Big Ideas
Behind Our Work
Our work at UDU builds upon the best practices of early childhood education, creativity research, and innovations in teaching and learning.
Our commitment to creative play
Creative play is crucial in early childhood development — it serves as a powerful tool for learning and development and is a vital component of curiosity and engagement. It fosters cognitive, social, emotional, and physical growth. It helps children build a strong foundation for future learning and sets the stage for healthy social and emotional development. From ages zero to five a child’s brain undergoes rapid and complex development shaped by relationships, experiences, and environment. Our program is designed to leverage these influences in activities that foster curiosity, resilience, risk taking, and a love of learning in your little ones.
A pioneering approach to thinking routines
Each play adventure is a collaboration between you and your child, think of it as a gym membership for their developing brains— designed to engage thinking habits that have lasting impact on the intelligence of your child. These habits compel children to behave with resilience, intelligence and find novel approaches to settings they’ve not seen before. When children come face to face with uncertainties, having strong thinking habits helps them know what to do. Our play adventures are intentionally designed to foster the following habits of mind:
Visual and Hearing Imagination
Creating and Innovating
Persistence and Flexibility
Information Gathering through the Senses
Listening with Understanding and Empathy
Openness to Wonder and Awe
Responsible Risk Raking
Finding Humor
Questioning and Posing problems
Thinking Interdependently
Past Knowledge Applied to New Situations
Whole-brain creative development
Children’s brains develop in spurts called critical periods. The first occurs around age 2, lasting until age 7. At the start of these periods, the number of connections (synapses) between brain cells (neurons) doubles. Two-year-olds have twice as many synapses as adults. Because these connections between brain cells are where learning and creativity occurs, twice as many synapses enable the brain to learn faster than at any other time of life.
Our process focuses on optimizing the brain connectivity in early childhood. We have focused our program for children 3-7 years of age to align with this tremendous period of growth, where engagement, environment, and relationships can super charge their developing brains. And, a child’s experience during this phase of their life, have lasting effects on their whole life. Four ways to maximize this critical period include:
Encouraging a love of learning,
Focusing on breadth instead of depth,
Paying attention to emotional intelligence.
Treating creative play as serious business
Multiple Dimensions of creative thinking.
Our program strengthens creative thinking by focusing on originality, flexibility, elaboration, and fluency. We foster specific skills and habits of mind, including imagination, empathy, curiosity, humor, and critical thinking.
A call to action
A happy and productive future requires creative capacities that remain engaged and constantly evolving. Our culture’s focus on developing singular talents in children by engaging one main activity may be appropriate later in life, but the children who will thrive in a fast paced world think creatively and abstractly, drawing from experiences gathered from their multiple fields of play—our program design helps leverage a wide range of thinking habits that will set your child up for their best possible future.
