Pre-Kindergarten— program details

OVERVIEW

Building from the foundation in Preschool, the Pre-Kindergarten Program takes them one step further. Although they are almost ready for Kindergarten this last stop will introduce and familiarize your child with the types of schedules and routines she’ll find when she gets there. In addition, emphasis is placed on our Pre-K program to develop strong literacy and mathematical skills.

Your Pre-Kindergartner's Day

Morning Circle

The preschool day begins promptly at 9:00am. All the children in the preschool classroom meet by the morning circle wall to begin their day. Here, your preschooler is exposed to man different routines designed to increase her oral vocabulary, social and verbal interaction skills, and her ability to actively participate in group activities.

Every day your child will participate in challenging routines, like:

• Kid Count Here, your child will count the children that are present for the day. She will learn math concepts like counting and comparison.
• Daily Weather. Each preschool, pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classroom has a “weather journalist” for the day-one child who helps discuss the weather and how we prepare for it.
• Calendar. A calendar helper helps determine what day it is, what month it is, the number of days that have passed in the month, that are left in the month, etc.
• Helpful Helpers. Preschool children are excited to help out during classroom routines. Children are randomly selected to be the classroom helper for the week. Jobs include attendance, snack helper, lunch helper, etc.
• Character Counts. Monthly the children will learn about a specific character trait and it will be discussed during Morning Circle Time.

Learning Centers

Throughout the day your preschooler will participate in different learning center activities of her choice. There are over 50 learning center activities and each activity is tied to a specific learning objective. So whether he is listening to a recording in the listening center or creating wonderful art in the writing center, your preschooler is learning a new concept, being assessed and mastering the objective tied to that specific learning activity. Remember, our teachers create lessons with specific purposes in mind. All activities are carefully selected for its ability to engage and teach your child in a fun and exciting way.

Small Group Time

While some children “play” in different learning centers throughout the classroom, the preschool teacher works with other children in small groups to extend the learning experience. These small groups allow the teacher to provide individual attention and instruction to each child ensuring that each child is successfully meeting and/or exceeding the theme-based learning objectives.

Outdoor Play (Gross Motor Development)

All children at Kids Kottage Learning Center go outdoors twice a day to exercise, burn off some energy, and develop their gross motor skills. If the weather is not accommodating, the children play in our indoor power zone. Here children can ride tricycles, play on the loft, walk on balance beams and more.

Lunch and Rest/Quiet Time

Lunch is served family style in our power play zone. Children assist in lunch preparation and clean up. After lunch the children have an opportunity to wind down during Rest/Quiet Time. Each child has their own mat that they may rest or sleep on. If a child does not fall asleep after 30 minutes of quiet time, complete a puzzle or read a book quietly.

Music & Movement

Get up and dance! This is a great time during the day for your child to get active, learn fun new songs, stretch, crawl, dance and expand her vocabulary. Ask your child what fun, new song she learned this week!

Closing Circle Time

After more outside play the children come in to enjoy Closing Circle Time. At the conclusion of the day, our preschool children meet in a large group to discuss what they learned during the day. It is here that the children wrap up learning concepts, review what they’ve learned, share precious artwork and look ahead for what tomorrow has in store.

Multiple curricula have been adopted to create an optimal learning experience for your preschooler. Experts have developed standards defining what children should know and be able to do by certain grade levels. States and local schools have adapted these standards.

Although these standards are used to determine if a child is “school ready” we use another set of standards. We have higher expectations of the children in our program. We firmly believe that by knowing what to teach and how to present it, the students in our program can far surpass the basic standards established by the state and local school districts and our curriculum allows us to accomplish this successfully.

The Kids Kottage curriculum provides carefully selected activities in the following content areas with a primary focus on literacy and math.

Science

Science concepts are more than just isolated facts. Scientific facts are important but how they are put together into meaningful ideas is more significant. Your child will learn science by exploring the world around him. Because we provide an environment with many varied materials, your child will try out things to see how they work, he will experiment, he will manipulate, he will be curious and he will ask questions. As he seeks answers to his questions, he will learn to enjoy and appreciate his surroundings.

these activities are science. your child will enjoy the following:

• • Physical Science
• • Life Science
• • Earth and the environment