Carmen Miranda Gomez

Carmen is the Director of Lighthouse Kids East Preschool Center in Madison

Our preschool classrooms are designed to encourage learning. Our classes are taught in English and Spanish and focus on social, emotional and spiritual growth. We work with children daily reinforcing their abilities and skills leading them to develop in all their areas of learning. Our greatest goal is that children feel that they are loved and that they will grow safely in our center and families can trust in all our work.

In our center all children are accepted and it doesn’t matter their skin color, nationality, social status or religion. At this time our staff is all of Latino origin. I am from Colombia, we have teachers from Venezuela and Mexico. From the time they start out in the Baby room, we talk to the children all the time in Spanish. We do circle time in Spanish and the children learn new words from daily repetition, even if they don’t pronounce the words in Spanish themselves, they do know what topic we are discussing or pointing out. Frequently families ask us about songs we do in Spanish that the children come home singing. This causes curiosity and interest in families and they very often ask us about the songs and make requests for me to include songs and words in our monthly newsletter so the parents can repeat them at home.

Regarding the multicultural focus, one other part of that is our nutritious food menu from Mexico, Asia, India, Panama and other places. We do activities that include the different cultures of our children and help them see that although we are different we can live together with love and respect, learning to appreciate the different cultural traditions and family contexts.

The field of education is constantly changing and new ideas arise as we find needs in children. I believe each of us must strive to adapt to these changes for the benefit of the child population.