By Cait Harding at ACSI.org
“When we opened the school in 2017, we were committed to creating excellent, biblically based curriculum and pairing it with cutting-edge academic instruction,”
Suzanne Anderson
The Nest Christian Academy didn’t happen overnight. Opening on the heels of a local church-based preschool closure, the school in Argyle, Texas has grown to shepherd more than 100 early ed children into loving Jesus.
The school’s leadership has always shared the vision of inspiring and fostering knowing and serving Jesus in the hearts, minds, and souls of children who attend Nest Christian. They do this through academically strong, Bible character-trait-based curriculum.
Suzanne Anderson, the school’s founder and its initial curriculum visionary, shared that the team is comprised of true innovators in early childhood education.
“When we opened the school in 2017, we were committed to creating excellent, biblically based curriculum and pairing it with cutting-edge academic instruction,” she said. “Our passionate team has shared this mission from the first day.”
At the beginning, Suzanne was joined by educational leader, Kendra Estrada. Both shared educational resources, ideas and strategies. A few months later, Crystal Grant, an experienced curriculum writer and teacher, brought her expertise to the team.
Phonics is more than just memorizing the alphabet; it’s about understanding the relationship between letters and sounds. The research by Dr. Linnea Ehri, a renowned expert in reading development, reinforces this idea. She states, “Phonics instruction helps children decode words accurately, a crucial skill for fluent reading.” This decoding ability is fundamental for early readers as it enables them to tackle new words independently.
Together, they conducted a thorough review of marketplace offerings, determining that no suitable curriculum products were available. As such, they set about building their own, ensuring they incorporated a Christian worldview.
“If we don’t teach children to follow Christ, the world will teach them not to,” Anderson shared.
The team set a lofty vision, which presented quite a challenge for a start-up preschool. However, they were ready to fight the good fight. The journey began with developing a curriculum that met their spiritual and academic objectives.
“First, young learners were led through God’s Word beginning with developmentally appropriate lessons in creation and culminating with the story of God’s plan to rescue His children,” Anderson said. “We integrated a strong academic component and spent years classroom testing and evaluating the curriculum.”
The program grew strong—so strong that the local community took notice.
“Nest Christian is now well-known and highly regarded in our local community,” Anderson beamed. “It is known for its academic excellence within a spiritual environment.”
Their curriculum is currently in development and will soon be published by Nest Knowledge for Christian preschools across the world.
In addition, the school has even created a new system to fit the way reading methods have been forced to change through media and new technologies.
“Nest Phonics system fits into the national reading revolution that is underway,” Anderson shared. “Coming at the perfect time, Nest Phonics connects with the science of reading wave as an organized, systematic, efficient phonics tool that starts children off on a pathway to reading well. The product will be launched on our new website on January 1, 2024.”
The Nest educational team recognized that their unique phonics system is pertinent to current trends and should be made available as soon as possible for other educators.
“Best practices for developing flourishing early learners mean we recognize and teach reading basics early using our timely, well-designed instructional approach,” Anderson shared. “Nest Phonics teaches awareness of sounds, symbols, and word meaning. We anticipate our visually stunning Nest Phonics product will become a newsworthy and highly sought-after invention—a best practices reading tool.”
The school continues to thrive and adapt its curriculum to an ever-changing educational climate.
“As an ACSI candidate school, the leadership, legislative, and educational resources available to us by ACSI contributed to our pursuit of best practices in everything we set about to accomplish,” Anderson said.
