The Saul and Carole Zabar Nursery School at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan is a progressive, Reggio Emilia-inspired nursery school that embraces families from all backgrounds. Jewish values and traditions are interwoven into everything we do. Our teaching approach welcomes all types of learners, celebrating the diversity and uniqueness of each individual in our community. We honor one of our core Jewish values, B’tzelem Elohim (we are all created in the image of God).
At the Saul and Carole Zabar Nursery School, we nurture the whole child by fostering emotional intelligence, empathy, and resilience. Through our Reggio Emilia-inspired approach, children develop a strong sense of self, build meaningful relationships, and learn to express their thoughts and feelings with confidence.
We support each child’s learning, their connections with one another, their achievements, and their points of view by making their work visible through many forms of documentation, ensuring that they reach developmental milestones and master the academic skills necessary for continuing their educational journey.
We believe that each child’s learning is enhanced by the diversity of learning styles in their classroom. All learners have a place at The Saul and Carole Zabar Nursery School.
We are thrilled to bring back this conference for early childhood educators for the first time since 2019! The day will include breakfast, a keynote address, morning and afternoon workshops, and a lunch. See below for details, and we hope you Come Learn With Us!
Our nursery school is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We celebrate differences in individual and cultural identity as well as differences in the many ways of learning. We are a school that engages children and families in the work of social justice. We include our youngest students in reflective conversations, and we partner with them as they think through actionable ways to make change and to challenge injustices.
We believe it is our ethical responsibility to support children in building increasingly complex understandings of race and identity, in growing comfortable talking about diversity, and in forming their own sense of commitment to the work of shaping a more just society. Education, at heart, is about fostering engaged and knowledgeable citizenship. This begins in the earliest years, as children take part in their first learning community. Young children are eager observers of structures of fairness and power; we believe that educating for democracy necessitates that we embrace these themes and nurture children’s capacity to identify and resist injustice and oppression.
We believe that each child’s learning is enhanced by the diversity of learning styles in their classroom. All learners have a place at The Saul and Carole Zabar Nursery School. We believe that every child arrives at school with a variety of interests, strengths, and challenges, and we root ourselves in the inclusive Reggio Emilia understanding that children have “100 languages”—or 100 ways of experiencing the world and expressing their thinking. Our goal is to support children as they reach their individual potential within a caring and inspiring learning community.
