to encourage creative thinking and collaboration, and there is tremendous focus on building a learning community with a sense of mutual respect and responsibility. Again, research into outcomes of early childhood experiences confirms that relationship-building skills overlap with and are a critical foundation for cognitive skills – including cognitive integration and executive function–skills essential to future learning and well-being, to problem solving and innovation.
Language Arts
Preschool children are rapidly acquiring language, experimenting with verbal sounds and beginning to use language to solve problems and to learn concepts. The program seeks to make the most of the opportunity presented by this developmental stage. A key focus in the classroom is daily exposure to children’s literature, reciting poems and rhymes, singing songs, and “fingerplays.” Objectives for receptive language development include the skills to follow one-step directions and to engage in auditory and visual discrimination when recalling stories and songs. Children work with various manipulatives to develop fine motor skills; they utilize drawing and writing materials, and learn to cut with scissors. Children are encouraged and actively supported in the use of language skills to articulate their wants, needs, and thoughts throughout the day, in their communications with teachers and classmates.
Mathematics
Preschool students explore mathematical concepts each day. They are exposed to numbers, counting, shapes, and colors through hands-on activities, everyday routines, and interactions with their outdoor environment. Counting, sorting, and patterning are incorporated into daily transitions, small group activities, and gross motor activities. Additional mathematical activities include comparing objects by size, shape, and color. Math through literature is also a key element in exposing children to new concepts and language to help to support mathematical understanding.
Science
Preschool students are engaged in multi-sensory science experiences throughout the year. These activities encourage children to observe, predict, estimate, count, measure, record, discuss, and develop an appreciation for living things.
Social Studies
Appropriate to the age of our preschool students, social studies topics are examined through the children’s personal experience and the experiences of people around them. Students are encouraged to share their family traditions and celebrations with classmates, and teachers seek to provide additional resources, from within and outside of school, to help students to develop an appreciation of different cultures. Students are active members of their ELC community, taking on “jobs” that demonstrate a shared responsibility for classroom management, and they engage in service learning that contributes to the broader community as well.
Visual Arts
The preschool visual arts program is Reggio-inspired in that it respects the ability of each child and honors the belief that young children can construct meaningful knowledge and understanding. The goal of the visual arts program in these early years is to promote individual imagination and creativity, communication with others, and the joy of creating group projects together. Performing Arts Preschool students have many opportunities to sing, move, and listen to music. They participate in regular movement and music classes in support of daily exposure to music in the classroom. Students explore tone and rhythm, and elements of sound, silence, space, and time in children’s songs, traditional folk songs, seasonal music and with instruments.
Pre-Kindergarten Reggio Emilia
As with our Early Learning Center, the pre-k program is guided by Quaker values and draws from complementary components of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. Our program emphasizes community and responsibility, with respect for each individual, through practices that encourage student-initiated exploration.
Language Arts
Through immersion in a literature- and language-rich environment, pre-kindergarten students begin their journey to literacy. Our focus is on developing reading and writing readiness through multi-sensory experiences and direct and explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, with an emphasis on auditory and visual discrimination, listening skills, and spoken language development. Sample objectives for pre-kindergarten students in receptive language include learning to recognize rhyming patterns, following multi-step directions, and engaging in auditory discrimination with phoneme units. In expressive language, objectives include students expressing feelings in an appropriate manner, and recalling and restating facts and sequence from stories read aloud. Students also begin to create and share their own stories through storytelling and illustration. Toward goals specific to reading readiness, students learn to identify letter sounds and to discriminate letters and words; they are introduced to beginning consonant sounds, and learn to recognize upper and lower case letters. They experience the functionality of written words in a variety of contexts, and are asked to demonstrate left to right directionality. Fine motor activities are also emphasized as children learn to write their upper case letters, refine their pencil grip, and explore small manipulatives.
Mathematics
Students in pre-kindergarten experience math through a variety of hands-on, everyday activities like taking attendance and learning to interpret the class calendar. They are exposed to 7
