New Haven Independent

“We don’t observe the stars from here any more,” Traci Turner-Moore was saying. “But we, of course, do observe the children.”

Turner-Moore (pictured) is the education coordinator of the new Pre-K program at the rebuilt Celentano School. New Haven’s citywide Pre-K effort — the state’s largest — begins its first full week Monday. Some 2,100 little people, like three-and-a-quarter year-old Thea and Edmund Bassett, are attending 8:30 to 12:30 classes in programs around the city.

Here, the twins from Morris Cove are regaling their dad, Lee, with highlights of new friends and animals they learned about on their first morning. They are among the 65 pre-schoolers Friday attending opening day at Celentano School’s Pre-K, the newest site among the dozens that New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) operates throughout the city.

The Celentano program is housed in the building that used to be Yale University’s observatory in the 1880s (and apparently, before that, was a structure belonging to the Winchester Firearms factory). The first and second floors have been renovated and appointed with kid-sized furniture and toilets.

According to Coordinator Turner-Moore, there are, alas, no telescopes left. But there’s plenty of activity to watch up close.

Like these two young builders, Tyler Kein and Daniel Trastsianka, who are getting those blocks perhaps a bit too high up. Ever wonder what kind of learning takes place at a Pre-K? Turner-Moore was asking the boys about what they were building. Was it a tower? What other word might describe the structure? Were they building something they can live in? (Daniel said he was.) And what is the word for the color of this block?

Ooops, and yes, what happens if they lean on it?

“The kids learn math skills,” from the building activities, Turner-Moore said. “They learn cooperation, vocabulary, too… . No, no, just because you built it doesn’t mean you can climb on it!”

We’ll return to the young architects, now become construction workers, a little later.

Celentano’s rooms, because of their 19th century dimensions, hold, by law, only eight to 10 children. Across the small room was three-and-a-half-year-old Isabella Peng with her dad Huaming, an economics graduate student from China studying this year at Yale. Isabella was hard at work at a different kind of activity, making a long festive line of one mama bear and her 22 babies.

The daddy complimented his daughter on her great work. He said he himself would soon be looking for work, perhaps in Singapore or Hong Kong, or the U.S., or even back in his native China. But for now they are nearby and delighted with the Celentano Pre-K program. Peng has two other younger children, including a two-week-old baby boy whom his wife was bringing over soon for a visit to the Pre-K classroom. Might these developments be connected with Isabella’s creative parade?

The demand for Pre-K slots in general is high throughout the city, particularly in the East Rock area. So the space in the observatory building, which used to be spillover classroom space for the Celentano K-8, was converted to Pre-K use. Turner-Moore said the program has a waiting list.

When the Bassett family, whom we met earlier, had been accepted, “the administrators were really interested,” Lee Bassett said, “to hear that the kids’ dad worked at a veterinary clinic. ‘We love to have animals at the school,’ they said. You know, for show and tell.’”

As Bassett read from Margaret Wise Brown’s Baby Animals and his son Edmund picked out a tame-looking cat as his favorite of the moment, a reporter wanted to know just what kinds of animals the veterinary Bassetts might have at home in Morris Cove that they might bring in.

“Oh, let’s see. At home we have frogs, rabbits, mice, dogs, sturgeon, and couple of pacus,” he said.

Pacus? “Yup, we have two of those. They are eight-pound fish, pretty serious, a kind of cousin of the piranha, but they’re vegetarians.”

Ah, vegetarian piranhas just might be a fit for East Rock. Would he be bringing the piranhas in for show and tell? “Only if the school really wants us to, and they provide a flat-bed truck for transportation of the tanks.”

Why would a family from Morris Cove travel the length of the city for Pre-K at Celentano in East Rock? Surely there were other programs more convenient. “Yes,” said Bassett, “but we wanted to give the kids a new kind of experience, with new kids they might not meet in the neighborhood. Also, one of the clients at the clinic is the woman who has had a hand in training the teachers here. She said the teachers were exceptionally good, experienced and really educated in early childhood. So here we are.”

Meanwhile, in another corner of the cozy, just-painted, gleaming space, Tyler had temporarily set aside his construction career, and was settling down with another friend, Saad Turner, on the right. With the concentration of chess masters, the boys worked on moving colorful “manipulables” around in different arrangements, patterns, orders. They were learning sorting and counting and how to become friends.

Under careful observation, minus the telescopes.