Our Curriculum
Art
Daily art projects will allow the child to grow in self expression and begin aesthetic appreciation.
Our objectives include:
- Developing motor skills and eye to hand coordination
- Providing exposure to a variety of materials and to encourage growth in creativity
- Seeing how colors are related and experiment with mixing colors
- Reinforcing learning in cognitive areas
- Encouraging children to follow a series of instructions
Music
Music is an important part of our daily routine. Children will become involved in music as listeners and participants. Music helps develop listening skills and improve speech and language development.
Our objectives include:
- Participating in rhythmic and creative movement
- Listening to and playing a variety of instruments
- Discerning differences in pitch
- Reinforcing concepts in cognitive areas
- Learning a variety of songs
- Singing in unison and time
Physical Development
Our daily schedule includes movement with concentration on motor development.
Our objectives include:
- Developing gross motor skills by walking, running, jumping, climbing both inside and out through a
variety of activities
- Developing coordination and balance using bean bags, balls, climbing, balance beam and creative movement
- Strengthen fine muscles through participation in art, writing and various manipulatives
- Becoming familiar with a variety of sports and equipment
Language Arts:
Teachers will use interactive modeling, singing, reciting finger plays, relating stories in sequence, participating in sharing time, sharing news, creative dramatics and a variety of other activities to build language.
Children will be encouraged to:
- Speak in complete sentences
- Review activities in sequence
- Speak fluently and comfortably
- Expand their vocabulary
- Use language as a social tool
- Organize ideas into oral expression
Building Vocabulary
Children will expand their expressing and receptive vocabulary by participating in experiences that increase their general knowledge.
Children will be encouraged to:
- Name and describe common items, actions or emotions
- Group objects into categories
- Sequence events
- Understand opposites
- Compare using degree (small, smaller)
- Qualify actions (use of adverbs)
Prereading
Our objectives are designed to develop the following skills:
- Visual discrimination (differentiating visually)
- Visual recall (remembering what is seen)
- Left to right progression
- Auditory discrimination (differentiating sound)
- Auditory recall (remembering what is heard)
- Understanding that markings on paper are transformed into language
- Understanding that certain letter combinations make words and names
- Eye hand coordination
Reading
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound, all letter sound are phonemes and so are blends.
Our objectives include:
- Isolating beginning, medial and ending sounds in a word
- Segmenting and blending phonemes
- Recognizing words and sounds that are the same and different
- Rhyming words
- Segmenting and blending syllables
- Understanding word boundaries
Phonics
Children will develop an understanding of the letter/sound relationship.
Our objectives include:
- Catagorizing letters by form and features
- Identifying upper and lowercase letters
- Realizing that letters represent spoken sounds
- Decoding and matching beginning and ending consonants
Comprehension
Individual students will employ the appropriate strategies to enhance their understanding.
Our objectives include:
- Use of illustrations to enhance understanding
- Making predictions
- Asking and answering questions to clarify understanding
- Identifying main ideas
- Retelling a story in sequence
- Understanding the terms title, cover, illustrations, author, illustrator
- Locate the front and back of a book
- Locate top and bottom of a page
- Understand that we read left to right with a return sweep
- Differentiate between letters and words
- Differentiate between words and sentences
- Identify upper and lowercase letters and some punctuation marks
Fluency
Children will begin to read words with accuracy and expression.
Our objectives include:
- Building a bank of high-frequency words including: names, color and number words, days of the week
- Reading labels that represent classroom objects
- Recognizing all upper and lowercase letters
- Matching letter names and sounds
Science
We desire for children to develop an appreciation of the world around them. We will promote analytical thinking and science as a process utilizing inquiry, exploration and discovery. We will encourage skills of observation, description, problem solving, classification and comparison.
Areas of exploration include:
- Life Science: the 5 senses; living and non living things; plants and animals
- Earth Science: weather; land and water; earth and space
- Physical Science: matter changes; how things move
- Health: taking care of yourself and your personal belongings
Social Studies
We will strive to create an awareness and appreciation of oneself and others. We will broaden the child’s social environment by exposing them to other customs and cultural diversity. Our focus will be on self awareness, relationships, interdependence.
A variety of community helpers will visit our classrooms.
We will celebrate harvest, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter and Mother’s Day.
Our Character Education curriculum will include:
- Acceptance and diversity
- Affirmation and self esteem
- Caring and compassion
- Cooperation
- Courage
- Creativity
- Feelings
- Friendship
- Generosity
- Manners
- Patience
- Perseverance
- Respect
- Responsibility
- Self control (making good choices)
- Sharing
- Truthfulness
SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT:
Social Development
Each child should begin to develop positive relationships with their peers and teachers.
Our objectives include:
- Cooperating with other children during play and following appropriate guidelines
- Learning to express anger verbally rather than physically
- Taking turns, sharing responsibility and sharing the teacher’s attention
- Becoming a part of a new group by handling separation from parents
- Adjusting to and accepting the preschool routine
- Treating others as you would like to be treated and using good manners
Emotional Development
We desire that your child have a positive self image which will allow them to function well in a variety of social settings.
Our objectives include:
- Adjusting to separation
- Developing self confidence
- Learning to express emotions appropriately
- Learning to accept guidance from the teaching staff
- Making responsible choices
- Focus attention on a task and following through
- Learning to handle transition times
Self Help Skills
Children should be encouraged toward age appropriate independence and be able to care for their personal needs in the absence of their parents.
Our objectives include:
- Walking into school (not being carried) and returning the teacher’s greeting
- Hanging up their own coat and book bag
- Beginning to attempt to zip or snap clothing
- Caring for their own toileting needs (including wiping)
- Washing hands independently
- Willingness to assume job responsibilities within the classroom
- Cleaning up after themselves
Math
Our math objectives include:
- Identifying shapes
- Understanding the concepts of same and different
- Distinguishing between some and all
- Making size comparisons such as equals, more than or less than
- Recognizing and write numerals to 31
- Matching numerals to their corresponding set
- Understand the concept of the empty set
- Classify items according to attributes
- Ordering objects of various sizes
- Understand patterning and complete a pattern
- Using terms denoting spatial relationship, using positional words
- Understand and use a calendar
- Begin simple measurements and graphing
- Begin simple addition and subtraction
- Begin to understand place value.
- Track the number of days we have been at school
The Bible
We will teach the children that the Bible is God’s special book and has many truths for us today. The children will become familiar with a number of Bible stories and scripture verses. Children will be exposed to daily prayer and learn that praying is simply talking to God. We will teach the attributes and character of God. Each child will learn that they are a special creation of God with unique talents and abilities. Children will grow in their understanding that God loves them and desires to be their friend and helper.
Our Old Testament stories include:
- Creation
- Daniel
- David
- Jonah
- Joseph
- Joshua
- Moses
- Noah
New Testament stories include:
- The birth and childhood of Jesus
- Jesus’ ministry
- Jesus’ miracles
- The triumphal entry
- Jesus’ death and resurrection
- Jesus appears to His followers
