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Want your kids to be 60% happier, with five times less stress and triple the vocabulary? The Settlement Music School in Philadelphia’ Queen Village has just what you are looking for.
Settlement’s preschool program, Kaleidoscope, generates those “astonishing” results in young children, according to child psychologist Dr. Ellie Brown, director of West Chester University’s Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab, who has been studying Settlement’s Kaleidoscope school for 20 years.
“It was a ‘wow’ moment,” Brown said about when she started to understand Kaleidoscope’s results.
The school now is offering the program for teachers and homeschoolers everywhere with an online teaching platform, KWEST.
“As an applied developmental scientist, I study factors that might influence child development every day, and most programs don’t have much of an impact,” she said. “But when you find something that really has a profound positive impact like the program here at Settlement, you want the world to know about it.”
Kaleidoscope teaches very young children the basic skills needed to start school, such as spatial and social awareness, recognizing patterns, and how to follow directions and act in groups. The school reinforces those skills with music, dance and art.
Tarrell Davis, Settlement’s director of early childhood programs, said different children learn differently.
“If a child doesn’t grasp what a pattern is in music class, where they’re using a cadence to learn about patterns, they may need their whole body to learn about what a pattern is,” said Davis. “Creative movement is where they would grasp what that concept is.”
