What We Do

Our goal at Merry Hearts is to nurture and protect the young child’s sense of wonder and imagination through encouraging children to play and explore in a loving indoor environment filled with natural materials and a safe, adventurous, natural outdoor environment.

Daily activities include singing and music, movement for brain integration, balance and expression, arts and crafts, nature walks, stories, and outdoor play. All activities focus on social-emotional skill building as well as encouraging a deep connection with the natural world and changing seasons.

Our schoolhouse has 3 distinct rooms that offer a variety of settings to foster different kinds of play. Children have enough room to engage in gross or fine motor play, and independent or group play without being impeded by space limitations. We maintain a small class size to ensure that every child has plenty of room to explore. We almost exclusively offer open-ended toys that children of all ages can play with creatively.

Examples of open-ended toys are wooden blocks, dried horse chestnuts, sea shells, wool yarn and string, carved animals and wooden people, multi-colored silk scarves, dress-up clothes and hats, a play kitchen, sensory table, puzzles that can be used in creative, imaginative play and a plethora of musical instruments.

Children might use wooden blocks to make a play road and then use those same objects to create a campfire to sit and roast pretend marshmallows over. Nature is the ultimate provider of multi-age, imagination-inspiring activities for children. Large broken tree limbs, lovingly called “Tree Dragons” at Merry Hearts, pose a challenge for new climbers and while they engage the child’s imagination, they are also doing great work in many developmental areas- particularly proprioceptive. As children grow and master these developmental challenges, they begin to jump on the Tree Dragons, finding the level of bounce they are comfortable with, experimenting with what parts of the branch create bigger and smaller movements, honing their reaction times and hand grip strength. All the while, children maintain a story dialogue with their friends of all ages as the dragon changes into a ship at sea or they become riders on a herd of wild horses.

In this way, children are continuously playing with each other, building off one another’s imaginations, engaging and inspiring each other as they grow and fine tune their proprioceptive, vestibular, auditory and visual processing, physical strength and agility, speech and language and so much more!