Northeast Family YMCA Child Development Center

Our emergent curriculum is a flexible approach to child-centered learning. It allows students and teachers to be collaborative, creative, and can help children develop a lifelong love of learning. Play-centered learning with a focus on social and emotional development allows our students to be well rounded individuals who will be successful not only in their next journey, primary and secondary school, but in their journey of life.

Emergent curriculum focuses on a teacher's ability to allow their classroom to be child-lead and teacher-guided. Supplying students to use recycled and self-collected nature items allows their projects to take on many layers of creativity, and process art over product art. As children creatively play, they can develop their ability to problem solve, work together, and engage their minds with integrating literacy, numbers, language development, color and shape recognition, and so much more. 

We focus on the three pillars of the Y—Spirit, Mind and Body—by partnering with our Youth Sports team and allow time for our 3 to 5-year-olds to have intentional movement focusing on appropriate gross motor skills, teamwork, and hand-eye coordination. We love being outside in nature and take full advantage of every opportunity we get to play outdoors.

Each day, we provide children with a nutritionally balanced breakfast, lunch and snack, which include fresh fruit and skim milk (whole milk provided for children ages one year old and above). We provide our infants with Similac Advance Formula, but parents may provide us with other formula or breast milk bottles if they prefer. Once the infant has been introduced to baby food, we will provide Gerber stage-two fruits and vegetables. Our meals are served using family-style dining so children learn to serve themselves by passing bowls around the table, pouring their own milk and practicing good table manners.

We have two seasons for our swim programming. During summer, our classes are given swim program lessons at Calypso Cove twice a week. 

During Calypso Cove’s off season, we partner with our aquatics team and provide swim lessons from certified instructors at no additional cost! These lessons start with our 2-year-old classroom and continue until they graduate with us!

Our music program is one of our most exciting community partnerships! We are excited to allow students from the University of Louisville under the direction of their department head to come to our center weekly and expose our students to music through different techniques in music education such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and more.