek to offer children many opportunities to represent and re-represent their understandings. We invite children to draw their block structures, or to dictate recipes for the play dough cookies they create, or to use clay to recreate a drawing of a beloved animal. We suggest that children move back and forth between media, to work on different scales to move from two- to three-dimensions. These opportunities to represent and revisit their experiences and understandings in a range of media encourage children to extend and deepen their thinking, to change perspectives, and to communicate their understanding.