Almenden Parents Pre-School in San Jose provides an opportunity for parents and children to experience nursery school together. They learn skills they need to be supportive parents and good students. All of our classes offer age appropriate play, learning experiences and social activities. Like some Montessori programs, developmental play based learning is at the core of every activity at APPS. The play and learn centers in each class include arts and crafts, science, music, cooking, block building, a playhouse with dress-up costumes, a library, and activities tables for puzzles, manipulatives and play-dough. Outside play areas include swings, a large play structure, playhouses, children's garden, painting easels, large sand areas, carpentry area, long tracks for bikes and wheel toys, areas for water play and a large lawn and grassy hill.

Each day, our teachers share stories and encourage children to participate in play, songs and fingerplays to develop literacy and pre-reading skills. Children also develop early math skills with counting and sorting activities. Music is learned through developmentally appropriate activities that support and respect the unique learning style of very young children. Our arts and craft area is always ready with fresh projects where children are encouraged to experiment through the process of creating. They explore sensory experiences and science through activities with a wide variety of materials and projects about plants, animals and natural phenomena.

We focus on the social emotional learning of each individual child, using Positive Discipline techniques. Parents learn along with the children, learning age-appropriate techniques that will help them guide their children to become self-controlled and socially adept individuals.

Our children also enjoy regularly scheduled holiday parties and field trips throughout the school year. Some of the favorite excursions include trips to the Pumpkin Patch, San Jose Fire Station 12, Emma Prusch Farms, the Planetarium at DeAnza College, Natural Bridges State Beach and the Caltrain trip to Palo Alto. APPS is proud to be an "intercultural" preschool. Our curriculum explores how music and art have been enriched by the contribution of each culture or ethnic group. At APPS, those cultural enrichments are explored at a preschool level as we seek to emphasize that different cultures can successfully cooperate and grow together within one society. At the core of all of our structured and unstructured activities, children are encouraged to explore, experiment and experience.

APPS is one of 14 schools worldwide that have been accepted into the Positive Discipline Association's Lab School Program.

Schools are evaluated based on the length of their whole-school implementation, percentage of staff trained in Positive Discipline and the depth of their practices in the classroom and community.

When you enroll at APPS you get the benefit of regular parent education from our teachers and Positive Discipline coach, and have ongoing support from members of our school community who are constantly striving toward a culture of belonging, significance and mutual respect.