 | Peter Cournoyer (front), a teacher at the Dr. Pat Feinstein Child Development Center, with the help of three other teachers and four assistants, leads children across Westminster and Union Streets in Providence.
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Recess in the city...For children enrolled in the Dr. Pat Feinstein Child Development Center at the Providence Campus, recess is a learning adventure that takes them throughout the capital city.
“We use the entire city as a playground,” said the center’s Director Deborah Morelle. The Center’s 40 enrolled children, ranging in age from three through five, walk to different parts of the city twice a day. On occasion they take a trolley.
That kind of adventurous learning, along with a play-based curriculum, earned the center its recent accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
The center, which opened in 1996 and added an all-day kindergarten in 1998, is a training site for about 100 students enrolled in URI’s Child Development Program. Another center is located on the Kingston campus and both are administered by Diane Horm-Wingerd.
About 60 percent of the children have parents who work in the city. The other 40 percent are children of continuing education students, many of whom have received scholarships to attend college and for their children to attend the Center, thanks to the generosity of Alan Shawn Feinstein.
“Providence is a unique place to learn,” said Morelle. “The children learn that we share the city with many others ...businesses, restaurants, taxi cabs, the homeless, and even peregrine falcons,” she said referring to the birds that have been sighted on the building tops in the city.
By Jan Wenzel
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