Rooted in faith. Free to wonder.
Free to Wonder is a tiny preschool community in Sugarhouse, Salt Lake City, built around a simple conviction:
Our goal is not to get children through childhood faster. It is to give them the foundations to flourish in a future we can barely imagine.
At three, four, and five, we want children to meet the world with curiosity and confidence—not with anxiety about everything they don’t know yet. We want them to discover that questions are worth asking, ideas are worth trying, and mistakes are part of figuring things out. That books contain treasures, numbers help us make sense of things, and making, building, imagining, observing, experimenting, and getting gloriously dirty can all lead somewhere interesting.
Above all, we want children to develop an appetite for learning: the confidence to try something they don’t yet know how to do, and the curiosity to keep going until they understand a little more.
And while learning to read matters enormously, another kind of literacy is developing at this age too: learning to read the room. To wait. To listen. To notice another person’s feelings. To handle disappointment. To disagree without hurting someone. To make things right when you do.
At Free to Wonder, all of that counts as education.
Built for the World They’re Growing Into
Children entering preschool today will begin their adult lives in the 2040s.
We cannot know exactly what that world will look like. Artificial intelligence is already transforming what machines can do and, consequently, what human beings will need to do especially well.
We don’t believe the answer is to push an increasingly outdated model of schooling earlier and earlier into childhood.
The best preparation for an uncertain future is to develop capacities that don’t become obsolete.
We keep coming back to five:
Curiosity
The desire to ask, explore, understand, and keep learning.
Creativity
The ability to imagine possibilities, make something new, and try another way.
Critical Thinking
The habit of observing carefully, asking good questions, testing ideas, and thinking about how we know what we know.
Character
Honesty, courage, compassion, self-control, responsibility, perseverance, gratitude, and a growing desire to choose what is right.
Community
The ability to live, learn, work, disagree, forgive, contribute, and solve problems with other people.
These are not alternatives to academic learning. They are the soil we want academic learning to grow in.
Learning Through Wonder
Children don’t experience the world divided into subjects, and we don’t think their first school needs to either.
A caterpillar discovered outside might lead to a week of questions. Children may observe it, draw it, count its legs, learn new words, read stories, build it a habitat, wonder what it eats, act out its transformation, and eventually discover what a butterfly is.
Along the way, they’ve encountered science, mathematics, language, art, storytelling, and perhaps theology.
To them, they were simply wondering about a caterpillar.
Our approach is influenced by Reggio Emilia and other play- and project-based traditions. Teachers pay close attention to children’s interests and questions, then create opportunities to take those ideas farther.
There will be a plan.
Sometimes a child will find something more interesting than the plan.
A good teacher knows what to do with both.
Small on Purpose
Free to Wonder is beginning with just 5–8 children, ages 3–5.
That’s intentional.
A small community allows a teacher to actually know each child—their temperament, interests, friendships, frustrations, strengths, and growing edges.
It gives friendships room to deepen, conflicts time to be worked through, and projects permission to unfold.
And it lets us build the school around the children who are actually in the room instead of around the logistics of managing a crowd.
Faith Woven Throughout
Free to Wonder is intentionally Christian and rooted in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.
Children will have simple, age-appropriate gospel instruction following Come, Follow Me, along with prayer, music, and scripture stories.
But God is not a separate subject.
Faith shapes how we understand truth, ourselves, other people, and the world around us. It is practiced when we marvel at creation, include someone who is lonely, tell the truth, forgive, take responsibility for harm, and try again.
Why Free to Wonder Exists
Free to Wonder began with a very personal search.
I was looking for a preschool for my own four-year-old daughter.
I wanted deep Christian faith without rigid, outdated pedagogy. I wanted genuine play without chaos–limited to short increments on hard surfaces. I wanted nature, beauty, books, intellectual curiosity, strong relationships, clear boundaries, and a school that understood what children this age actually need.
I kept finding pieces of it.
I couldn’t find the whole thing.
So I decided to build it.
We are trying to create one exceptionally good, childhood-sized place to learn.