The Child1st Difference

Our Mission

Our mission is to empower children to learn from a position of strength, with an approach that works in harmony with their unique wiring. Our goal specifically is to reach the 60% of children who are struggling or failing, because their natural strengths do not match their learning environment.

We accomplish this goal by focusing on the child first so we can work in harmony with their wiring. We create resources that include elements children of varying gifts need in order to learn with ease.

Child1st supports teachers and parents by providing resources designed to pick up and use, bypassing the need for training or for writing multiple lessons to accommodate all the learning differences in their classroom. The resources themselves do the work of engaging and teaching.

Background

It was 1990, a decade before the Child1st experiment began, and I was teaching preschool. As I observed the children, I began to question why some seemed to catch on so easily and why others didn’t progress, no matter the repetitions.

Seminal questions

Soon I was obsessing over these questions:

“Why do bright children fail?”

“If the brain is designed to learn, what gets in the way when children fail?”

I believed combining graduate studies with face-to-face kid-study would answer my questions.

Assumption and theory

My assumption:

“When a child fails, they will succeed if I change my approach to accommodate their learning needs.”

My theory was:

“The way my approach will change is that I will take left-brain content and embed them in right-brain elements in order to strengthen whole-brain activity for all my students.”

Summary

Just like adults, children are not homogenous in the way they learn. They are wired differently from each other. Brains are for learning, they are plastic, and will change to a degree based on experiences. However, reality is that children are differently gifted, and when we respect their gifts and align ourselves with them, children will learn.

Because children are not homogenous, one approach cannot be considered the correct way to teach, unless it successfully meets the needs of all learners.

Child1st resources are specifically designed to include elements that reach all types of learners so teachers can teach once and reach children across the Learning Spectrum.