Individualized Teaching, According to Creative Children Learning Center

Enrollment season is here again, and for new parents, that comes with the daunting task of having to pick which preschool fits their child best. With the rise of non-traditional schools, it’s best to keep informed on how these differ from traditional schools.

The Creative Children Learning Center (CCLC) in Project 4, Quezon City is one example. A well-known progressive school in the northern Metro Manila area, it offers a "developmentally appropriate program, dedicated to addressing the needs of the whole child.” 

It’s all very conceptual. How does the teaching style of a progressive school actually translate into everyday learning?

SmartParenting.com.ph sat down with Teacher Ina Estrada-Tulio, directress and founder of CCLC, to tell us about her preschool and its adapted teaching style. 

“The main pride and backbone of any progressive school is its ability to provide individualized teaching,” explained Teacher Ina. This means that the school “must be able to address and cater to the needs of each child.”

To put it simply, Teacher Ina explains that every child is unique. One pupil might be excelling at learning the alphabet but lag a little behind in social skills, while another might have it the other way around. It’s the preschool’s job to address these needs in a manner that’s both age appropriate and interesting. And for that, the school must have the right tools.

“You have to have the resources, the materials, to provide each child whether it’s in their language skills, cognitive skills, writing skills or social and emotional skills. The school must be able to provide for those specific needs of the child.

“There are no two kids who develop at the same time in any area. So if you are providing them with the same materials, then how are you addressing the development of the other children? If one child is already writing and one is only beginning to trace, then I can’t give both of them the same materials,” said Teacher Ina.

An Integral Part of CCLC: The Resources and Materials
Teacher Ina has a room entirely dedicated to all kinds of materials, stocked to the ceiling with everything from puppets, letter and color blocks, books, costumes, and there’s even a box for four different kinds of scissors. 

“The basic step in writing is to develop the fine motor skills, meaning developing the muscles of the fingers,” explained Teacher Ina. “So we develop them with exercises like cutting.”

Most young children, when given the instruction to tear a paper using their hands, will be unable to do so. It might not be complicated to us adults, but for children the task is usually already too complex for their little fingers to do. “They’ll start to tear it up and then they just pull it out of frustration,” explained Teacher Ina. To illustrate her point, she shows us some of the materials they use:

The first pair of scissors has a second set of finger holes attached to the back of the first so that the teacher may guide the student. This is to introduce the child to the “scissor motion”, the action of putting the forefinger and the thumb together. The second pair looks more like pinchers and is designed to be easier to use than regular scissors so that the child gets used to cutting on his own. The third looks almost like regular scissors, only that the finger holes are bigger, making the scissors usable whichever way they hold it. The fourth is the one we're familiar with.

How it started
Teacher Ina graduated with a degree in Psychology and took up a Master’s degree in Child Development. She taught in different preschools with different teaching styles from traditional to Montessories and Progressive schools. It was when she worked at the Disney Children’s Center in Burbank, California that she fell in love with the teaching method using the progressive style of teaching. 

Having worked there for 10 years, she decided to bring the Disney preschool here in the Philippines. With the preschool’s permission, in 2006 she was allowed to put-up a Disney Children Center replica -- everything from the teacher-student ratio of 1:5, the size and the look of the classroom and down to all the materials, including the paper, is exactly how you would see it in the Burbank preschool. 

“That was the agreement: if I could do it, then it’s a done deal,” said Teacher Ina. For that, she was granted access to the exclusive distributor of all the materials used in the Disney preschool. 

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What exactly is a Disney preschool?

“Disney's belief is that everything starts with imagination. More than academics, more than the lessons, more than the numbers, it’s imagination,” said Teacher Ina. Children at CCLC are encouraged to learn through the avenues that help them learn the best.

“At this age, learning must really be through the five senses. It should all be used through that avenue, not solely paper and pencil. You cannot execute writing a letter when your brain doesn't know what it looks like. For you to be able to write it correctly, you should have experienced what it feels like. You need to take them to a different level of writing, not just paper and pencil. You need to use sand, glue, clay, paint, and other materials that enhance their senses,” she added.

What’s CCLC like?
To be able to fully understand and cater to the needs of each child, every day a teacher sits down and has a one-on-one session with each pupil. “Each teacher is in-charge of five to six children. For the whole month of June, she’ll be evaluating her assigned students,” said Teacher Ina. “We see which materials they interact with and then we assess their skills in language, math and all developmental areas. Come July, that’s when we start to plan what to give them on a monthly basis. Once a week I meet with my teachers and they present to me the development of each child and what they think would be a good material to give this child during the one-on-one session. We're constantly updating," she adds.

Teaching philosophies of a progressive school

“We don’t do punishment. We don’t raise our voice. We don’t say “no”. We don’t do time-outs. We don’t attack situations where children are belittled. Everything is done through communication. 

“When we have children having a situation, like a child having difficulty sharing, we always approach it in question form. We call the children, whoever’s involved, and we ask them what happened. Disney is about the why’s and the how’s. We’re big on explaining and knowing where the action came from.

“We give 2 or 3 solutions that the child can pick from. In the sharing scenario, we ask the child “What’s the problem?” even though the teacher already knows what’s going on. Then we ask, “Do you want to play with it or do you want to borrow?

“Hindi kami nanenermon. (We don’t scold children.) We don’t say whose fault it is. We don’t pinpoint what the child did wrong. We work it out by asking the what they think the problem was and how they think they can work it out.” 

On holistic development
“It's a critical age and [we] believe that from 0 to 5 the child must know that they are good in something, whether it’s in arts and crafts or reading. We want children who graduate from school to be socially- and emotionally-balanced because their chances of surviving in a big school is greater than somebody who's [solely] highly academic.”

“The academics can be dealt with in a lot of different avenues,” added Teacher Ina. If you are failing or not doing well in a subject, you have avenues to help you improve, such as tutoring, studying the lessons everyday and using other resources, but when you don’t feel good about yourself, when you are failing, it is a struggle to tell yourself “I can do better”.

Should you consider a progressive preschool for your child?
CCLC, as a progressive preschool, sees to it that its students cultivate a love for learning. “Sometimes, our students don’t even want to go home or they want to come to class even if it’s a holiday,” said Teacher Ina, citing it as a natural reaction when they love what they are doing, or it may also come from the secure teacher-student bond created from having an intimate class of only a handful of students.

The biggest worry of most parents, however, is if their child will be able to cope when it’s time to graduate to a traditional elementary school - where the materials are primarily pencils and books. How will they fare in a class where the teacher-student ratio is 1:40?

This aside, progressive schools still have many strong points that make it hard to ignore. If you think the progressive style of teaching makes a compelling argument on how we should introduce school learning to children, then maybe it’s also time to consider enrolling your child in one.


The Creative Children Learning Center is located at 32 Riverview Drive, Blue Ridge B, Q.C. 1109. Teacher Ina can be contaced through email at cclc_blueridge@yahoo.com or mobile at 0917-880-8847.

See more photos of the CCLC learning materials by clicking 'View slideshow'!

Photos by Vincent Coscolluela