3 to 5 Preschool
"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn". Benjamin Franklin
Our Curriculum
Young children learn best by doing and play provides the foundation for academic learning. 3 to 5 Preschool uses The Creative Curriculum approach in our program to help children learn about the world around them. By using their natural desires for exploration and discovery, The Creative Curriculum enables children to develop confidence, creativity, and lifelong critical thinking skills. It is through intentional teaching we are able to provide playful and engaging activities that help turn every minute of the day into learning opportunities, intentionally promoting language, literacy, math, science, social studies, and physical skills. The most important goal of our curriculum is to help children become enthusiastic learners, not just in preschool, but all through their lives.
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In addition to The Creative Curriculum, we use Handwriting Without Tears during our daily activities. This award-winning Pre-K curriculum is developmentally appropriate and designed so that all children can thrive and build a strong foundation for kindergarten. The Get Set for School book and CDs use music and movement to engage children and help them develop good learning habits. Children learn actively as they play, color, draw, count, build, and sing. We’ll be teaching your child to:
• Develop social-emotional skills to support learning
• Build physical coordination, strength, and crayon grip
• Recognize letters and numbers
• Learn habits for writing capitals and numbers (Start at the top!)
• Ask and answer questions
• Build vocabulary
• Listen to and repeat a simple story
• Sort objects by size, color, or other attributes
• Count, sort, and, create patterns
• And more!
Your children will learn important readiness, early writing, literacy, and math skills. These potentially complex subjects will be broken down into simpler tasks that develop on what children already know. This way, they can master skills one step at a time as they build lifelong learning habits.
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To compliment the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum we utilize a portion of the Zoo-phonics curriculum program to help children learn their letter sounds in a fun and engaging way. Animals are drawn in the shapes of the letters for ease in memory and a related body movement is given for each letter. This concrete approach cements the sounds to the shapes of the letters. Each week we meet a new letter friend and discover the letter sounds around us and how together each letter forms the words we see and hear in our world.
Find the Zoo-phonics letter actions and song here:
Both the Handwriting Without Tears and Zoo-phonics animal actions are used in the local elementary school. This early curriculum connection to their future education helps build the solid foundation needed for academic and life success.
What do our teachers do all day?
We Play!
Children learn best through play, not just sitting and listening. Play can be child lead or teacher directed. Sometimes we are immersed in it, modeling appropriate use of materials and social skills, and other times we observe so we can learn and tweek our lesson plans. Even play requires some planning to be valuable.
•Play builds self-esteem and confidence
•Play develops problem-solving skills
•Play encourages new vocabulary usage
•Play teaches children to be alone and independent
•Play teaches children to release their emotions
•Play teaches children to be social and interactive
•Play encourages planning and thinking ahead
These are developmental skills, too!
We Create!
We create lesson plans based on the developmental needs of the children. For the child lacking hand strength, we bring out playdough to practice squeezing. For the child questioning how things work, we put out tinkering and building toys. For the child lacking confidence to make friends, we invite them to play and make them feel loved and welcome.
We sing!
We sing good morning, chant interesting facts, sing while washing our hands, learn fingerplays to get our hands and bodies ready to learn. Singing helps children feel welcome and interested, as well as increase their oral language skills.
We care!
We care for children and about children. Their emotional, social, and intellectual well being, all of it. Their big hearts and big emotions are a BIG deal and we respect and love them for it.
We love!
We love our students. We understand their developmental needs and know they rely on us to feel safe, secure, and comfortable while away from their family. Children depend on us to teach them academics, cause and effect, conflict resolution, cooperation, communication skills, all while encouraging their need to explore and desire more. We provide a safe environment to take risks, make messes, have fun and learn.
We love children as individuals. As little people who need hugs, reassurance, guidance, safety, and fun. As people who make us happy and make us better teachers.