Preschool - Kindergarten

In Preschool, literacy concepts are taught by hearing and retelling stories from quality children’s literature including classics, nursery rhymes, poetry, and finger plays. The children also learn reading readiness skills such as turning pages and learning the left to right reading direction, remembering details in the stories and expressing their ideas and observations. They begin to recognize the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet and they learn foundational phonetic sounds.

In Pre-Kindergarten, the curriculum is connected to the end of the three’s curriculum and builds upon that foundation enabling the fours to begin reading. The first semester we blend initial consonants with the vowels, and in second semester we begin to read short words and sentences.

The Kindergarten curriculum begins with a quick review of the end of the four’s curriculum and progresses to short and long vowel rules, special sounds, and sight words giving our students the ability to decode and read 100’s of words. Then they begin ability leveled reading groups in the fall with a series of 12 basic readers that take them into spring. After that series is completed, a new series of readers are introduced taking the students to the end of their school year with most students reading on a first grade level. By this time, they are becoming more fluent and expressive, and their comprehension abilities soar. The love and adventure of reading begins!

In Preschool, children’s little hands and fingers are not ready to hold a pencil and write. Instead they enjoy experimenting with lines, shapes and scribbles. We provide the opportunity to exercise those small muscles through coloring, cutting, painting, lacing, gluing, tracing, clay play, etc. These activities are not only enjoyable; but also helpful in strengthening a correct grip and control of their fingers, and hand/eye coordination. 

Even though small muscle development continues in fours, they are enjoying their ability to better control their markers, crayons, scissors, and paint brushes. Soon the children receive a large tri-sided pencil giving them the opportunity to trace the alphabet, numbers, and their names.

By kindergarten, the children’s hand/eye coordination and pencil grip are vastly improved and ready to take on the challenges of writing. We provide ample opportunity to practice in our special writing tablet made just for their size. Before you know it, they will be writing sentences.

Our preschool goal is to enable them to count and recognize the numbers and understand the concept of one-to-one correlation. They have a delightful numbers workbook, and a puppet friend called Button Bear that helps reinforce their lessons. Other cognitive skills are developed, such as sorting, sequencing, classifying, evaluating, matching, measuring, geometric shapes, logical thinking, problem solving, etc.

When you ask these children, “How old are you?” they proudly smile and hold up little fingers. Counting is so much fun! Our goal in pre-kindergarten is to enable them to count and recognize the numbers and understand the concept of one-to-one correlation. Other cognitive skills are developed, such as sorting, sequencing, classifying, evaluating, matching, measuring, geometric shapes, logical thinking, problem solving, etc.

Our kindergarten students continue in all of the above skills and engage in more advanced math concepts: clocks, coins, addition, subtraction, counting and writing to 100 by 10’s, 5’s and 2’s, understanding the calendar—weeks, months, year, and much more. Math concepts are best learned and applied in a “hands on” approach, in which we incorporate a variety of tools to help them visualize the connections between the abstract and the concrete.

In our preschool - kindergarten program, not only do the children sing daily with their teachers, but they also have regular visits from our music teacher. The children develop musical skills by listening, clapping and marching to music, playing the rhythm instruments, practicing and participating in our Christmas and spring programs.