Pre-Kindergarten

Our Pre-K class for students ages 4 and 5 builds on the skills they learned in preschool and focuses on helping each child prepare for Kindergarten. This readiness program enriches motor, auditory, visual, and comprehension skills. The curriculum engages the child developing awareness in the emotional and aesthetic as well as the intellectual dimensions of learning. The program is designed to create strategies that promote the children to think critically and creatively in all aspects of the educational domain (socially, intellectually, spiritually, physically, and emotionally). 

Parents will see their progress in handwriting, foundations of math, imagination, and social understanding in the many books they create and bring home at the end of the year. Students also visit the “big school” for all their specials: Art, Music, Spanish, Gym and Guidance.

Our 4 Year Old Pre-K class meets Monday through Friday from 8:15am to 2:00pm and ALL children must be fully potty trained to attend.

Please select from the following for more information:

• Curriculum

  PRACTICAL SKILLS | LANGUAGE ARTS | MATH | SCIENCE | RELIGION | SPANISH | ART | MUSIC

• The Year at a Glance
• Preschool Family Handbook

 

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Practical Skills

• Follow directions
• Listen attentively
• Play well with others
• Learn to share with others
• Learn proper hygiene
• Use appropriate language
• Take care of materials and property
• Obey school and safety rules
• Use art materials correctly

Language Arts

Language Arts is the art of communication. Language Arts in the preschool years is defined by the young child's ability to recognize the relationship between the written and spoken word as a form of communication. It embodies the communication skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Language Arts encompasses:

• Dramatic Play
• Storytelling
• Environmental Print
• Participate as speakers and listeners in group activities
• Language development
• Master sequence of alphabet
• Recognition of upper and lower case letters
• Letter-sound correspondence
• Identify simple vocabulary words
• Auditory and visual perception
• Respond to stories, poems, and songs through questions, dramatization, retelling, and drawings
• Left to right progression
• Top to bottom progression
• Sequencing
• Eye-hand coordination
• Rhyming words
• Enhancement of creative thinking
• Increase oral vocabulary
• Answer in complete sentences
• Ask for help using appropriate vocabulary
• Predict what a book will be about
• Recognize the details of a story
• Recognize the basic idea of a story
• Identify whether characters will be people or animals
• Determine whether the story could really happen
• Develop an interest in literature
• Build comprehension skills
• Appreciate poetry

Math

Mathematics at the preschool level is based on inquiry, exploration, and discovery of the child's environment leading to future development of abstract thought. Through a variety of teaching strategies, the child will be exposed to both structured and informal group activities. 

• Problem solving (block area, puzzles, games, etc.)
• Symmetry and balance (block area)
• Standard and non-standard units of measure
• Positional terms (above, below, top, middle, bottom, over, under, etc.)
• Comparison and patterns
• Number readiness and graphing
• Concepts such as fewer, more, and equal sets
• Tallying
• Number recognition and writing 0-10 (continue numbers after these are mastered)
• Counting
• Calendar activities

Science

Natural science enables children to understand themselves, others, the world in which they live, and their Creator. Observation and discovery is a meaningful experience for young children.

• Examine daily weather conditions and predict changes
• Explain the Earth experiences seasonal changes
• Examine planting materials
• Observe the growth of plans, seeds, bulbs, cuttings
• Discover color changes observed in autumn and discuss
• Compare habitats and food of animals
• Measure with scales and balances

Religion

Religion is a vital part of a child's education. Our goal is to help children grow as Catholic Christians. Our objectives are:

• To provide young children with an experience of belonging to a warm, welcoming, caring community
• To provide opportunities to discover the wonder of God's creation, living and non-living, and to see all of creation as a gift from a loving God.
• To affirm families as God's gifts
• To help the children express their enjoyment of God's gifts through prayer
• To have the children experience prayer, liturgy and bible stories in class
• To learn to love and forgive and live a Christian life as Jesus

Spanish

Children will be introduced to the Spanish words for colors and numbers, simple greetings and songs, as well as parts of the body and family members.

Art

Line, texture, shape, color and value are elements of art.  These are the building blocks from which art is created. This program is designed to help young children discover and interact with various media and have an appreciation for beauty found both in the natural as well as the creative (invented) state. Creative expression and fine motor skills will be developed.

• Experience various media forms of art (drawing, painting, collage, and clay)
• Incorporate technology with art
• Support, guide and challenge children in their expressions of art

Music

The music program is designed to instill and promote joy and appreciation of music as well as feelings of joy and praise to God, our Creator.

• Learn to actively listen to music
• Experiment with movement by encouraging freedom while moving rhythmically
• Differentiate between high and low notes, and soft and loud notes
• Differentiate between songs with and without accompaniment
• Learn finger plays and rhymes
• Learn songs of praise and thanksgiving to God

 

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Fall is a great time to learn about apples and pumpkins and their life cycles, from seed to harvested fruit and back to seed. We jump right into math with Apples Up On Top by Dr. Seuss and science with an apple cooking lesson. As children collect leaves in their own backyard they see how the chlorophyll has left the leave uncovering the yellows, oranges and reds underneath.  This becomes a lesson in photosynthesis.

In our unit on transportation, we learn how trains, planes, cars and boats go: buoyancy, wind, and engines are different ways to power vehicles. We address the changing weather through our weather board, and we learn how animals adapt to weather with migration and hibernation. Halloween provides a background for the study of bats and spiders.  We become zoologists learning about nocturnal behavior, echolocation and web spinning.

Winter is a great time for science!  We watch ice crystals form under a microscope. We learn about the Arctic and Antarctic and the people and animals that make these places their homes: the Inuit people and their culture, musk oxen, snowy owl, walrus and penguins.

Valentine’s Day provides the perfect lesson about the human heart.  How does it function? How do we take care of our own hearts? It’s also time to practice love of neighbors. We make Valentines for senior citizens to show them we care.

Books are the foundation of learning. We write, illustrate and publish our own Fairy Tale Book complete with a book signing and Knighting ceremony.  We also spend time with our tech tablets solving puzzles and playing letter and number games.

In the Spring, we study the night sky: the phases of the moon, planets and stars.  This leads into nocturnal animals and planting Moon Flowers which bloom at night.  We end this unit with a classroom camp-in. Children learn some simple tools and techniques for wilderness survival. 

At Easter we learn about New Life, from an egg to a bird and from a seed to a flower.  We will also study marine biology as we explore under the sea creatures, and an end of the year trip to the beach brings it all to life. 

Preparations for Mother’s Day Tea and getting in shape for Father’s Field Day keep us busy in May! Graduation is bittersweet as we say goodbye, but the many homemade treasures and books we proudly take home are wonderful keepsakes of this special time with our teachers and friends.