Welcome to Pre-K4!
We are so excited to partner with you this year as we watch your children learn and grow! We like to structure our day with a variety of whole group, small group and center learning times, because we know children learn as they move and experience things. We have a focused Bible time, but all day the children know that God is in everything we do and learn. We want them to start to look through a Biblical worldview.
Themes: Introducing School Routines, All About Me/Family, Friends, Bears
Letters: Introduction to short vowels
Math: Calendar/Math Routines, Shapes (2-D and 3-D)
Bible Story: Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, Tower of Babel
Author of the Month: Bill Martin Jr.
We have our very own raccoon named Chester, who is from the book The Kissing Hand. We will be reading it the first day of school. Chester will remind us that your love is with us while we are away from you at school.
Chester will help us learn about school routines by sending us a letter each day during the first week. He will continue to send us letters periodically throughout the year.
On Mondays, we have Chapel. We will get to meet with the Pre K 3 - First grade and worship and learn about God’s word together. Tuesday - Friday we will be going through a story each week learning about it through discussion, activities, and crafts. We will be working on a memory verse each week. I will communicate the Bible story and the memory verse in the newsletter, as well as on the weekly information sheet in your child’s folder. I would love for you to work on the memory verse with your child. What a blessing to have God’s word hidden in your heart at such a young age!
We have a few different curriculum pieces that make up our reading/phonics program. The first is the Heggerty phonemic awareness program. It is an everyday 10 - 12 minute program that goes through isolating, blending, segmenting, and rhyming sounds in order for the children to become phonemically aware. Research has shown that phonemic awareness is very important in the child becoming readers. Each week there is a nursery rhyme highlighted. We will be doing some activities with that nursery rhyme each week. Here is the website so you can look into the Heggerty program. https://heggerty.org/
We will also be studying a letter each week starting with the vowels and then moving through each consonant. We will do activities through the week to learn to recognize that letter and the letter sound. The children will be able to bring in something that starts with that letter on Friday for show and tell. As the school year progresses, we will also start working on sight words. Sight words are words that are not easily decoded and it is important for children to memorize in order to help them as they learn to read. In addition, we will be learning vocabulary each week. I will let you know the letter, sight words, and vocabulary for the week in the newsletter, and on the weekly information sheet in your child’s folder. We will have an author of the month and will be reading several stories by that author to introduce character, setting and beginning/middle/end concepts.
Our math curriculum consists of three main learning areas. The first is our calendar time and math review each day. During our calendar time the students will be counting, learning ordinal numbers, learning positional words, sequencing, learning the days of the week and the months of the year, etc. As we review our schedule each day the students will be learning about sequencing events and getting a sense of time passing. We will also learn patterning and notice colors and shapes during our calendar time.
The second area is focused time two days a week for whole group and small group math lessons. We will work on sorting, shapes, patterns and numbers 1-10 in the first quarter.
The third area is during our center time. We will always have math concepts that students are exploring through sorting, classifying, matching shapes, putting together manipulatives, and matching numbers to sets. Children learn so much by playing and exploring manipulatives and these discoveries are often the ones that they retain the most.
Our handwriting curriculum is Handwriting Without Tears. The students start out by learning the big lines, little lines, big curves, and little curves through Mat Man. We then talk about the correct pencil grip and practice flipping our pencil the right way. We will then begin practicing on magic boards, chalk boards, and building letters with manipulatives.
Each week, we will learn to write the upper and lower case letter of the week, as well as our number of the week. We will also be learning to write our names neatly and correctly.
For science/social studies we will have a theme each week that we will be focusing on. We will learn about this theme through class discussion, reading fiction and nonfiction books, center activities, and crafts. I will let you know the theme for each week through the newsletter as well as your weekly information sheet in your child’s folder. Please let me know if you would like to come in and share something that relates to our theme each week or if you would like to send in a special snack or help with a craft.