Our Programs

Children begin to point, raise hands, and make different movements and sounds to communicate as the educator asks questions connecting to the movement or to the sound. Babies love to be spoken to. Your child will begin to imitate sounds they hear and experiment with different facial expressions like smiling and frowning. Our educators prepare various large motor experiences inside the classroom, around the common areas of the school, and outside in the playgrounds and garden for your child to challenge themself physically and develop gross motor skills. It is a time when children reach many milestones such as, turning over, sitting, crawling, standing, and maybe even take their first steps.

While their fine motor skills evolve the children dig and pour in the sensory table, paint, scribble, and express graphically on an easel, paper, or other materials. The world is full of things to discover for the Nidos as they move and dance to music, discover insects, leaves and flowers, and begin sorting and collecting things they find in the playground.

While your child becomes more vocal and begins to put sentences together, our teachers create opportunities for conversations to help expand your child’s comprehension and literacy skills.

The environment is arranged so that children are exposed to their written name, establish a daily flow, create peer relationships, understand emotions and start to express their thoughts and ideas in simple sentences. By encouraging communication between the children they begin to understand the dynamics of a classroom community.

Our educators share stories that help build new vocabulary and also instill the interest to read. The teachers connect stories with objects and events in children’s lives so that they may begin to understand that print and pictures have a meaning.

A variety of opportunities are offered for children to experiment with art and drawing as they are able to make lines, zigzags, make a series of scribbles, and begin to give meaning to the symbols they create. Educators create a rich environment to offer various possibilities to recognize common symbols, some letters, sometimes the first letter of their names, and drawing lines that begin looking like letters and shapes.

Educators begin to ask open-ended questions and plan brainstorming discussions to encourage children to verbalize their ideas and promote conversations amongst them. During these discussions the teachers take notes or make recordings to document children’s thinking. As children create theories and ask questions projects begin to emerge. Through projects children develop cognitive skills such as problem solving, collaboration, understanding cause and effect, sharing and how to be a member of a group.

Teachers prepare environments that encourage interactions between the children. The children exchange knowledge as they engage in conversations. The teachers ask open-ended questions to deepen children’s discussions of topics and to support the evolution of children’s theories. Teachers’ and children’s intentionalities are shared with one another as a network of ideas is developed enabling both to be active participants of the learning process. While your child learns new words and fine-tunes their articulation they communicate in simple sentences, begin initiating conversations, display a desire to talk about their interests, and can relate personal experiences with others with the support of their teacher. Most children at this age express themselves in sentences and are able to recite simple rhymes and ask questions.

Considering that children of the three’s are still making sense of the world around them using all of their senses our educators continue to expose them to many sensorial materials such as paint and clay. These open-ended materials support the children in developing divergent thinking, problem solving skills, and creativity.

As children’s drawings become more detailed and representational children begin to tell stories through them. This, in turn, helps them to understand that print carries a message and the words we speak can be written and read; that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end. During the year scribbles begin to appear more like symbols and letters, and children may string several of these “letters” together to form words. They become aware of the uses for writing and may dictate words for the teachers to write down.

Teachers are able to support this process by setting up provocations around the spaces of the classroom that invite children to explore the world of the written code: books, notepads and writing tools, labels, maps, and more. Tracing names and numbers, categorizing shapes and the recognition of patterns are also introduced to support the development of emergent literacy skills.

We support children in the discovery of the meaning print holds by creating provocations and situations that awaken their affinity for and interest toward written communication. To strengthen their growing understanding of language, children are encouraged to recognize key ideas and details of stories, understand positional relations and vocabulary terms as well as learn to develop hypotheses based on observations, questions, and investigations.

While their gross motor skills become stronger, activities such as running, throwing and catching a ball, and dancing are a source of great joy. They begin to challenge themselves further and it is common to see them outside in the playground climbing up and jumping down. Children love to feel a sense of accomplishment and putting a puzzle together, painting, and drawing are all ways they demonstrate their growing abilities.

