One of our core beliefs is that the attitudes children form about school, work and themselves in early years will carry with them for the rest of their lives.  We believe that school and work can be fun and hope that children in our programs will come to this conclusion as well when they learn by asking questions, playing games and creating.

We encourage persistence so that children learn that they can overcome feelings of frustration and look forward to the satisfaction they feel for a job well done.  Our goal for teaching foundational concepts in math and reading is to help children thrive in Kindergarten, 1^st and 2^ndgrade.  We believe that feeling successful in early grades will help children to incorporate “being a good student” into their identity.  Once this happens, children will become internally motivated to do well in school so that they can maintain this positive self-image.

Math and reading concepts, as well as handwriting practice are part of our daily instruction routines.  Mathematics topics include numbers, shapes, counting, graphing, patterns and sorting, introduction to operations such as addition and subtraction, position and spatial concepts such as inside/outside and above/below, and identifying measureable attributes of objects such as length and weight.  We develop fine motor skills during arts and crafts, centers and handwriting practice.  During handwriting practice, we focus on teaching uppercase to first year Pre-K students and both upper/lowercase to second year Pre-K students.  Social studies and science content is spiraled into our unit learning objectives throughout the year.

Literacy is the core of our Pre-K curriculum and we use research-based methods for teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, print concepts and reading comprehension. Not only does this provide a strong foundation for children as they enter kindergarten, but it eventually enables them to feel more secure in their environment and to become independent learners. Through daily reading practice, we hope to teach children that groups of letters form words and that printed words have meaning. Once these concepts are established, children can begin to recognize clues to their environment so that the world around them feels like a more logical and predictable place. As their reading abilities improve, children may also begin to learn on their own by reading books or using technology resources such as computers.