While most Haven students spend their whole day learning from teachers, a handful spend a block doing the teaching.
Haven has three childhood classes listed in the 2026-2027 Silver Guide: Exploring Childhood, Advanced Childhood, and Fundamentals of Education. Students taking Exploring Childhood and Advanced Childhood are placed in the same class, just assuming different responsibilities.
“Advanced [Childhood] are their own team, so they’re able to help the Exploring Childhood kids and guide them a lot so they’re able to see how it’s done,” junior Shannon Murphy, who has taken both the classes, said.
In these classes, students run a preschool from Tuesday to Thursday. Each week, students either come up and create a lesson plan, teach a lesson, or observe other lesson plans and their assigned preschool student “buddy.” At the end of the semester, students write a letter to the parents of their assigned buddy, detailing their growth and kindergarten readiness.
“My favorite part of the class is getting to see how my buddy improves throughout the year and getting to work with her directly and help her reach milestones,” junior Missy Rich said.
The class is held in room 355, and is taught by Family and Consumer Science teacher and Department Chair Ms. Jennifer Zanoni.
“She’s seen pretty much all the lessons that’ve come through and she knows exactly what needs to be tweaked for them. She’s only there to help,” three-time childhood student and senior Miranda Ward said.
On May 12, the class held a graduation ceremony for the preschoolers in the chorus room, which was decorated with crafts that the preschoolers made throughout the year. The kids spent the days leading up to the event practicing singing songs and receiving their diploma.
Although the preschool has wrapped up for the year, the class will spend the end of the school year holding a summer camp for the kids. The camp will run similar to the preschool, just less structured.
”[Camp] will be fun things always,” Murphy said. “I think that everything we do is fun, but normally there’s a background of something that we’re learning with the theme of the week. And this will just be loose. There is no theme.”
The class has held the two-week summer camp before, but has not done it for the past few years.
“We’ll get to plan more summer camp related activities, like tie-dye, or more opportunities for them to kind of have fun before summer begins,” Rich said.
Running the preschool and summer camp helps students see a side of child development that they may not have seen before.
“Doing things like babysitting and stuff like that, you get a lot of experience with the emotional sides of kids,” Murphy said. “But this gave me a better perspective of everything, like their fine and gross motor skills, and what they have to learn before they go to kindergarten, and how different they all are even though their ages are similar.”
These classes give students the chance to explore teaching, child development, and related careers to see if it is right for them.
“When I took childhood my sophomore year, I had no idea I wanted to be a teacher,” Rich said. “I didn’t think I wanted to be a teacher. But then getting to actually teach the kids and lesson plan and see them grow, made me realize that that’s definitely what I want to do in the future.”
For other students, the class confirmed the opposite.
“There’s someone in my class who thought she wanted to be a teacher, and now she knows that she doesn’t want to do that for the rest of her life. So it’s a really good way to figure out your interest,” Ward said.
