At Garden Gate we value our time in nature and spend hours outside, every day, in every kind of weather. Children and teachers alike come to school prepared to explore outdoors in rain, sun and snow.

Spending time outdoors fosters attentiveness, calm, and joy, while helping children build respectful relationships with living things and with one another. As they care for shared spaces, notice changes in weather and seasons, and move through familiar places, children begin to see themselves as part of a larger community that includes the land itself. This awareness lays the foundation for empathy, stewardship, and a lifelong connection to the natural world. We are grateful for our outdoor classroom spaces that support a lifelong love of learning and full engagement with the world around us.

Garden Gate Child Development Center acknowledges and honors the land where we play and learn, Noepe, the native homeland of the Wampanoag People and nation. 

We are grateful for their ancestors and descendants, who are the original stewards of the land on which we live, gather, explore and play, and for the air and water, forests and fields, the birds, insects and animals that we share with our children. 

We acknowledge the importance of helping children develop a strong sense of their own culture and an awareness and respect for different cultures and people. We strive to help our children confront stereotypes about Indigenous People, so that they will have a strong, positive and more fully formed understanding of Native people, and develop relationships that will help ensure that history isn’t forgotten or repeated.