Funds raised through SchoolPop will go towards the playground enhancement project.

The parent council has partnered with Schoolpop, an online shopping network of hundreds of merchants including Amazon and Target, to raise funds for the school.  By shopping online through the Schoolpop website, The Clifton School will receive a portion of your total purchase.  Best of all, the program is absolutely free!  To participate, you simply link to the merchant’s website through the Schoolpop site at www.schoolpop.com or click here.  Helping the school raise funds has never been easier.  Best of all, there is no need to spend extra money!  Friends and family members can also participate simply by selecting “The Clifton School” (Schoolpop organizational ID: 121602) as their shopping partner.  We hope this will be a wonderful way to raise funds for the school without adding an extra financial burden to The Clifton School parents.  We will publish monthly updates here in Cliff Notes to let you know how the program is progressing.    

Children's Healthcare of Atlanta

Inspired by the Reggio Emilia pedagogical  approach, we aspire to create an outdoor environment at The Clifton School's campuses that facilitate learning by offering stimulating and interactive outdoor play and learning settings.

Reggio Emilia guiding principles (emergent curriculum, project work, representational development, collaboration, teachers as researchers, and documentation) are represented through setting designs that facilitate learning and support exploration, research, and group work.

These spaces are rich in vegetation, child scale, comfortable, and age appropriate.  They include a diversity of settings for working, playing, and resting that allow teachers to shift activities from indoors to the outdoors.

Exploration of the outdoor environment, as the "third teacher," expands the possibilities of understanding natural phenomena and processes.  Its sensory qualities support children's creative expressions and engagement with the local flora and fauna, environmental features, and culture of place.

Carefully selected outdoor settings and physical components add to the space symbolism providing an experiential framework for learning abstract concepts.  Arches, trellises, and bridges mark "passages" conveying concrete interactions with the dimensions of space and time.  The dimension of time can also be captured by the introduction and experimentation with elements or settings that change every few hours (such as cut flowers); they never change (such as glass or plastic objects); that visibly change over time (wood discoloration, compost); or landscapes that show clear seasonal variations.

The Design of spots or corners containing opposite qualities help children discover properties of the environment and support their natural investigations (cold/hot, dry/wet, rough/soft).

Sensory stimulation outdoors is offered by providing areas to highlight the different senses: smell, sight, taste, touch, sound, and movement.  Such settings include massive plantings of fragrant plants, wind structures, metal roof rain shelters, shadow play curtains, installation of outdoor lights for dark days, and music installations.