Green Program
Oakhurst Cooperative Preschool (OCP) is one of the few preschools including environmental education in its curriculum.

While many private and public kindergarten classes are beginning to introduce environmental awareness into their curriculum, few start earlier; preschoolers are not commonly thought of as an easy age group to start teaching the importance of taking care of their planet.

Oakhurst Cooperative Preschool (OCP) is seeking to do just that, by introducing environmental education to young children in a way that engages them, intrigues them, and creates an empathy and respect for all living things and their habitats. We hope to provide even our youngest children not only with a gentle awareness of their impact on the world around them, but also an understanding of how they can make a positive difference.

At the core of our current 'green' vision is a desire to introduce to the children two key concepts: Where does our food come from, and Where does our trash go.

These two simple ideas can be used to take the children down a myriad of learning paths: to the farm to learn about animals that provide our food or clothing, to the garden to see how plants grow and produce fruits, vegetables and seeds, to the farmer's market to see what's available in each season, to the recycling station to see what trash can be remade into something new, and to the trash dump to see just how much waste people create. Many of these trips can be taken in the classroom, others involve visits to local sites, and there is within these questions the possibility for countless everyday spin-off lessons. We have in the past gathered scraps from our recycling bin to pulp and make into new paper, planted seeds in trays to watch grow and eventually plant outside in our garden beds, dug for worms in the play yard and watch them in the bug box, counted dumpsters and talked about how much trash it would take to fill them. By establishing an eco-friendly curriculum, OCP plans to instill in our children the need to respect and care for our environment at a very early age.