About LGPNS
Our School
With a beautiful, fully-owned facility, Los Gatos Parent Nursery School provides a fun and nurturing educational experience for children ages 12mo-5yo, and an opportunity for parents to play an active role in their child’s education.
We offer a developmentally oriented preschool experience in which children learn through play. Children develop in an atmosphere of encouragement and support where they are free to explore and discover.
We emphasize socialization and free choice of activities. The daily schedule affords exposure to large and small group activities as well as self-directed project participation and free play.
LGPNS provides a rich experience for children and their parents to share, and a wonderful first step in the lifelong process of learning.
Our History
Founded in 1946, Los Gatos Parent Nursery School (LGPNS)
is a non-profit, parent cooperative preschool.
Los Gatos Parent Nursery School opened on May 6th, 1946 in a backyard on Glenridge Avenue in Los Gatos with a few bags of sand and a large barrel donated by the Eatmore Ice Cream Company for the play yard. The founding parents wished to establish a cooperative preschool providing a nurturing, safe environment for children and their parents to learn and grow. The idea caught on quickly and they soon outgrew this location. After many months of fundraising, they purchased the property at 15 Lyndon Avenue. The first classes were held on November 3, 1947. Since that day in November, the physical property has gone through many improvements, including rebuilding after a fire in October 1967 and three complete playground overhauls.
While the school has undergone many physical changes it has stayed true to the founding families’ principles. We continue to provide a play-based curriculum for preschool-age children and parent education classes with the goal of building a strong community that values parent involvement in early education.
Piaget’s Philosophy
Our school’s philosophy is based on the work of Jean Piaget (1896-1980), a Swiss-born biologist turned psychologist. His theory states that a child builds mental “maps” for understanding and responding to physical experiences within his or her environment. Our focus group is in the preoperational stage which ranges from the ages of 2 to 7 years of age. In this stage, children's learning opportunities increase as they engage with their environment. They need to touch, taste, test, and try it, repeatedly, to begin to understand it. This is how they learn about the world around them.