Happy Apple Preschool
Happy Apple is full for the September 2024-2025 school year. If you are interested in placement for the September 2025-2026 school year we will happily add your preschooler to the waitlist. Happy Apple is a mix of Montessori and Waldorf styles of learning. While focused on learning the basic preschool core, we are equally focused on hands-on movement, music, art, and indoor/outdoor gross motor skills. We are a small school with a maximum capacity of 10 students per day.
The Happy Apple approach is one in which careful attention is placed on nurturing the child’s innate joy and passion for education. This process happens as the child does meaningful work, completes a task from start to finish, and explores the world around them. At Happy Apple Preschool your child will be excited to learn, discover, and succeed. We teach math, ABCs, science, art, and music. We also have a daily parkour session from 8:00a-9:00a, as well as daily outdoor activities.
Examples of topics your preschooler will be introduced to at Happy Apple Preschool include:
Practical Life: Instilling care for self, others, and the environment through activities like preparing food, creating a tidy space, and being a part of the kindness team along with exercises of grace and courtesy.
Sensorial: Building cognitive skills and ability to order and classify impressions by touching, seeing, smelling, tasting, listening, and exploring the physical properties of a child’s environment.
Math: Giving children a solid understanding of basic mathematical principles prepares them for abstract reasoning, and helps to develop problem-solving capabilities.
Language: Exploring verbal and written language, learning phonics, and left to right progression.
Science: Learning botany, biology, cause and effect, and engineering.
Geography and Culture: Exploring people from other countries with an attitude of respect and admiration.
Art: Giving children every opportunity to enjoy a variety of creative activities.
Music: Learning timing, beat, melody, and passion for music.
Miechel Barksdale
Miechel (pronounced Michelle) loves getting muddy, riding a bicycle long distances just for fun, throwing a ball for a yellow Labrador & German wirehaired pointer, and kayaking at Hagg Lake. She knows her ABCs frontwards AND backwards, loves to give and get big squeezes from preschoolers, tumbles around in the parkour room, and is an expert at sandcastle making. Miechel has a daughter named Kennedy that just graduated from high school and is attending the University of Oregon. Miechel has over 20 years of experience in early childhood education and would love to get to know you so you can sing, create, and learn together at Happy Apple Preschool.