We belief children learn holistically and ever child needs an individual approach.
We offer a diverse and exciting curriculum with many stimulating activities in an environment that has a variety of learning centers and opportunities for free play. These include:
These centers and activities provide unlimited creative opportunities for discovery, challenge and exploration as well as a safe environment for building self-confidence, self-awareness and supportive relationships with peers.
As well as free play opportunities, we offer daily structured learning activities for larger groups, such as circle time and story time in which we explore music, drama, movement, language and literature.
We also work individually and in small groups with children to help them attain skills and achieve specific learning goals identified by families, day care staff and therapists.
During their year before kindergarten, the children become ready to take on greater challenges in all areas of the program. In order to meet the developing needs of our four year olds and to help prepare them for kindergarten we shift our focus and our expectations in the following areas:
Self Help and Life Skills
At four years old we expect the child to be independent in the areas of toileting, dressing (e.g. buttons, zippers, shoes), mealtimes and cleanup. Children start to assume more responsibilities and take more initiative in the classroom (e.g., putting away their work, laying out and clearing their lunches, helping tidy up their activity areas).
We expect a lot of our four year olds. They are learning to be mature and cooperative members of a large group. We expect them to be able to communicate and interact positively with other children, both individually and in groups. They are learning to understand the other person’s point of view. They are starting to be able to solve social problems independently. They are also starting to exercise their leadership in the group. We expect them to take some responsibility for their younger classmates and be positive role models. They should now be feeling empathy for others. We are also expecting them to be able to control their emotions and express them in appropriate ways. We expect a more mature relationship with staff. We encourage our four year olds to be helpful and cooperate with their child care staff’s requests. They are now also more able to work and play independently of their teachers’ assistance.
We offer all our children a variety of activities in the curriculum areas of art, music and movement, language and literature, social studies, science and math. While most of these activities are available to the whole group, we expect our four year olds to participate in all the curriculum areas in more complex and sophisticated ways. While our four-year-old program is still largely self-selected, in that children have many choices about what they will do, we encourage our older children to participate in all the activities that the childcare staff have prepared. The children should be spending more time, taking more care, asking and answering more questions and completing their activities. At four years old children are taking pride in their growing knowledge base, competence and achievements.
We offer our four-year-olds a variety of pre academic activities exploring concepts such as number, size, shape and color. They are doing counting, matching, categorizing and one to one correspondence. They are also learning the names and sounds of the alphabet and how to print upper and lower case letters. As well they are learning to recognize and print their names. Other important readiness skills they are practicing are listening to and following directions, doing neat and careful work, staying focused and completing their tasks.
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