At the age of four, your child is constructing their knowledge of written language. They want to know what words in their environment say and are able to recognize many letters. By the end of this year, many children understand that letters represent the sounds in spoken words and may associate some letters with their sounds. Most children also write some legible letters and know that writing goes from left-to-right and top to bottom. When your child draws or paints, they begin to represent detailed aspects of their imagination as well as begin to incorporate letters and words to describe them.

Your child’s capacity for learning math concepts increases at this age. They can successfully use language to compare and describe objects and shapes. Children of the fours know days of the week, months and the seasons.

They are able to walk, climb, jump, hop, skip, march and gallop skillfully at this age. They have also improved their ability to throw, catch, kick and bounce balls. Four-year-olds enjoy dancing and are able to move rhythmically and easily. Their fine motor skills have also improved therefore supporting their ability to hold writing tools. As their hand-eye coordination develops, dressing and undressing themselves is mastered.
Four-year-olds are very curious and use their imaginations to help understand the world around them. They become complex thinkers through predictions, and their teachers provide supportive information and opportunities for experimentations of trial and error observations. Our teachers value and respect these abilities and offer opportunities to explore in spaces that invite the children to utilize the collection of data and graphing, the class of the four’s begins to use science and engineering practices to better understand their communities, economic and ecosystems as well as the physical earth in which they exist. As the children engage in different explorations where their interests are taken into account, the teachers facilitate learning through questions and providing appropriate tools and materials that will further their research.

As children explore and develop relationships they build an understanding of learn what causes certain feelings and realize that others may react differently to the same situations. Because of this children begin to further progress in more complex social interactions such as joining in organized group play.

Writing

While connecting to their context and encounters, children document their experiences in journals and create dictionaries to enhance and to support their writing. They use computers, smartboards, scanners, as sources of communication and research, as well as audiobooks from our library. Through the observation and manipulation of these tools, they familiarize themselves with different texts. Eventually, children will start to write words on their own using emergent spelling. It is important to remember that at this stage the practice of using letters is more important than getting the correct spelling. Learning to spell is a developmental process, and children learn the rules for conventional spelling as they learn more about letter patterns in English words. The progress from making scribbles to printing letters to writing words to sentences to composing stories is an incredible and rewarding one.

Mathematics

Children need to encounter math experiences that incorporate their senses and require them to experiment, make observations, and that allow them time to investigate a topic further. Numbers are constantly present in a kindergartener’s life and learning process. This is why our environment is enhanced with tools and materials that support the natural development of math skills. Calendars, digital and analog clocks, calculators, counting tools such as beads, rocks, and straws are some of the tools that support addition, subtraction and counting. Number sense is very important for success in math. It describes a child’s understanding that numbers represent quantity. In Kindergarten, children see the relationships that numbers have to one another; they understand how numbers are put together and taken apart, and they have an intuitive sense about the number system. They will be working with patterns by sorting and grouping objects into sets and by explaining and extending simple patterns. Kindergarteners explore simple measurements using non-standard units. They analyze how to classify objects based on weight (heavy/light); capacity (holds more/less); and length (long/short). Through their analysis, they begin manipulating rulers and other measuring tools that expose them to standard units of measurement. They will have a basic understanding of time concepts, and use graphs in more dynamic ways, using them to collect, analyze, and represent data.

Science

In Kindergarten, children are introduced to the process of scientific inquiry. Our Kindergarten learning environment is filled with opportunities for children to investigate, ask questions and research. It includes a wide variety of materials that allow them to find out how the natural world works, with observable physical evidence. They are also able to record their observations and elaborate theories about their surroundings. We believe that kindergarteners are natural explorers who learn by taking part in meaningful life experiences, by inquiring, asking questions, inventing and through social interaction. Our classroom is filled with provocations that give children opportunities to experiment, giving them the tools to become confident creative thinkers and problem solvers.

Social Studies

Kindergarteners are ready to expand their views beyond their home and classroom environments to their general context and surroundings. They learn more about the rules that help people get along with each other, and begin to form opinions on issues while understanding that others may have different points of view. Children learn to identify roles and responsibilities in their environment. They develop an understanding of their roles as members of a community. They work towards showing responsible behavior in caring for their environment and begin showing it in their everyday actions.