MENIFEE -- An education center opening this month at Good Shepherd Lutheran School will accommodate about 50 percent more preschoolers and give the school room to start caring for infants as young as 2 months old.

A grand opening for the 7,000-square-foot Child Development Center was held earlier this week said Cindy Begando, the school's director of early childhood education.

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church started a school about 12 years ago, teaching preschoolers in a room inside the Newport Road church. The school has grown to include younger and older students from toddlers to up to sixth-graders. A new elementary school building was completed in 2007.

The new center for preschoolers has some state-of-the-art features and has received a $25,000 state grant to mentor teachers in early childhood education concepts, Begando said.

Three of the seven classrooms are specially designed labs that students will visit periodically to experiment with art and science, music and drama and language and mathematics, Begando said.

They also will offer yoga classes, science experiments, woodworking and an array of other activities, she said.

"I think science and math are lacking in early childhood education and it's something I feel strongly about including," Begando said. "And we're all about literacy too. Anywhere we can put words in their play, we will. Even the welcome mats and blocks have letters and words on them."

Another goal for teachers is to focus on identifying individual learning styles and to vary instruction based on how a student learns, rather than focusing on the traditional teaching style that is often geared to auditory or visual learners, and sometimes to girls more than to boys, she added.

Begando, 42, of Canyon Lake, said her two children had distinctly different learning styles.

One did well with traditional teaching methods and had no trouble listening to a lesson and absorbing the information, while her other child was a kinesthetic learner and grasped his alphabet better, for example, by drawing those letters or doing an activity while repeating them.

At the center, educators will observe children to see what they are interested in learning and how they best absorb information, she said.

"We use several methods -- academic, development, Montessori -- whatever it takes to bring them to the next level," she said.

The church's pastor, the Rev. Scott Ganas, said the congregation is very supportive of the school.

"Kindness and love goes along with education," he said. "We want to not only create a safe and nurturing environment, but we want them to be creatively involved and have a balance of left- and right-brain activities."

The preschool curriculum includes faith-based lessons, Begando added, and students are now learning about other cultures, and about helping others, by supporting a mission project to help earthquake victims in Peru.

The new center will boost the preschool's capacity from 160 to 248 children, she said.

More capacity to serve children in preschool are needed in the region, according to a 2007 study by the Riverside County Children and Families Commission. The study estimates that more than 20,000 child care/preschool spaces are needed in the county's unincorporated areas. At that time, Menifee was an incorporated area.

Full-day preschool is especially needed for working families, said Mark McGregor, director of Menifee Union School District's preschool program.

The district serves 96 preschool-age children from lower-income families and has about 200 children on a waiting list, he said.

Preschoolers need to learn socialization and other skills once taught at the kindergarten level, McGregor said.

"There is a huge need," he said. "The standards are kind of ratcheting down to younger children."

One couple who toured the new preschool on a recent morning, JoeAnna and Rick Hernandez, said they were impressed by the classrooms and the school's programs and glad to have the option close to their Menifee home.

JoeAnna Hernandez said she toured many schools while looking for a preschool for her son a couple of years ago.

A reading specialist for the Temecula Valley Unified School District, Hernandez said that district has lost some of the technology and music programs it once had and that Good Shepherd offers those programs and others, including after-school programs such as dance and tae kwon do.

"It was very nice; I was quite impressed," she said.

For infants, the school also will try some new concepts, including one called continuation of care that involves teachers moving up along with their students, because the infants bond so strongly with their caregivers/teachers, Begando said.

Infant care can be expensive and challenging, she said, and requires one teacher for every four children.

But it is needed, she said, and the school will be able to accept 20 infants when the program begins in January.

"We feel we are a big enough school and a nonprofit, and that we want to provide that service to our families," she said.

Tuition for preschoolers at Good Shepherd ranges from $225 per month for two half-days per week to $670 per month for five full days. The prices for infant care have not yet been set, Begando said. For information, call (951) 672-6675.

Contact staff writer Cathy Redfern at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2621, or e-mail credfern@californian.com.