OUR CURRICULUM

This year we will be using curriculum from Discovery Station Learners in class. The whole premise of Discovery Station Learners is to have the students learning through HANDS ON activities that make learning fun and engaging for everyone. Once a child enters grade school years the ability for them to learn through PLAY is essentially gone. That is why this is so important to us. Research has shown that play is the most developmentally appropriate way for a child to learn in these early childhood years. So we will be doing as much of that as possible this year. Will we be learning those core concepts like letters and numbers as we do so? Absolutely! But instead of having worksheets where a child writes a letter over and over again to memorize a letter we will be doing things like writing a letter in shaving cream, building it with counting bears, searching for it in sensory bins, dice games with a partner, and other activities that strengthen fine motor skills and bring excitement into a “lesson”.

Our curriculum builds on itself all year. It is sequential in design and has an intentional flow. In phonics we start with letter A and will end with letter Z before we do some beginning sound practice to prepare for their PreK year. In math we start with the very basic numbers (1-5) and shapes. But by the end of the year they will be able to work with numbers up to 10 and even start combining numbers when they hear an addition story. We will learn about colors and community helpers, along with basic science concepts like what happens to a seed and animal life cycles in the spring.

This first year of preschool is meant to introduce the very most basic and core concepts to your child while teaching them social and group setting skills. We will also start building those fine motor skills so they will be ready to do things like write letters when they start PreK or kindergarten. This year isn’t necessarily for academic mastery – the social skills they gain as they learn these core concepts this year will

be monumental in importance for setting them up for success in PreK and kindergarten. We want them to learn to LOVE school – and our curriculum is set up to help us do that.

Thank you so much for trusting us with teaching them this year!