Slippery Fish is a cooperative preschool and pre-preschool. The teachers and parents in our co-op work together to create a safe environment that supports all children as they develop self-awareness, social skills, and the ability to solve problems, while nurturing their creativity and sense of wonder. We value the deep relationships formed among our diverse set of families. We welcome, observe and honor our differences, knowing that they enrich the learning environment for children, families and teachers.
Our Mission
Our mission is to create and support an inclusive, play-based, and child-centered education that honors individual strengths in children, parents and teachers while fostering relationships between each other, our diverse community, and our wider world.
Inclusion
At Slippery Fish, inclusion is both a practice and a feeling. In practice, we work to ensure that everyone is invited and able to participate, both socially and physically, and we actively look for ways to dismantle any artificial barriers that may limit participation. As a feeling, inclusion is about belonging. We belong by feeling that we matter, that we are appreciated as individuals, each with our own gifts, challenges, experiences, and perspectives. We belong when our sense of self is respected within our community and when we are proud of who we are. Inclusion is important because when we belong, we feel safe to be ourselves and, ultimately, to learn.
Our teachers receive training, resources, and coaching from SF Inclusion Networks and Support for Families. In the classroom, you will see a variety of ways we support communication: visual schedules, social stories, and visual play plans. We are working toward universal design and the tools to better support the learning of all our children, parents, and teachers.
Community Partnerships
As a participant in Preschool for All (PFA), a program of San Francisco’s Office of Early Care and Education (OECE), our school benefits from training, coaching, and other resources that contribute to the growth and quality of our programs.
Our partnership with OECE also helps to make our programs affordable for all families. Nearly 40% of our families receive funding from the city’s Early Learning Scholarship Program or a subsidy from the Preschool For All initiative, which helps fund tuition for four-year-old residents of San Francisco, regardless of income.
In 2016, our staff began working with San Francisco Inclusion Networks (SFIN) to develop and strengthen our practices for including children with disabilities and their families in our programs. Slippery Fish completed a yearlong series of educational workshops with SFIN that included both teachers and parents.
Children benefit from plentiful opportunities to explore nature. Slippery Fish is one of several sites in San Francisco selected to participate in a joint initiative of First 5 San Francisco, SF Recreation and Parks, and WestEd to create more opportunities for young children to connect to nature at school. We received training, resources and design coaching to bring more of the natural world into our indoor and outdoor classroom spaces.
Play in nature is especially important for developing capacities for creativity, problem-solving, and intellectual development. — (Kellert, 2005)
