About Us
We may be small, yet we will have a big impact on your child’s life.
At The Fishtown School, we understand that choosing a child care center is one of the most important decisions you will make for your child. Our full-time daycare program for children ages three months to six years offers a school-like environment with a home-like feel to nurture and support your little one as they develop throughout their formative years.
Our staff is dedicated to creating a safe, warm, and fun environment for children to gain the confidence to engage in active learning and develop a lifelong thirst for knowledge. We help our students build relationships that foster respect, honesty, and caring, as well as value all cultures and lifestyles. Our foremost goal is to instill a love of learning and self-confidence in our students, focusing on the development of your child’s independence.
Scientific studies show that strong bonds based on trust are essential to fostering a child’s willingness to learn. With our low teacher to child ratio, we provide the individual attention of in-home care with the benefits of a caring staff in our cutting-edge, technology-secured, and safe environment. We take the time to learn about your family and to develop activities that cater directly to your child’s individual needs and interests.
Our teachers are trained, certified caregivers who offer an educationally enriched curriculum to encourage language development and social and emotional growth. We strive to teach our students how to learn, not just what to learn, and encourage them to wonder, question, grow, and explore their world with excitement. Our programs introduce students to writing, math, language, cognitive, social and emotional skills, and physical activities through lessons that focus on your child’s holistic development.
Our Programs
The Fishtown School bases its teachings upon the Creative Curriculum strategies. Through this approach, our teachers set developmentally appropriate goals and objectives specific to each age group within four main categories: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language. The school year is separated into monthly units with each month further divided into weekly themes. Our students develop and learn through personal interactions, theme-based play, and lessons geared to bring out creativity, confidence, and critical thinking skills.
Our teachers develop lessons that focus on our students’ holistic growth. Hands-on lessons that utilize music, reading, writing, play, discussions, and physical activities are worked into a daily routine to offer meaningful experiences that nurture learning and age-appropriate development.
We understand that every child is full of wonder and curiosity and encourage our students to use all of their senses to explore and learn about the world around them. Our small teacher-to-student ratio allows our teachers to provide a stimulating environment geared to each individual child’s interests and needs. Accordingly, our classrooms are divided into areas for dramatic play, building, toys, games, art, music, books, and writing.
Our teachers love their students and are passionate about teaching. We mix play and hands-on learning to engage your child’s natural curiosity about the world around them. Instilling the love of learning and fostering a sense of self confidence is our foremost goal. Working together we strive to make learning at The Fishtown School the very best experience for each and every child.
Infants
Infants
Our infant room teachers meet each child’s individual needs and provide a developmentally appropriate and stimulating environment. We encourage our students to use their senses to explore the world around them.
Our goal in the infant room is to help each child achieve the following milestones:
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Recognition of different sounds and their name; exploration of food using whole hands; ability to differentiate between known people and strangers; ability to focus on and reach for objects; begin to stack toys and show interest in shapes, colors, and size recognition.
Toddlers
Toddlers
Our toddler room teachers understand that each child is full of wonder and curiosity. We use Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences to engage our students in activities and play. This teaching technique uses words, numbers, pictures, and music, to focus on the importance of social interaction, introspection, and physical movement. Established routines and consistent boundaries allow the students comfort, security, and safety while exploring their world. Children begin to learn self-help skills and age-appropriate independence. We focus on physical, emotional, social, and cognitive developmental areas while making learning fun for all.
Our focus in the toddler room is on helping each student achieve the following milestones:
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Increase in language skills including but not limited to the ability to name simple objects and sing simple songs; the beginning of the ability to match shapes and to sort objects by color, size, or shape; begin to be aware of their feelings and how to communicate them; show curiosity in new things and ask “why” questions; the ability to stack 3-5 blocks; the ability to wash hands with assistance; demonstrate an increase in balance; and the ability to run and kick a ball.
Preschool/Pre-K
Preschool/Pre-K
Our preschool and pre-k children are beginning to prepare for the skills needed to succeed in moving on to kindergarten. The students are introduced to writing and math, language, reading, cognitive, social and emotional skills, and physical activities to prepare them for the years ahead. We continue to work on self-esteem and independence, as well as learning about others and diversity. Our teachers focus on strengthening interaction and communication with others through group activities, allowing each child to grow socially and academically with their peers.
Our focus in the Preschool/Pre-k room is to help each child achieve the following milestones:
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Cognitive Skills: The recognition of patterns, sorting, counting, and comparison of quantities; the ability to verbally spell and print their name; the ability to identify and write letters and numbers; the ability to recall events and answer questions about stories; the ability to describe a picture using sentence structure; and to attempt to spell and read simple words.
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Large Motor Skills: Begin to kick balls towards a specific area, throw, bounce, and catch balls; the ability to hop on one foot; the ability to start and stop movements upon directions from a teacher; the ability to point to body parts when named.
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Fine Motor Skills: Increased coordination using scissors, paintbrushes, pencils, markers, and crayons.
This age group also becomes aware that others have feelings and that all people are both alike and different. Your child will begin to become interested in and will be exposed to the lives of others, how things grow, and the world beyond theirs. Children begin to understand that the world is vast with many diverse cultures. We will focus on learning and acceptance of all types of cultures and diversities through activities, projects, and play.
Meet Our Founder
Lori Pallas
Owner and Program Director
A mother and former camp counselor, Lori fulfilled her lifelong dream by founding The Fishtown School. Raised by two educators, she has had a passion for early childhood education for as long as she can remember. As a teenager, Lori assisted in her mother’s fourth-grade classroom and regularly sat in on her father’s college psychology lectures. Summers were spent as a camp counselor, developing fun activities for children ages 4-12. It was during those summers that the idea for The Fishtown School was born. Lori dreamed to one day open a school where kids could learn and grow in the same warm, fun, and safe environment that she did.
Lori earned her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and her J.D. from Villanova University School of Law. Life took over and Lori later married and had two daughters, but never gave up on fulfilling her dream. It was at her daughters’ daycare where she met Miss Heather, an early childhood educator with over 25 years of experience in early childhood education. Heather immediately became a part of the Pallas family and was their babysitter for over 18 years. Having entrusted the safety of her own children to Miss Heather for the better part of their developmental years, Lori knew that she had found the future director of The Fishtown School. Securing the perfect location for the school in Fishtown was the last piece to making her dream a reality.
As you enter our school, we hope you feel the love and care that has gone into bringing Lori’s vision to life and we can’t wait to share it all with you and your children.
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