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Our Pre-K program is designed for children who are 4 years of age by September 1. This year before Kindergarten is an invaluable one, for it is during this year that the child develops the skills that he/she needs in preparation for a more structured classroom environment. This is the year for “readiness”.
Readiness is the decisive factor in placing a child in the Kindergarten classroom. In order to have a successful Kindergarten experience, a child should be ready in all skill areas: SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, PHYSICAL, COGNITIVE. Readiness skills include, but are not limited to:
Social and emotional maturity
Fine motor skills
Gross motor and coordination skills
The desire and interest to learn new concepts
The ability to listen to and follow directions
Completing a task within a given time period
Desire to participate, to ask questions
It is not only what the child has learned before entering Kindergarten, but how the child learns that is the key to a successful Kindergarten experience. It is not only letter recognition, sounds, and basic math concepts that the Kindergarten teacher looks for in entering students. It is the skills and behaviors that enable the student to learn these concepts, and to learn them without frustration.
Learning seems to come naturally and with ease when a child is interested, self-motivated and eager to learn. Our hope is that our program brings out the natural curiosity and love of learning that we know is part of each child. The child going to Kindergarten should be ready in all skill areas to handle successfully the demands of the program.
We use several resources, including “The Creative Curriculum”, utilizing big books, songs, rhymes, and games to promote phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds. As we introduce a new letter each week, children will match letters to sounds, work on formation of the letter, see that groups of letters become words, discover word families, sight words, rhyming words, use pictures as clues as they are reading. Punctuation and parts of a book are included in our reading discussions. Being excited about reading is a great avenue to learning to read. Once a teacher sees that some children are actually reading, she will use simple readers with those children on an individual basis, and send books home with the children to read with their parents.
Transitional Kindergarten is offered to students who have completed Pre-Kindergarten and would benefit from an extra year of readiness before they go on to Kindergarten. Transitional Kindergarten is a developmentally positive approach for providing a strong foundation on which to build future academic achievement. This extra year of social, emotional and academic growth often can give the child the self esteem needed to excel in his/her future school life, and to fully reach his/her potential in all areas.
The Language Arts curriculum is set up for the pre-emergent to emergent reader. The central theme around which all reading instruction occurs should be to teach not only how to read, but to enjoy reading. The young child is learning to read. In just a few years, and for a lifetime after that, he/she will be reading to learn, so we want to make this skill as enjoyable as possible! Reading is a reflection of spoken language. It should always make sense -- the goal is not saying words, but understanding what is read. We utilize “The Wright Group” Language Program. This program offers stories that are of great interest to children of this age, and lays a great foundation for teaching the elements of reading.
This is a very important part of our reading and writing program. Your child signs in when he/she arrives in the classroom each morning. This gives the children an opportunity to write for a purpose, and any attempt at signing in is great. Their skills will improve throughout the year.
Children take turns reporting “news” to the class. The news is usually something the child has done, is about to do, or an event they experienced or witnessed. The News is meaningful and the child feels a sense of pride and ownership when they see their words written on the chart paper. The teacher uses the text from The Daily News to teach reading and writing skills.
We use the program “Mathland” in both Pre-K and T-K. In Pre-K, this program offers exciting hands-on activities to teach counting, one-to-one correspondence, patterning, ordering, sorting, grouping, comparing, classifying, part/whole, measuring, shapes and space, and simple addition.
In T-K, we use the “Daily Tune-Ups”, which are organized into twelve content topics, including: patterns, number recognition, sequencing numbers, counting, measurement, geometry, auditory memory, mental math, number stories, estimation, visual memory, and logical thinking. These “Daily Tune-Ups” provide short, frequent and repetitive math activities that teach the children how to think mathematically. This is an exciting, hands-on, math program. We supplement these activities with math worksheets in order to evaluate and assess the children’s understanding of these concepts.
Opportunities are provided for the children to observe, predict, interact and formulate ideas and outcomes. Science activities are included in Circle Time discussions, center activities, as well as during our Science Enrichment class. The curriculum provides a balance among the broad disciplines of life science, physical science and earth science, as well as process skills.
By exploring family, school and community, children learn how people live, work and get along with others. They also learn how to collectively solve problems and how people shape and are shaped by their surroundings.
Motor Development and Spanish are each offered twice per week to Pre-K and T-K students. After lunch, we have a rotating Specials Schedule, including Science, Computer and Art. Each group will go to a different Special each day, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Monday and Friday, they have an enrichment activity in their classroom.
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