Curro Academy The Blyde has a preschool in Pretoria, that provides high-quality early childhood development for children from 3 years to 5 years. Our classes are divided by age, and we carefully control the number of children per class to ensure that they are all cared for and entertained. Our internally developed preschool programme engages inherent curiosity and love of play, while supporting their well-being all-round.

View our fact sheet to discover our school times, activities, and everything else your child can enjoy with us.

What your child can enjoy

Our children enjoy a programme that supports their physical, social, emotional and cognitive well-being. This approach to early childhood development is built around Early Learning and Development Areas (ELDAs), which focus on development areas rather than strict milestones. This means that children feel supported and encouraged instead of pressured to develop at someone else’s pace. Children spend the day playing and being creative while teachers and teacher’s assistants guide them through the activities to ensure that the ELDA areas are engaged.

The learning and development areas include the following:

• Identity and belonging: personality, friendship, sharing
• Physical well-being: balance, movement, safety
• Communication: speech, listening, understanding
• Creativity: playing, drawing, painting, dancing, imagination
• Mathematics: shapes, size, time, counting
• Learning about the world: exploring and understanding the world around them

Do you want to know more? Visit this page on our website to discover more about the ELDAs and how they work together to give children a high-quality preschool programme.

We encourage loose-parts play

As part of the Curro school group, we believe that the development of curiosity and imagination in early childhood is vitally important to the development of problem-solving skills and critical thinking later on. Therefore, we encourage playing with loose-parts and multi-purpose playthings, rather than single-purpose toys that don’t involve much imagination. Through loose-parts play, children use their natural curiosity to explore previously undiscovered fascinations such as stacking, rolling, sliding, fitting, colours, and more – which are crucial to early childhood development.

Children learn by discovering the world around them, which you may note as imitating actions or gestures exhibited by family members. That is why we also incorporate play with real-life items that they see their parents or siblings use around the house. This may include everything from spatulas and brooms to purses and computer keyboards. By using these items to imitate the actions they observe in those around them, they get a boost in understanding the world around them.

See what we offer on our fact sheet.

Activities at our school

We believe that participation in extramural activities plays an important role in building social skills and confidence. Our daily programme is packed with a variety of physical and cognitive activities (based on a weekly theme) where children play while they learn.

Extramural activities are offered as additional opportunities to strengthen focused areas or hone certain skills. Our extramural activities are offered by external tutors or coaches at an additional cost and take place on the school’s premises.

See which activities we offer on our fact sheet.