By Susan Payne
Transitional Kindergarten works.
For Juliya Spiegel, mother to a now five-year-old kindergartener, a decision was on the table one year ago to enroll her son into Eclipse School,a TK program in the Pacific Palisades.
After touring the school and learning more about the program, Spiegel felt the program was right for her son and decided it was a yes.
Because it’s a smaller, more intimate setting, her son — like the other students — was encouraged to find commonalities and build a bond with each of the students through activities and play. While developing social emotional and foundational skills in his last year of preschool, Spiegel’s son gained confidence in making new friends and the ability to read before kindergarten started.
“It was the best parenting decision we could have made. His confidence was soaring on his first day of kindergarten this year,” Spiegel said.
With over 50 years of combined teaching experience, Eclipse founders Beth Reilly and Shea Morris lead the program, combining foundational skills and developmental learning with an emphasis on language and literacy.
Eclipse’s unique curriculum prepares children socially, emotionally and academically to ensure they succeed in any kindergarten — progressive, traditional or rigorous academic.
“Social emotional growth is one of Eclipse’s focuses and that’s what gave my son confidence. They(Reilly and Morris) have been lifechanging teachers and humans and I’m so grateful that I listened to my gut,” Spiegel said.
After spending over 14 years as friends and colleagues,many conversations about child development, teaching philosophies and collaboration propelled the founders to start Eclipse. What began as a summer camp is now a school in its third year, preparing each child the strongest foundations for their academic journey.
Reilly and Morris believe wholeheartedly that opportunities for play and social emotional growth with exposure to foundational skills set young students up for success in kindergarten and beyond.
“If they’re developmentally ready then they will grasp those skills sooner. If they are not quite ready, the multitude of opportunities to be exposed to the skill will give them familiarity to the skill when they are ready in kindergarten,” Morris said.
Eclipse’s literacy program introduces children to sounds and letters throughout the transitional kindergarten year. By the end of the year, the students are putting sounds and letters together to create words while reading or writing.
For math, Eclipse exposes children to a variety ofskills such as number recognition, counting, patterns and critical thinking in a fun and developmentally appropriate way. Diving deeper into science topics and art, Morris said this year, they take each letter of the alphabet and focus on an artist or art techniques.
“The letter C was connected to Eric Carle, the illustrator and we createdcolorful collages,” Morris said. “It’s another way to be engaged while learning. Our job is to instill a love of learning in these children and to do that we have to have a fun and invitingenvironment.”
Now that TK has passed for Spiegel’s son, she reflects on the decision she made to transition him to Eclipse.
“Beth and Shea really delivered, they instilled a love of learning in Lev and confidence both inside the classroom and on the playground. Eclipse is a magical school that provided the perfect foundation for Lev’s school experience,” Spiegel said.
To learn more about the school and its founders, visit EclipseSchool.org. Eclipse Schoolapplications of interest can be found online.
