Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum Guide
PRE-KINDERGARTEN AT THE ORCHARD SCHOOL
Social-Emotional Learning
Each pre-kindergarten student at The Orchard School is valued as an individual member of their classroom and school community. Students learn to honor and celebrate one another with a focus on their own identity and building empathy and understanding of the perspective of others. There is a strong focus on nurturing and developing conflict resolution skills, independence, respect for others and self, and honoring differences.
Emergent Writing
Our pre-kindergarten students’ early writing skills are developed in many ways. Children exercise their fine-motor muscles through sensory play in the classroom and the outdoors, developing strength and control that will aid their ability to use writing tools. curricular materials help children learn about lines and curves for forming letters and numbers. Children are encouraged to express their ideas through drawings and add other forms of early writing to their work. Students know that even at their young age, they are doing the work of authors and illustrators.
Language and Literacy
Pre-kindergarten students and teachers engage in emergent literacy skill work to build the foundations of phonological and phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, and language/ vocabulary development. Throughout the school day, we play with the sounds of our language by rhyming, clapping syllables, and identifying beginning sounds of words. Students are exposed to a print-rich environment, practice naming uppercase letters, and begin to learn letter-sound relationships. Through daily Read Aloud times and conversations, we discuss the meaning of words and make connections to our own experiences. Nature provides us with many opportunities to expand our vocabulary skills as we identify and describe the world around us.
Mathematics
In Pre-Kindergarten math, students focus on expanding their knowledge of foundational skills. This shift from an exposure to math skills to a functional understanding of numbers, shapes, patterns is aimed to help students develop a love of math by integrating across their day. One important way to do this is to highlight how we use math in our daily life, to regularly encourage students to manipulate and count objects and build a strong relationship between the quantities and symbols we use. Strengthening a student’s ability to use these skills across several environments and contexts is important work in Pre-Kindergarten and helps prepare them for a robust math curriculum in the future.
THE ORCHARD SCHOOL
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