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Preschool Curriculum
Curriculum
The preschool curriculum is anchored in literacy and focuses heavily on cooperative learning, social-emotional well-being, problem-solving, vocabulary, phonemic awareness, math, and science. The curriculum consists of 5 thematic themes: Family, Friends, Wind & Water, Shadows & Reflections and Things that Grow. It maintains a scoped and sequenced progression of both literacy and math and incorporates Building Block Math Curriculum and Heggerty Phonemic Awareness.
Daily Curriculum Components
Arrival (5 Minutes): Children practice independence skills by putting away their belongings and washing their hands. Children start their day with a fine motor activity such as practicing writing their names or free drawing.
Morning Meeting (10 minutes): Children begin with a good morning song, participate in breathing techniques to help with self-regulation and an overview of the day given. New centers are introduced along with expectations and potential for the kind of work that can happen are demonstrated. Morning meetings allow children to build connections and for a positive and welcoming tone to be set for the day.
Read Aloud (15 minutes): Through texts, children build content knowledge, vocabulary and reading acuity. They then make connections, build on and extend the text's big ideas and language in centers.
Centers (80 minutes): Children cultivate autonomy and decision-making skills by moving freely and independently through the classroom. In a guided, play-based approach, center activities connect to the texts read in class to further integrate skills and concepts. Students engage in different areas of the room: sensory table, dramatic play area, library, math, manipulative area, art area, easel, and block area. Led by autonomy and interest, students will deepen their understanding through their love of play.
Small Group: During center time, teachers work with small groups of children to focus on a skill or concept through guided play.
Thinking and Feedback: Throughout the day, teachers guide learning by scaffolding play: asking thought provoking questions and facilitating collaborative learning.
Heggerty Phonemic Awareness (10 minutes): The Heggerty curricula provides explicit and systematic lessons in phonemic awareness. During these lessons, children engage through movement with eight phonemic awareness skills: rhyming, onset fluency, blending, isolating final or medial phonemes, segmenting, adding, deleting, and substitution.
Gross Motor/Nature Hike (20 minutes): At the Alfred Rubin Riverwalk Community Center location, children will spend time during their day in our indoor gym which features a play structure, large obstacle course mats, basketball hoops and play equipment to support gross motor play.
At the Seager Park and Knoch Knolls locations, children will spend time outside hiking through the park, climbing on logs and jumping over nature obstacles which allow children the opportunity to hone their gross motor skills.
Problem Stories (as needed): Based on real-life classroom dilemmas, teachers introduce short, simple, engaging “fictional” scenarios for children to puzzle through collaboratively, to arrive at solutions and approaches they can draw on in other challenging situations they encounter. Problem Stories invite children to consider new perspectives and potential solutions without having to manage their emotions on a personal level. They listen to and watch a story play out; identify the characters' feelings; name the problem; and then propose, discuss, and role play possible solutions. Problem story scenarios are both familiar to children's direct experiences and open enough to allow for a variety of possible next steps; there are no “correct” solutions, but ones that can be played out in satisfying ways.
Dismissal (5 minutes): Children end their day with a goodbye song.
Learning Showcase
Childrens' work, and projects are saved throughout the unit and displayed. At the end of each unit, you will be invited to a Learning Showcase where your child will have an opportunity to share all their hard work with you.
